Montgomery Knight (February 22, 1901 – July 25, 1943) was an aeronautical engineer who specialized in rotary-wing aircraft. He was the first director of the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at the

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

and a founder of and long-time researcher at the

Georgia Tech Research Institute The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit applied research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. GTRI employs around 2,400 people, and is involved in approximately $600 millio ...

Education and early career

Knight was born on February 22, 1901, in

Holyoke, Massachusetts Holyoke is a city in Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States, that lies between the western bank of the Connecticut River and the Mount Tom Range. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 38,238. Located north of Springfield ...

to Franklin and Gertrude Knight and graduated from

Holyoke High School Holyoke High School is a public high school in western Massachusetts, United States that serves the City of Holyoke. Since 2015, the school, along with the district, has been in state receivership and through a series of changes in practices, such ...

in 1918. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under advisor Edward P. Warner, graduating in 1922 with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering. Knight did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University, and taught courses at MIT. He may have briefly worked for Westinghouse, given that there are two patents for electrical equipment under his name. He joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field in 1925, and in 1927 served as NACA's director of the Atmospheric Wind Tunnel Section. McMath, pp. 169

Georgia Tech

Georgia Tech president

Marion L. Brittain Marion Luther Brittain Sr. (November 11, 1866 – July 13, 1953) was an American academic administrator and longest serving President of the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1922 to 1944. Brittain was born in Georgia and, aside from a brief s ...

worked to establish an aeronautics program at that institute; classes were offered as early as 1926 and in 1927, in a visit paid for by the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics, Charles Lindbergh visited Georgia Tech and flew the

Spirit of St. Louis The ''Spirit of St. Louis'' (formally the Ryan NYP, registration: N-X-211) is the custom-built, single-engine, single-seat, high-wing monoplane that was flown by Charles Lindbergh on May 20–21, 1927, on the first solo nonstop transatlant ...

over Grant Field. McMath, pp. 168 In particular, Brittain sought to secure the funds for a chair in aeronautics at Georgia Tech. The fund had awarded grants to several other schools, but none in the southern United States. It was considering another award and 27 universities competed for it, most notably the University of Alabama and Georgia Tech. In particular, the foundation liked Georgia Tech's history with the Army Air Corps but was hesitant due to the lack of financial support typically received by universities in Georgia. Due in part to Brittain's faculty hires, most notably Montgomery Knight, the Guggenheim Foundation gave its largest and last ever grant, $300,000 () which allowed Brittain to establish the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics. About $100,000 of that was used to fund the Guggenheim Building, and $50,000 was used to purchase equipment and fund a wind tunnel; the wind tunnel was designed by Knight and patterned after the wind tunnel at

GALCIT The Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), was a research institute created in 1926, at first specializing in aeronautics research. In 1930, Hungarian scientist Theodore von Kármán accepted the di ...

. Knight had developed one of the first jet-powered rotors for a helicopter. In the 1930s he created a full-scale version of the rotor and tested it. In 1929, some Georgia Tech faculty members belonging to Sigma Xi started a research club that met once a month at Tech. McMath, p.186 One of the monthly subjects, proposed by ceramic engineering professor

W. Harry Vaughan William Harry Vaughan, Jr. (born February 9, 1900) was a professor of ceramic engineering at the Georgia School of Technology and the founder and first director of what is now the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Education Vaughan graduated from ...

, was a collection of issues related to Tech, such as library development, and the development of a state engineering station. Such a station would theoretically assist local businesses with engineering problems via Georgia Tech's established faculty and resources. This group investigated the forty existing engineering experiments at universities around the country, and the report was compiled by

Harold Bunger Harold Alan Bunger (1896 – August 15, 1941) was the head of Georgia Tech's chemistry department and the director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (then known as the Engineering Experiment Station) from 1940 until his death in 1941. Bun ...

, Knight, and Vaughan in December 1929. The station was created as the Engineering Experiment Station (EES) in 1934 under Vaughan, and changed names in 1984 to the

. Knight served on EES's advisory board and would perform a significant amount of research there.

World War II

In the early 1940s, Georgia Tech was one of thirteen schools that were part of a New Deal National Youth Administration / Army Air Corps war preparation program to double the number of pilots in training. Montgomery Knight was in charge of Georgia Tech's participation; 90 additional students enrolled in the program that year. McMath, p.204 Knight was also involved in some of the only early wartime-related research at Georgia Tech in 1941, focusing on helicopters. McMath, p.214 The war would vastly accelerate the amount of research performed at Georgia Tech, particularly for the aeronautics faculty: in particular, research was performed on the " autogyro" designed by Knight; and the school's air tunnel was used ten to twelve hours a day under contract by a variety of aircraft companies. On February 15, 1942, '' The Atlanta Constitution'' ran an article predicting the atomic bomb; Knight's comments in the article were based on his knowledge of Uranium-235. Shortly after the article was published, FBI agents " escendedupon the campus ... and closeted themselves with Knight for a long session in his office".

Death and legacy

Montgomery Knight held the position of director of Georgia Tech's School of Aeronautics until his death on July 25, 1943. In 1968, a $1,716,000 () building with 55,600 square feet of floor area was dedicated to the Montgomery Knight Building. The school's research (generally conducted in partnership with the Engineering Experiment Station) continued to focus on Knight's area of interest, rotary-wing aircraft; Georgia Tech received national recognition for this research in 1970. McMath, p.395

References

Works cited

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Knight, Montgomery 1901 births 1943 deaths People from Holyoke, Massachusetts MIT School of Engineering alumni National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics Georgia Tech faculty Georgia Tech Research Institute people