Sir William Congreve, 2nd Baronet

Sir William Congreve, 2nd Baronet KCH FRS (20 May 1772 – 16 May 1828) was a British Army officer, Tory politician, publisher and inventor.

Many years previously, several unsuccessful experiments had been made at the Royal Laboratory in Woolwich by Lt. General Thomas Desaguliers.

[6] After living with a mistress and fathering two illegitimate sons, he married in December 1824, at Wessel, Prussia, Isabella Carvalho (or Charlotte), a young woman of Portuguese descent and widow of Henry Nisbett McEvoy.

[6] He died in Toulouse, France, in May 1828, aged 55, and was buried there in the Protestant and Jewish cemetery of Chemin du Béarnais.

Hyder Ali, the 18th century ruler of Mysore and his son and successor Tipu Sultan used them against the forces of the East India Company during the Anglo-Mysore Wars, beginning in 1780 with the Battle of Pollilur.

He considered his work sufficiently advanced to engage in two Royal Navy attacks on the French fleet at Boulogne, France, one that year and one the next.

In 1807 Congreve and sixteen Ordnance Department civilian employees were present at the Bombardment of Copenhagen, during which 300 rockets contributed to the conflagration of the city.

[16] Congreve rockets were successfully used for the remainder of the Napoleonic Wars, with the most important employment of the weapon being at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813.

Congreve invented a gun-recoil mounting, a time-fuze, a rocket parachute attachment, a hydropneumatic canal lock (installed at Hampstead Road Lock, north London[17]) and sluice (1813), a perpetual motion machine, a process of colour printing (1821) which was widely used in Germany, a new form of steam engine, and a method of consuming smoke (which was applied at the Royal Laboratory).

He also took out patents for a clock in which time was measured by a ball rolling along a zig-zag track on an inclined plane; for protecting buildings against fire; inlaying and combining metals; unforgeable bank note paper; a method of killing whales by means of rockets; improvements in the manufacture of gunpowder; stereotype plates; fireworks; and gas meters.

Congreve's unsuccessful perpetual motion scheme involved an endless band which should raise more water by its capillary action on one side than on the other.

He used capillary action of fluids that would disobey the law of never rising above their own level, so to produce a continual ascent and overflow.