Solomon Andrews

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Solomon Andrews (1806–1872) was an aero inventor and physician from New York and Perth Amboy, NJ.[1]

He served in the Union Army as a surgeon then to work on aerial reconnaissance, seeking to improve on the tethered balloon. He developed an airship called the Aeron, described in Patent US-1864-43449, featuring three side-by-side cylindrical balloons. The Aeron was 80 feet in length and about 40 feet total from side to side. He demonstrated this vessel on 1 June 1862, in Perth Amboy, travelling a short distance in high wind and successfully returning to his starting point. He flew again at a demonstration in August, at the conclusion of which he detached the basket, tied the rudder, and allowed the vessel to spiral off into the air at high speed. Following these successes, he met with President Abraham Lincoln and then a committee of the U.S. Congress. These meetings in turn prompted Congress to ask War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton to form a committee on aeronautics, which included Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry, Alexander Dallas Bache of the U.S. Coast Survey, and Major J.C. Woodruff of the Army Corps of Engineers. The committee recommended constructing a second Aeron but this was never done.[2]

Andrews built an Aeron II whcih he demonstrated twice in 1866. He never received the big funding he was hoping for and thereafter left the field.


Patents whose inventor or applicant is Solomon Andrews

Publications by or about Solomon Andrews

Publications by or about Solomon Andrews

References

  1. "Rutgers Veterans of the Civil War", appended to Steven D. Glazer, "Rutgers in the Civil War", Journal of the Rutgers University Libraries, Vol. 66, 2014.
  2. Hallion, 2003, p. 84.