Burrell Cannon
Burrell Cannon was a clergyman and inventor from Pittsburg, Texas. His claim to fame was the creation of the Ezekiel airship, based somehow on the biblical 'wheel within a wheel' of Ezekiel's vision. He filed some international patents that were probably connected with this design. He created and sold shares ($25 each) in the Ezekiel Airship Manufacturing Company.
Cannon was born in Coffeeville, Mississippi, and studied mechanics at Mississippi College. He left Mississippi at age 30 did various kinds of business, and secured two patents. He started major work on Ezekiel in summer 1900.[1]
Scott Gold, "The Ezekiel Airship: Fact, or Flight of Fancy", Daily Press, 21 December 2003:
A handsome, square-jawed man who stood 6-foot-4, Cannon was a Renaissance man in an industrial age.
Armed with a keen understanding of engineering, much of it passed down from his father and a blacksmith he worked for as a young man, he patented a half a dozen inventions. They included a marine propeller, a type of windmill and a camera designed to photograph people as they stepped onto trains.
Carrying a tattered Bible, he preached on the side, mostly in one-room schoolhouses in East Texas towns that didn't yet have a church. Some say he spoke eight languages and spent time in the foreign service before the Civil War.
He once told a friend that he was rich twice, poor twice, and married four times.
In the late 1890s, he decided he wanted to fly.
He persuaded a local businessman named P.W. Thorsell to let him build his ship in the top floor of a foundry Thorsell owned. Cannon incorporated the Ezekiel Airship Manufacturing Co. in 1901 and sold $20,000 worth of $25 stock certificates to raise money. With three full-time employees, his airship came together quickly.
He named his 26-foot-wide machine, which looked like a box kite, after the biblical account of the prophet Ezekiel, which speaks of "living creatures" that were "lifted from Earth."
Covered in sailcloth, it was also designed largely through biblical inspiration, right down to an apparatus Ezekiel described in the Bible as a "wheel within a wheel."
Cannon, convinced the passage was effectively an instruction manual for ascending toward God, used those words to piece together the key components of the ship: four giant, interlocking wheels that turned a series of wooden, hinged paddles.
Links
- http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/cannon_ezekiel.html
- Archive of Pittsburg museum website dealing with "Ezekiel"
- Ezekiel stock certificate
Airplanes created by Burrell Cannon
- Ezekiel (Year constructed: 1902)
Patents whose inventor or applicant is Burrell Cannon
- Patent US-1902-695276 (English title: Marine Propellers, Filing date: 1901-05-31)
- Patent US-1902-698391 (English title: Wind-wheel, Filing date: 1901-05-31)
- Patent GB-1901-20016 (English title: Aerial or Marine Propellers, Filing date: 1901-10-07)
- Patent CA-1903-79019 (English title: Propeller or motor wheel, Supplementary to patent: Patent GB-1901-20016, Filing date: 1902-06-20)
Publications by or about Burrell Cannon
- Publication 4266, 1901, The Ezekiel airship (Simple title: The Ezekiel airship, Journal: Engl. Mech. World Sci.)
References
- ↑ Michael Hall, "Two Wings and a Prayer", Texas Monthly, January 2003.
| Names | Burrell Cannon |
|---|---|
| Birth date | 1848-04-16 |
| Death date | 1922 |
| Countries | US |
| Locations | Coffeeville, Mississippi; Pittsburg, Texas |
| Occupations | clergy |
| Tech areas | Heavier-than-air, Propulsion, Propeller |
| Affiliations | |
| Wikidata id |
