Georg Wulf (1895-1927) was a German aviation pioneer and aircraft manufacturer.
Biography
Wulf was born 17 May 1895 in
Bremen
Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (german: Stadtgemeinde Bremen, ), is the capital of the German state Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (''Freie Hansestadt Bremen''), a two-city-state consis ...
. He was the son of a customs agent. He attended the high school on Dechanat Street.
Around 1910,
Henrich Focke
Henrich Focke (8 October 1890 – 25 February 1979) was a German aviation pioneer from Bremen and also a co-founder of the Focke-Wulf company. He is best known as the inventor of the Fw 61, the first successful German helicopter.
Biograp ...
, with the help of his brother
Wilhelm Focke, built a simple
canard airplane of steel tubes and bamboo. It was powered by an eight-horsepower engine. Their attempts to fly on the Bremen paradeground failed, but they awoke an interest of the 15 year old Wulf.
Wulf was so enthusiastic about flying that he quit before he graduated from high school and instead made airplanes. He offered to work with Focke, which Focke accepted. Starting in 1911, Wulf and Focke designed aircraft and built them with the simplest means. In 1912 they completed a flyable
monoplane
A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration with a single mainplane, in contrast to a biplane or other types of multiplanes, which have multiple planes.
A monoplane has inherently the highest efficiency and lowest drag of any wing confi ...
, which Wulf flew.
The
treaty ending World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
prohibited aircraft with engines from being built in Germany, until 1923. But Wulf and the Focke brothers secretly continued to build their aircraft in the basement of the Focke family house. After 1921 Wulf flew the aircraft they built. In 1923 Wulf also worked as a flight instructor. Also in 1923, the "'Bremen Aircraft Construction Company (Bremer Flugzeugbau-Gesellschaft) was founded by Focke and Wulf, which was renamed
Focke-Wulf- Aircraft Construction Inc. (Focke-Wulf-Flugzeugbau AG) a year later. Wulf was the managing director, the technical director of operations, and a pilot.
As a preliminary study, they had built a light monoplane, which first flew in November 1921. This was followed by the known under the name '' Seagull '' and '' duck '' commercial aircraft.
Death
On September 29 1927, Wulf died while testing a prototype of the
F 19a ''Ente'' aircraft.
Wulf is buried in Bremen in the Osterholzer cemetery (field E), near the bridge to the North Chapel.
Honors
* In the district of
Bremen-Neustadt the ''Georg-Wulf-Straße ''was named after him in 1955 near
Bremen Airport
Bremen Airport (German: ''Flughafen Bremen'', ) is the international airport of the city and state of Bremen in Northern Germany. It is located south of the city and handled 2.66 million passengers in 2015. It mainly features flights to Europ ...
.
* The 'Georg-Wulf-Straße' in
Berlin-Schönefeld bears his name.
sources
* Monika Porsch: "Bremer Straßenlexikon", complete edition. Schünemann, Bremen 2003, .
*
Herbert Schwarzwälder
Herbert Schwarzwälder (14 October 1919 – 11 September 2011) was a German historian. With his decades of work and his extensive publications, he has had a major influence on the research and communication of the .
Life
Schwarzwälder was born ...
: '' The Great Bremen Lexicon ''.
Edition Temmen
Edition may refer to:
* Edition (book), a bibliographical term for a substantially similar set of copies
* Edition (printmaking), a publishing term for a set print run
* Edition (textual criticism), a particular version of a text
* Edition Recor ...
, Bremen 2003, .
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wulf, Georg
1895 births
1927 deaths
Businesspeople from Bremen
German aerospace engineers
Engineers from Bremen (state)
German aerospace businesspeople