Charles Walker (engineer)
British engineer and aerodynamicist
Charles Clement Walker (25 August 1877 – 30 September 1968) was a British engineer and aerodynamicist, who became a founding director and chief engineer at de Havilland. He was "one of the great men of aviation's formative decades".
Family
In 1837 his grandfather Charles Walker (1788-) formed a company and manufacturing works on Little Sutton Street in Clerkenwell, to make valves for gasworks. The company moved to Shropshire in 1857, being owned by his sons William Thomas Walker and Charles Clement Walker, as C. & W. Walker.
Charles Walker took over until his death in 1897, when it became a limited company. His uncle, Charles Clement Walker, (23 November 1822 - 4 February 1897) died in Lilleshall Old Hall in Shropshire, aged 74. By 1939 the site, the Midland Ironworks, was 20 acres, with 800 workers.
In 1867 C. & W. Walker were instructed to build a gasworks at Sandringham House, for the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. The company made gasholders across the world. By 1970, the London headquarters were at 51 Westminster Palace Gardens. The company made distillation columns, storage tanks, pressure vessels and pipework for the petrochemical industry.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Charles Walker (engineer)” as british engineer and aerodynamicist. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q108939999. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1877, 1968, 1837 and 1788.
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This entry incorporates text from “Charles Walker (engineer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.