Matthew Piers Watt Boulton (22 September 1820 – 30 June 1894), also published under the pseudonym M. P. W. Bolton, was a British classicist, elected member of the UK's Metaphysical Society, an amateur scientist and an inventor, best known for his invention of the aileron, a primary aeronautical flight control device.

Thereafter he conducted numerous studies, wrote a wide variety of papers and earned a number of patents, including for an aileron flight control system, various types of motive power engines and their components such as propellers and pumps, plus other works on solar heat, photography and more.

[6] In 1815–1816 M. P. W.'s father, Matthew Robinson Boulton, bought the 3,250 hectares (8,000 acres) Great Tew Estate and manor in the civil parish of Cotswold Hills in Oxfordshire.

[7] In 1825 he added a Gothic Revival library to the east end of the manor house, and by the middle of the 19th century the Boulton family had a large Tudor style section designed by F.S.

[11] In one letter written from Eton with "boyish enthusiasm", Boulton described life at his boarding school:[12]"About a week ago two boys named Waring & Stanley .

They were not heard of for two or three days after, but they came back on Monday, and were flogged and turned down....." "The chief games are still foot-ball and hockey, but a great many go out in boats, which however are forbidden at this time....." "My new companion Fane is rather older than I am, as he will be 14 in May, he is rather good-natured, and is neither clever nor stupid."

[11][13] Among Boulton's earliest accomplishments was earning the Eton Prize in February 1839 for his essay, The Decline and Fall of the Persian Empire,[14] and an award for his collection of witty epigrams at Cambridge University in 1841.

[Note 2] Dr. Chris Upton of Birmhingham's Newman University wrote on Boulton's 1841 Latin poem Vehicula vi vaporis impulsa, roughly meaning "Vehicles driven by the power of steam".

Describing Boulton's poem in an English rendering, Upton wrote:[16]"Devilish" he calls the machine, cutting through the middle of mountains, slicing through the countryside.

"However even as a young man Boulton earned a reputation for avoiding the notice of his peers as he had "...no wish to attract the attention of his contemporaries", eventually eschewing university scholarships and other limelight.

Boulton showed a "compete indifference to all the rewards and distinctions attached to the manifestations of them", as written by his second Cambridge tutor, Reverend John Moore Heath (1808–1882), in a letter to the student's father and sponsor.

[11][19] Boulton's first marriage produced two daughters, Marianne Aubrey (sometimes Mary Anne Audrey, b. London, 1854–1934)[Note 3] and Ethel Julia (b. Tew, 1858–1924).

[11] After selling Soho House and his father's mint facility in 1850, Boulton retired to his family's manor and estate of Great Tew, in the Oxfordshire village of the same name, and also living in London.

[7][11] He was part of the landed gentry due to his family's holdings at Tew Park, and the Great Haseley Court estate and manor that M. P. W. later purchased in Tetworth, Gloucestershire in 1880.

[21][28][Note 8] Boulton improved the Tew estate by enlarging its grand three-story manor house, adding another garden and refining its grove.

[36] Boulton's flight control device, first described in his 1868 patent, "Aerial Locomotion, &c", was publicly praised by the pioneering U.S. aeronautical engineer Charles Manly.

While addressing the Society of Automotive Engineers in 1916, Manly referred directly to Boulton's invention, telling his audience:[7] ... the system of lateral balancing or control now so universally used; [is] that of supplementary planes, now called ailerons.

But in reality they share the common lot: the ideas of Force, Law, Cause, Substance, Causal or Active Matter, all dwell in the region of metaphysical twilight, not in the luminous ether.

According to Catherine Hajdenko-Marshall, Boulton's paper argued that in free and open societies, "the plurality of ideas meant that debate was [essentially] impossible".

[Note 10] This was soon noted by The Times which wrote in his obituary that he was:[7] ... a most gifted member of a gifted family, the inheritor of a large fortune, and highly cultured; but, being naturally a recluse, with no care for self-assertion, his wide knowledge and sterling qualities were known only to a fewAfter Boulton's death his eldest son Matthew retained the Great Tew Estate until his own death, still single, in 1914,[9] after which the estate fell into general disrepair, unused for a number of decades.

[39][40] Boulton Peak is a mountain summit at the southeast side of Curtiss Bay, about 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) south of Cape Andreas in Antarctica.

[48] Although Boulton's prescient aileron control system was fully functional, he, as did almost everyone of his era, lacked a detailed understanding of aerodynamics, and an airplane he designed never achieved flight.

[53][54][Note 13] In 1873, five years after Boulton's aileron patent, the French military engineer and aircraft designer Charles Renard built and flew at St.-Eloi, near Arras, a small unmanned multi-wing glider incorporating ailerons (which he termed "winglets") on each side of its body, controlled by Boulton's pendulum control single-axis autopilot device with a design layout that closely matched the patent.

[36][58] The patent's actual wording of ailerons reads (page 16, from line 8):[47] For the safety of aerial vessel it is important to provide a controlling power not only to direct their horizontal and vertical course, but also to prevent their turning over by rotating on the longitudinal axis.

Other 19th century engineers and scientists, including Charles Renard, Alphonse Pénaud, and Louis Mouillard, had described similar flight control surfaces, possibly serving as further inspiration to Boulton aside from Count d'Esterno.

Another technique for lateral flight control, wing warping, was also described or experimented with by several people including Jean-Marie Le Bris, John Montgomery, Clement Ader, Edson Gallaudet, D. D. Wells, and Hugo Mattullath.

[69] They did so despite rudders, elevators and ailerons having been invented long before their efforts began, and then aggressively sued other aircraft builders worldwide for failure to pay them licensing royalties on the basis of the lateral flight control described in their expansive 1906 patent.

[43] A manned ornithopter was later created in 2006 when teams at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) achieved a working design with large flapping wing areas.

[1] Under the alternate 'Bolton' spelling the British Museum lists several philosophical works (all published by Chapman & Hall, which had also published most of Boulton's works), including: Several of the Bolton writings fiercely attacked the theological positions expounded by Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton and the metaphysician Henry Longueville Mansel, who both argued that God was "infinite" and "absolute".

Additionally, a letter by an M. P. W. Bolton is archived at Trinity College, Cambridge, although a biographical work listing all of the university's known students has no record of any such person, only that of Boulton.