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Cyril Francis Caunter (22 March 1899 in Ilford, Essex – 10 April 1988), was a British aviation historian and author. ==Life== He was the son of L. G. Caunter.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Flight Archive, 10 May 1928 )〕 When he was at school, his headmaster was Fr. Ignatius Rice M.A., O.S.B. He was a pilot in World War I.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Authors : ''Caunter, C F'' : Science Fiction Encyclopedia )〕 In 1932 Caunter published a design for a 60 hp two-stroke light aero engine. Frederick George Miles of the Phillips & Powis Aircraft company (later Miles Aircraft Ltd) built a test prototype of the Caunter engine and successful tests were carried out at Reading Aerodrome in Woodley, Berkshire, during the late 1930s. The Caunter engine performed well at Woodley with Miles, who proposed a company to produce it, to install in an aeroplane that would be sold in large numbers like Ford cars. Caunter worked at the Royal Aircraft Establishment starting in the summer of 1937 in the aero engine department, writing some of the operational text books of the RAF aero engines, including the Rolls Royce Merlin engine which powered the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine Spitfire fighters. Phillips & Powis increasingly concentrated on military training aircraft production at Woodley from the late thirties and the Caunter engine was put aside. Caunter eventually became Chief Technical Librarian for the R.A.E. after a 1943 transfer and sold his prototype engine to Alvis Ltd., Coventry, for £2,000 after the war. In 1950, he joined the Science Museum as keeper of the Road Transport Collections, beginning ten years of work documenting one of the finest collections in existence at the time. He began the process of restoring the collection. An 1888 1½ h.p. Benz three-wheeled car which had been purchased by the Science Museum in 1913 for 5 pounds and was one of the oldest cars in the world, was driven in the 1957 London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, as the No. 1 car, but its poor braking meant it did not finish. He fitted a second brake to it in 1958 and successfully completed the Run. The National Film Board of Canada produced ''Full Circle'', a vignette about Caunter returning to flight and college at the age of eighty.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Episode Guide for Canada Vignettes (from 1977) )〕 He was writer-in-residence at Glendon College in 1979; and he received his M.A. there in June 1982.〔(Souvenir Album (PDF) ), p. 9〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「C. F. Caunter」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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