Charles Stewart Rolls

Charles Stewart Rolls (27 August 1877 – 12 July 1910) was a British entrepreneur, aviator and Rolls-Royce co-founder.

The youngest son of a wealthy colonel, Baron Llangattock, he was born in London but grew up on the family estate near Monmouth. Educated at Eton and in engineering at Cambridge, he became passionately interested in cars and was Wales’s third motorist.

His first car, a Peugeot Phaeton bought in 1896, was Cambridge’s first. He led protests against the four-mile-per-hour speed limit, just over 6 km/h, and secured a threefold increase. In 1903, he set a national speed record of 93 mph and founded a London dealership for French cars.

He met Henry Royce in 1904 and founded Rolls-Royce with him in 1906. Charles handled finance, Henry engineering. Their cars entered racing in 1907 and retain their reputation today.

Starting ballooning in 1898, he made 170 flights and co-founded the Royal Aero Club in 1903.

Taking a break from business, he focused on aeroplanes in 1910. That spring he received Britain’s second pilot’s licence, after John Moore. In July, he set a time record for crossing the Channel and returning, improving Louis Blériot’s performance. It was the third such crossing after Jacques de Lesseps and Blériot.

On 10 July 1910, he fitted horizontal control surfaces to his French-built Wright biplane. Two days later, near Bournemouth, it broke up only six metres, twenty feet, above the ground. He died, becoming the first Briton killed in an aircraft crash.