Baden-Powell: Aviation Pioneer and Scout Leader

Family

Baden was the youngest child of the Rev. Prof. Baden Powell, and the youngest brother of Warington Baden-Powell, George Baden-Powell, Frank Baden-Powell, Robert Baden-Powell and Agnes Baden-Powell. His mother, Henrietta Grace Smyth, was a daughter of Admiral William Henry Smyth, and was the third wife of Rev. Baden Powell (the previous two having died). She was a gifted musician and artist, but when her husband died she was left with eight small children and four older step-children, so she had to be "tough". Baden did not marry - his mother was quite brutal in trying to keep her children and herself as a family. Baden was god-father to, among others, his brother's daughter Betty Clay nee Baden-Powell.

Military

Baden-Powell was commissioned a Lieutenant in the Scots Guards on 29 July 1882, and served with the Guards Camel Regiment in the Nile Expedition (1884–85) in Egypt and Sudan. Promotion to Captain followed on 5 February 1896, and to Major on 24 June 1899. He served with the 1st battalion of his regiment in South Africa during the Second Boer War, and was present at the battles of Belmont (23 November 1899), Modder River (28 November 1899), and Magersfontein (11 Dec 1899). He was in the Relief Column that in May 1900 relieved the siege of Mafeking, where his elder brother was in command. A month after the end of the war in late May 1902, Baden-Powell returned to Britain with his regiment in the SS Tagus.

Baden-Powell was one of the first to see the use of aviation in a military context. He was a military aviation pioneer; within a year of joining the army at 22, he was lecturing on military uses of lighter-than-air flight, and in 1894, Baden-Powell made the first British military balloon flight. Baden-Powell wrote an article including "What will the good citizens of London say when they see a hostile dynamite-carrying aerostat hovering over St. Paul's?" He wrote to Lord Kelvin, who replied that he had "not a molecule of faith" in flight.

Aviation and inventions

Baden-Powell became a Fellow and later President of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (elected in 1891). He also wrote, "Ballooning as a Sport", published in 1907 by William Blackwood and Sons.

With his sister Agnes , they built and flew in their own hot-air balloons, man-carrying kites, gliders and powered aircraft. He invented a twelve-foot man-carrying kite that he flew at Whitton Park, Hounslow, England, and later a three-kite system that he called the Levitor. He helped Marconi in Newfoundland in his efforts to transmit and receive radio messages across the Atlantic, using Baden-Powell's man-carrying kite to lift the radio aerial.

He also developed a collapsible military bicycle.

He obtained one of the first British patents for a television system, "An electrical method of reproducing distant scenes visually", published 19 April 1921 (GB161706).

He contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition entry on 'kite-flying'.

Bibliography

1892: "In savage isles and settled lands. Malaysia, Australasia and Polynesia, 1888-1891", published by R.Bentley and Son, London. Among other incidents, Baden-Powell recounts a visit to Batavia (now Jakarta), where he was a guest at a dinner party hosted by a leading local magnate, Khouw Yauw Kie, Kapitein der Chinezen.

1903: War in practice

1909: Practical aerodynamics and the theory of the aeroplane. A résumé of the principles evolved by past experiments

Scouting

Baden-Powell was the first who brought flying-based activities into Scouting in the form of kite and model aeroplane building. He can be considered the founder of Air Scouting even though he thought it was hardly feasible to have special 'Air Scouts'.

Baden-Powell was President and later District Commissioner of a North London District, was District Commissioner of Sevenoaks District, Kent between 1918 and 1935, and was Headquarters Commissioner for Aviation from 1923, until his death in 1937.