Henry “Harry” Pollard, 30, was an inventor traveling aboard Lusitania to sell a formula for poisonous gas to the British Government to aid the war effort. Pollard was a British subject. His ticket aboard Lusitania was 13133 and he was in cabin E-40. Pollard was lost in the Lusitania sinking. The details of his deadly invention went down with the ship and was never used.
Life
Henry Pollard was born in Bradford, England, United Kingdom. He was the son of Edwin Pollard and had many siblings. The Pollard family moved to Old Corn Mill, Silsden where Henry spent most of his childhood. Through his schooling, he became an engineer’s draughtsman. He also became an inventor and was had many patents, one of which was the use of liquid ammonia in ice production.
Pollard left Manchester, England, in 1914 to work in the United States. He arrived in New York city aboard the Cunarder Transylvania on 16 December 1914. From there he went on to Washington, D.C., where he stayed in the Victor Building with an acquaintance named Middleton.
An explosion occurred when he was installing machinery for an ice plant. The accident knocked out several men and left one near death. Pollard investigated the cause of the explosion and believed that he found something to counter the poison gases used by Germany in the First World War.
After much hard work in refining his discovery and when he was done, Pollard believed that he had something much more destructive than anything in the German arsenal. With his notes, he booked saloon ticket 13133 on the Lusitania and stayed in cabin E-40. He would offer his discovery to the British Government. Pollard was lost in the Lusitania disaster, when the ship was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-20 on 7 May 1915. Henry’s brothers Frank and Lewis traveled to Ireland to look for Harry but without success.
Exactly what Pollard’s invention was has been lost to history in the Lusitania wreck. However, as he had been investigating the explosive potential of refrigerant ammonia, his invention may have been something similar.
Links of interest
Encyclopedia Titanica: Lest We Forget – Part 2
Contributors
Jim Kalafus
Michael Poirer
References
Kalafus, Jim and Michael Poirier (2005) Lest We Forget Part 2: As the Lusitania Went Down ET Research. <http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/lusitania-lest-we-forget-2.html>
“The tragedy of the Lusitania; embracing authentic stories by the survivors and eye-witnesses of the disaster, including atrocities on land and sea, in the air, etc.” Internet Archive. Web. 9 July 2011. <http://www.archive.org/stream/cu31924006692796/cu31924006692796_djvu.txt>.
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