Archibald Reith Low (31 December 1878 – 21 January 1969) was a British pilot and aeronautics pioneer. He designed the
Vickers F.B.5. and
Vickers E.F.B.1. According to
Mervyn O'Gorman, Low coined the term "drag" to refer to
aerodynamic drag
In fluid dynamics, drag, sometimes referred to as fluid resistance, is a force acting opposite to the direction of motion of any object moving with respect to a surrounding fluid. This can exist between two fluid layers, two solid surfaces, or b ...
.
Life
Born in
Aberdeen
Aberdeen ( ; ; ) is a port city in North East Scotland, and is the List of towns and cities in Scotland by population, third most populous Cities of Scotland, Scottish city. Historically, Aberdeen was within the historic county of Aberdeensh ...
, Low was one of eight children of his father, a
Church of Scotland
The Church of Scotland (CoS; ; ) is a Presbyterian denomination of Christianity that holds the status of the national church in Scotland. It is one of the country's largest, having 245,000 members in 2024 and 259,200 members in 2023. While mem ...
minister and Jane Stuart Reith, aunt to
Lord Reith. He was educated at
George Watson's College and Edinburgh University, and at
Clare College, Cambridge
Clare College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. The college was founded in 1326 as University Hall, making it the second-oldest surviving college of the Unive ...
.
Low held the rank of
Second Lieutenant in the
City of London Imperial Volunteers.
He held the rank of Acting
Lieutenant Commander in the
Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve
The Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) is one of the two volunteer reserve forces of the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Together with the Royal Marines Reserve, they form the Maritime Reserve. The present RNR was formed by merging the original ...
attached to the
Royal Naval Air Service
The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was the air arm of the Royal Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty (United Kingdom), Admiralty's Air Department, and existed formally from 1 July 1914 to 1 April 1918, when it was merged with the British ...
(RNAS).
When on 1 April 1918, the RNAS was merged with the British Army's
Royal Flying Corps
The Royal Flying Corps (RFC) was the air arm of the British Army before and during the First World War until it merged with the Royal Naval Air Service on 1 April 1918 to form the Royal Air Force. During the early part of the war, the RFC sup ...
to form the
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force (RAF) is the Air force, air and space force of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies. It was formed towards the end of the World War I, First World War on 1 April 1918, on the merger of t ...
(the world's first independent air force), he held the rank of
Major
Major most commonly refers to:
* Major (rank), a military rank
* Academic major, an academic discipline to which an undergraduate student formally commits
* People named Major, including given names, surnames, nicknames
* Major and minor in musi ...
(in the Royal Air Force). He had therefore held a commission in all three services. The new rank structure for the RAF was not introduced into the RAF until 4 August 1919, following inter-service squabbling in the wake of massive post-war defence cuts, which reached a new low when the Army and Navy refused to allow the RAF to use their officer ranks, forcing
Trenchard to create new ones. The new rank titles (Pilot Officer, Flight Lieutenant etc.) came into being on this date. So Low, having been retired before then, continued to call himself "Major A R Low, RAF" despite, in the early 1920s, it is believed that a directive was issued that the old ranks were no longer to be used and that the new ranks were to be used instead. He was awarded the star (S.), Victory (V.) Medal and the British War Medal (BS.).;
[Naval War Medal Roll:
1914-1920 Volume 2. Retrieved 8 November 2022.] they were irreverently known as
Pip, Squeak and Wildfred, respectively.
Career
Publications
# ''Normal Elliptic Functions'' (University of Toronto Press 1950)
See also
*
List of pilots awarded an Aviator's Certificate by the Royal Aero Club in 1910
References
1878 births
1969 deaths
British aerospace engineers
Scottish aviators
Scottish aerospace engineers
20th-century Scottish engineers
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