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Conrad Lau

engineer

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ87334237 ↗
Source-derived summary

Conrad Albert 'Connie' Lau (February 8, 1921 – April 18, 1964) was an American aeronautical engineer, inventor, and executive. Lau led or contributed to the development of a number of important aircraft and spacecraft projects.

Early life

Conrad Lau was born on February 8, 1921, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, then part of the British West Indies, to Mr. and Mrs. Egbert Lau. He had three brothers: Neil, Roy and John.

Lau attended school in Trinidad through his sophomore year at Queen's Royal College, transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in his junior year. Lau received his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1942 and his master's degree in Aeronautical Engineering in 1943.

Career at Chance Vought

Lau joined the Chance Vought aircraft corporation upon graduation from MIT in 1943. He devoted his entire professional career to the company.

Editorial summary

“Conrad Lau” enters the record as engineer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Conrad and engineer can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1921, 1964, 1942, 1943—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1921-02-08. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Conrad and engineer.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Conrad Lau” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Conrad and engineer provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q87334237. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1921, 1964, 1942 and 1943.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Conrad Lau”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Conrad Lau primary sources, Conrad Lau archive and Conrad research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Conrad Lau”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Conrad Lau” 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.