1. Brigadier Ralph Alger Bagnold, OBE, FRS, was an English 20th-century desert explorer, geologist, and soldier.
20 Facts About Ralph Bagnold
1. 2.
Ralph Bagnold's work has been used by United States' space agency NASA in its study of the terrain of the planet Mars, the Bagnold Dunes on Mars' surface were named after him by the organisation.
3.
Ralph Bagnold returned to the forces in the Second World War, in which he founded the behind-the-lines reconnaissance, espionage, and raiding unit the "Long Range Desert Group", serving as its first commanding officer in the North Africa campaign.
4.
Ralph Bagnold's sister was the novelist and playwright Enid Bagnold, who wrote the 1935 novel National Velvet.
5.
In 1915, Ralph Bagnold followed in his father's footsteps and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers, after having graduated from the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
6.
Ralph Bagnold spent three years in the trenches in France, being mentioned in despatches in 1917 and receiving the Belgian Order of Leopold in 1919.
7.
Ralph Bagnold served in Cairo and the North West Frontier, India, where he was again mentioned in dispatches.
8.
In 1932 Ralph Bagnold explored the Mourdi Depression, in present-day Chad, and found implements dated to the Palaeolithic period in the valley.
9.
Ralph Bagnold wrote of his travels in the book Libyan Sands: Travel in a Dead World.
10.
Ralph Bagnold is credited with developing a sun compass, which is not affected by magnetic iron ore deposits or by metal vehicles as a magnetic compass might be.
11.
On 10 June 1940 Italy declared war on the United Kingdom in alliance with Germany while Ralph Bagnold was in Cairo due to an accident involving a troopship collision that he was on interrupting his journey elsewhere.
12.
Ralph Bagnold replied that the new unit that he had in mind might be able to commit "acts of piracy".
13.
Ralph Bagnold left after six months in March 1942, visiting Gaza, Brummana and Jerusalem, Sudan and Eritrea and Turkey before returning to England in March 1944.
14.
On 7 June 1944 Ralph Bagnold retired from the British Army with the end of military operations in North Africa after the Axis powers' defeat in that theatre.
15.
Ralph Bagnold made significant contributions to the understanding of desert terrain such as sand dunes, ripples and sheets.
16.
Ralph Bagnold developed the dimensionless "Bagnold number" and "Bagnold formula" for characterising sand flow.
17.
Ralph Bagnold gave a constitutive relation for a suspension of neutrally buoyant particles in a Newtonian fluid.
18.
Ralph Bagnold was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.
19.
Ralph Bagnold died at Hither Green on 28 May 1990 at the age of 94.
20.
Ralph Bagnold married Dorothy on 8 May 1946 at Rottingdean in East Sussex, and had a son and a daughter.