Montgomery Knight

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Montgomery Knight (February 22, 1901 – July 25, 1943) was an American aeronautical engineer who specialized in rotorcraft. He was the first director of the Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a founder and long-time researcher at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

Knight was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, to Franklin and Gertrude Knight and finished Holyoke High School in 1918. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1922 under advisor Edward P. Warner. He did graduate work at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University and taught at MIT. He may have briefly worked for Westinghouse, as there are patents for electrical equipment under his name.

In 1925, Knight joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field, and in 1927 he served as NACA’s director of the Atmospheric Wind Tunnel Section. Georgia Tech President Marion L. Brittain aimed to build an aeronautics program at the school. In 1927, during a visit funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis over Grant Field at Tech. The foundation decided to fund the program, awarding Georgia Tech its largest grant to date: $300,000. About $100,000 was used to build the Guggenheim Building and $50,000 to purchase equipment and fund a wind tunnel, which Knight designed, modeled after the wind tunnel at GALCIT. Knight helped develop one of the first jet-powered rotors for a helicopter and, in the 1930s, built and tested a full-scale rotor.

In 1929, members of Georgia Tech’s Sigma Xi society formed a research club that explored engineering problems and the idea of a state engineering station to assist local businesses. This effort led to the creation of the Engineering Experiment Station (EES) in 1934, which later became the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) in 1984. Knight served on EES’s advisory board and conducted much of his research there.

During the early 1940s, Georgia Tech participated in a New Deal National Youth Administration/Army Air Corps program to increase pilot training, with Knight overseeing Tech’s involvement and helping enroll about 90 additional students. He also contributed to early wartime research on helicopters and autogyros, and Tech’s air tunnel was heavily used for aircraft company contracts. In February 1942, a newspaper article predicting the atomic bomb prompted FBI agents to visit Knight after his remarks about Uranium-235.

Knight remained director of Georgia Tech’s School of Aeronautics until his death in 1943 at age 42. In 1968, Georgia Tech named the Montgomery Knight Building in his honor—an air-conditioned facility of about 55,600 square feet funded with $1.716 million. The school’s research, often conducted with the Engineering Experiment Station, continued to advance rotor-wing aircraft and brought national recognition in 1970.