William Hale

William Hale (21 October 1797 – 30 March 1870), was a British inventor and rocket pioneer.

Hale was born in Colchester, England in 1797. He was self-taught although his grandfather, the educator William Cole, is believed to have tutored him. By 1827 he had obtained his first patent; he also won a first class Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in Paris for his paper on ship propulsion using an early form of jet propulsion.

Hale was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 2004.

In 1844, Hale patented a new form of rotary rocket that improved on the earlier Congreve rocket design. Hale removed the guidestick from the design, instead vectoring part of the thrust through canted exhaust holes to provide rotation of the rocket, which improved its stability in flight.

These rockets could weigh up to 60 pounds (27 kg) and were noted for their glare and noise on ignition.

Hale rockets were first used by the United States Army in the Mexican–American War of 1846–1848. Although the British Army experimented with Hale rockets during the Crimean War of 1853–1856 they did not officially adopt them until 1867. In the American Civil War of 1861-1865 the Union forces deployed the Hale rocket launcher, a metal tube that fired 7-and-10-inch (18 and 25 cm) long spin-stabilized rockets up to 2,000 yards (1.8 km). It was only generally used by the U.S. Navy.

• Frank H. Winter, The First Golden Age of Rocketry: Congreve and Hale Rockets of the Nineteenth Century, (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), p. 321 illus. ISBN 0-87474-987-5