Ing. Gustav Victor Finger was a Czech aviation pioneer, designer and founder of the aviation department of the then Technical Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia (today’s National Technical Museum in Prague). He was also apparently the first Czech who toyed with the idea of using the principle of reactive propulsion in practice.
He was born on June 30, 1854 in Řepín near Mělník to the family of the forester Josef Finger. He graduated from a higher secondary school in Prague and, during his military service with the Hungarian cavalry regiment in Transylvania, he also attended a military artillery school. He then went to Germany to study mechanical engineering. After his return, he worked at the Prague engineering firm Tašek & Weis and subsequently at Waldek & Wagner. In his free time, he devoted himself to educational and promotional activities, mainly giving lectures in the Association of Engineers and Architects, Industrial Unity and in various student organizations.
The participation of French aeronauts at the Jubilee National Exhibition in Prague gave Czech aviation enthusiasts and pioneers a strong incentive to found the Czech Aeronautical Society. One of these aeronauts, Eduard Surcouf, hosted the first meeting of interested parties held on September 23, 1891 in a restaurant in Bezovce. As a founding member, Gustav V. Finger was the executive director of this company, which was officially confirmed by the governor’s decree 36.042 on April 10, 1892. He saw in the membership, among other things, the hope of obtaining financing for his later Cyklon airplane project. Professor Karel Václav Zenger became the chairman at that time, who several years later tried to use the Prague balloon to observe the solar eclipse, which I wrote about in the post Gardener’s balloon.
Cyklon
In 1892 he designed an airship driven by a propeller in a long cylinder passing through the axis of the carrier balloon. However, in the following years, he decided to work only on studies of heavier-than-air aircraft structures. Three flows later, he developed the Zyklon aircraft design, the essence of which was the so-called propulsor, consisting of a long tube with two propellers. It was actually the principle of a jet engine. In this way, he wanted to solve the motive power with the cold air stream, while at the same time he apparently hoped that his drive would provide the aircraft with sufficient stability and contribute to the lift of the aircraft. However, he had not yet clarified the final arrangement of the propellers and also did not expect significant energy losses in the propulsor tube. Another obstacle in the development was the financial situation, which, despite all efforts to raise the necessary amount with the help of lectures, articles in technical magazines and events of the Czech Aeronautical Society, did not allow him to build a prototype.
Thanks to these efforts to popularize aviation, however, many individuals also turned to him with a request to review their inventions. For this reason, V. Karmazín later called him the first Czech aeronautical engineer. After various disagreements with other members of the aeronautical society, G. V. Finger resigned, but on July 30, 1895, he re-enlisted. Two years later, on April 13 to be exact, the company disbanded. In the same year that he designed his Zyklon, i.e. 1895, he published a book called Studie aeronautica, which at the time was only the second work in the field of aviation published in Czech. In the same year, he began publishing the monthly Epocha, which he originally intended as an aviation magazine, but due to little interest in this field, he transformed it from the second year into a general technical periodical with a permanent section on aviation. After six years, he handed over this magazine to the publisher E. Weinfurter.
Unheard warning
In 1896, the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée was preparing a balloon expedition to the North Pole. On September 19, 1896, Gustav V. Finger wrote a letter to his colleague in which he warned him against flying an uncontrollable balloon to the Pole. S.A. Andrée, however, rejected his doubts in a letter dated October 5, 1896, and the expedition subsequently ended tragically.
Back to aviation
In 1897, when he saw the first Benz gasoline car in Vinohradská Street, he immediately understood that the future propulsion of airplanes would not be a steam engine, as he thought until now, but a significantly lighter gasoline engine. After a series of failures in 1897, he suspended his aviation activities for a while. In the same year, he was very instrumental in founding the Patent Society in Prague, whose founding meeting took place on April 25, and Finger was elected the association’s executive. In 1903, he opened a technical agency in Královské Vinohrady (today a city district in Prague) and returned to lecturing and publishing publications together with the flourishing of aviation in Europe in 1908. Among his first printed articles is a feuilleton entitled What is the significance of the last attempts at air navigation. In this year, the Technical Museum of the Czech Kingdom (today’s National Technical Museum in Prague) was founded. Two years later, thanks to the great efforts of G. V. Fineger, it was decided to establish the aeronautical department XVII. Transportation group. He later created a permanent aviation exhibition in the first building of the Schwarzenberg Palace museum in Hradčany.
Hermann Ritter gave a lecture on Finger’s Zyklon airplane on May 1, 1908 at the Wiener Flugtechnischer Verein (Vienna Aeronautical Union), unfortunately again without much response. Finger’s hopes turned to France, where he received Patent No. 408,205 on January 19, 1910. Unfortunately, he received no further support or funding. His Austrian patent application was rejected on June 21, 1911, with the explanation that it did not bring anything new and similar patents were already patented abroad. For example, Rudolf Krocker from Teplice had his idea patented in Great Britain in 1899, in Austria on April 15, 1901 (No. 4050) and in America on November 4, 1902 (No. 712,689). In Prague, on November 19, 1909, he saw Blériot’s first plane, and two years later he witnessed the memorable flights of Jan Kašpar and Evžen Čihák. He welcomed these then admirable feats and praised them highly. However, until the end of his life, he believed in the correctness of his idea and hoped for the realization of his airplane, which is proven by his statement with a flavor of bitterness from the failures at the already mentioned exhibition in Prague, where he blurted out: “If there were no limited opinions, we could have exhibited a Czech airplane today in Paris.”
Gustav V. Finger died in Prague on March 25, 1919. According to his study, V. Vondráček started building the plane in 1910, but unfortunately he never finished it. The world thus had to wait for the first functional airplane until 1932, when the Italian designer Luigi Stipa built it on this principle. The Italian Royal Air Force, which tested the prototype on it, appreciated the flight stability and extremely low landing speed (68 km/h). However, due to its clumsiness, further development of the aircraft was stopped and the project ended. The official name of this experimental machine was Stipa-Caproni, but the press soon renamed it Flying Barrel or Flying Tunnel.
source:
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stipa-Caproni
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Victor_Finger
http://biography.hiu.cas.cz/Personal/index.php/FINGER_Gustav_Victor_30.6.1854-25.3.1919