George Marie Capell
Rev. George Marie Capell (c1845-1915).
Inventor of the Capell fan.
Was he connected with the Capell Fan Co?
1883 G. M Capell of Passenham Rectory, Stony Stratford.[1]
George Marie Capell of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Passenham, London (1897).
The Capell fan 'differed from all previous fans by having two series of blades, inner and outer, separated by a curved blank piece between the inner wings, dipping into the fan inlet and the outer wings, and having an expanding casing, and a wide hopper-shaped chimney. The first of these fans at Waliswood Colliery, near Rotherham, marked an epoch in mine ventilation. The fan was 10 feet diameter by 8 feet wide, and had two inlets 5 feet 6 inches diameter. At 210 revolutions this fan gave:— Cubic feet per minute, 105,000 ; water gauge, 3.25; or 55 per cent. manometric effect. The useful effect reached 88 per cent. horse-power in the air compared with indicated horse-power. ....[2]
1915 Obituary [3]
THERE passed away, on January 28th, a well-known and interesting personality in the mining world in the person of the Rev. G. M. Capell, Rector of Passenham, Stony Stratford. He was born in Grosvenor-square, London , in 1844, and was a son of the Hon. Adolphus Capell (brother of the fifth Earl of Essex) and the Hon. Mrs. Capell (eldest daughter of Viscount Maynard). He entered the Church and became Rector of Passenham in 1870, which position he retained until his death.
Mr. Capell farmed his own land, and finding on one occasion his haystack heating, applied artificial ventilation by means of a small hand-driven fan which he constructed in his own workshop attached to the rectory, and by which means he forced air through a pipe to the heated part of the stack, thus successfully overcoming the evil. The construction of this littlle fan led him to build up a great development of ventilating fans, culminating in the construction of large fans for the ventilation of coal and other mines and for other purposes. He took out many patents for the protection of his inventions, which were a wide departure from the Guibal and other large fans previously in use for mine ventilation, the principal features being small diameter, high speed, curved vanes, and large ratio of inlet to body capacity, thus producing a high efficiency and low oil consumption, and owing to the rigidity of the structure a very low maintenance cost.
The merits of the fan were first recognised by the Germans and Belgians, who have now a large number working on some of their principal coal mines, where owing to the restricted airways in the thin seams of these countries, the fans were designed to produce a very high water gauge, in some instances as high as 15in. Some hundreds have also been installed in England, France and America, some of which have been running for twenty-five years with great economy.
During the last few years of his life Mr. Capell devoted his attention to propellers for boats and aeroplanes. His genial manner and devotion to scientific matters made him very popular with mining engineers, colliery proprietors and others with whom he came in contact, not only in Great Britain, but on the Continent and America, where he was always welcomed by the principal mining engineers of those countries. His loss will not only be felt from the engineering point of view, but from the social standpoint throughout Europe and America, and the absence of his inventive genius at a time when the development of aeroplanes and waterplanes has reached so important a stage in military tactics will be a loss to the nation.