- Louis Brennan sold his steerable torpedo to the British Government
THE incredible life of renowned Irish inventor Louis Brennan will be remembered this morning as Taoiseach Enda Kenny visits the grave of the Mayo man who designed the world’s first guided torpedo and the prototype helicopter.
Despite making a small fortune selling his steerable torpedo to the British Government and having his genius lauded by the likes of Winston Churchill, Brennan was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave after failing to find buyers for his ground-breaking monorail and helicopter.
This morning the Taoiseach will visit that grave in London to unveil a new headstone for the inventor and Castlebar native, while Brennan will also be remembered at a special exhibition which will run throughout this month.
Jean Lear, who will be hosting a month-long exhibition devoted to Brennan at Gillingham Library in Kent, described him as someone “who had ideas coming out of his ears all the time”.
“He was the sort of guy who if you went to him and said ‘I have a bit of a problem on my production line’, he would come up with an idea for you,” she added.
“He was thinking about inventions day and night, right from an early age.”
Brennan’s family left their native Castlebar for Melbourne, Australia, in 1861, when he was just nine.
Said to be a lover of puzzles, he started his working life as a watchmaker before going on to learn engineering from renowned mechanical engineer Alexander Kennedy Smith.
Little evidence survives about his early life except a recently-discovered play that includes a scene in which Brennan is trying to gain entry to the University of Melbourne by producing a vast range of inventions, including an incubator to help his mother’s hens lay eggs.
He then travelled to Britain in 1880 to sell his Brennan Torpedo, the world’s first guided weapon, to the British Government for £110,000, a huge sum at the time.
Settling in England with his wife, fellow Castlebar native Annie, and their three children, Brennan set up a workshop in Gillingham. While there he worked tirelessly on his idea for a monorail, a train running on a single track.
But despite a young Winston Churchill praising him for creating something that could “revolutionise the railway systems of the world”, Brennan never found a buyer for the invention and spent almost all of his money developing it.
He was then commissioned by the British Government to create a prototype helicopter at Farnborough’s Royal Aircraft Establishment.
But again Brennan would be left disappointed, as he was forced to abandon the project when its funding was withdrawn.
Brennan developed health problems in his later years. But he continued to work on new inventions, like his idea for the first electric car, after being giving money by a fellow member of the Savage Club, an organisation popular with London’s bohemian scene.
It was while working on the plans in Montreux, Switzerland, as he recuperated from illness, that Brennan was hit by a car on December 26, 1931.
He died from injuries, aged 79, almost a month later and his body was returned to London for burial in a grave marked only with the number ‘2454’ despite leaving £2,500 to his two surviving children.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Mayor of Castlebar Cllr Noreen Heston will today unveil Brennan’s new headstone at 11am.
It follows a two-year campaign involving a number of Irish people living in Britain, including London-based Andy Rogers and retired Manchester businessman John Kennedy CBE.
