Two men who share a name — William Lenoir — sit in very different corners of history: one a frontier soldier and statesman who helped shape a young United States, the other a physicist who rode one of the first operational Space Shuttle flights. Here is who they were.
William Lenoir (1751–1839) — Frontier Patriot and North Carolina Statesman
William Lenoir was born on 8 May 1751 in Brunswick County, Virginia, and became one of the defining figures of the western North Carolina frontier. During the American Revolution he served as a captain and major in the Wilkes County militia, fighting at the Siege of Savannah, Stono Ferry, and Pyle’s Massacre. His most famous action came at the Battle of Kings Mountain on 7 October 1780, where he was wounded. He eventually rose to the rank of Major General in the state militia.
After the war he built a long political career. He sat in the North Carolina legislature representing Wilkes County from 1781 to 1795 and served as Speaker of the North Carolina Senate from 1790 to 1795. An anti-federalist, he took part in both the Hillsborough Convention of 1788 and the Fayetteville Convention of 1789, and was the runner-up in the 1792 gubernatorial election. He was also a founding trustee — and the first president of the Board of Trustees — of the University of North Carolina.
His name endures across the American South: the city of Lenoir and Lenoir County in North Carolina, Lenoir City in Tennessee (named jointly for him and his son), Lenoir Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the World War II attack cargo ship USS Lenoir (AKA-74). He died on 6 May 1839, two days short of his 88th birthday, at his home, Fort Defiance, in Caldwell County, North Carolina.
William B. Lenoir (1939–2010) — Physicist and NASA Astronaut
Nearly two centuries later, another William Lenoir made his mark far above the ground. William Benjamin Lenoir was born on 14 March 1939 in Miami, Florida. He earned three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a bachelor’s in electrical engineering (1961), a master’s (1962), and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science (1965), with a dissertation on remote sounding of the upper atmosphere by microwave measurements. He taught at MIT as an instructor and associate professor before NASA selected him as a scientist-astronaut in August 1967, as part of Astronaut Group 6.
Lenoir flew as a mission specialist aboard Space Shuttle Columbia on STS-5 (11–16 November 1982), the “We Deliver” mission — the first operational flight of the Space Shuttle programme. The crew deployed two commercial communications satellites from the orbiter’s cargo bay, and Lenoir logged more than 122 hours in space. He left NASA in 1984 for the consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton, then returned in 1989 as NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Flight, overseeing shuttle operations until 1992. He died on 26 August 2010 in Sandoval County, New Mexico, following a bicycle accident.
A Note on the Name
The Lenoir name turns up often in histories of invention, and it is worth clearing up one common mix-up: the pioneer of the internal-combustion engine was Jean-Joseph-Étienne Lenoir (1822–1900), a Belgian-French engineer — not a William. The two Williams above are the figures most often meant when people speak of a “famous William Lenoir.”