Sir William Congreve, 2nd Baronet

William Congreve (1772-1828) was a British artillery officer and inventor who greatly advanced the development of black powder rockets for military purposes. His rockets were commonly used by the British Army in the first half of the nineteenth century, including in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. He based his rocketry on the pioneering work of the Indian prince Hyder Ali, who had used rockets successfully against the British in 1792 and 1799 at Seringapatam. Congreve rockets were designed to bombard enemy fortifications, and his work turned an Indian battlefield weapon into a standard piece of European military equipment, an early step in the line of solid-fuel rocket development that later spaceflight engineers would build upon. He died in 1828.