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Thomas Sult, you wrote:
"I wonder if the riding accident occured due to poor eye site from
looking at the sun for so many years ;-)"

Alas, that may be the case, but it wasn't Captain Bygrave --it was his horse, 
ominously named "Sun-Starer". :-)


I think I only posted a summary previously. Here's some longer text on 
Bygrave's later work and the reference to his demise:

source:
The Journal of Navigation‎ - Page 136
Institute of Navigation (Great Britain) - 1955
article:
"Automatic Dead Reckoning and Navigation Instruments for Aircraft" by H.C. Pritchard 
extract:
"I. Introduction. The development of automatic dead reckoning navigation 
instruments owes its main impetus to the needs of the airman during the 
second world war. It was foreseen that manual plotting would not be adequate, 
for example, in bomber operations where frequent changes of course are 
desirable and speed and [...]

"Early in the 1930's Captain LC Bygrave constructed an experimental instrument 
which undoubtedly influenced later developments. This instrument was to be 
fed by a gyro-magnetic compass with heading and from an air log with air 
distance; on it could be set wind speed and direction. [missing sentence]
[the readout would be] ... in miles north-south and east-west.
  Captain Bygrave was killed in a riding accident in 1936, which was a great 
loss to instrument development. Little appears to have been done with his 
instrument after that time. Before his death he had, however, not only 
embarked on the dead reckoning instrument, but had also originated the idea 
of the British distant-reading compass, which was to prove which was to prove 
an important element in British navigation equipments later vised in the 
second world war. The need for a distant-reading compass had been apparent 
even before the need for automatic dead-reckoning."

The above was cobbled together from a "snippet view" of this article on google 
books. Some of the rest of you might like to try this, so I'll elaborate... 

Even when google books shows only a portion of a sentence for works still 
under copyright, it is often possible to work through a couple of paragraphs 
by searching on words at the beginning and end of each "snippet". So for 
example, a general search on the phrase "Captain Bygrave" limited to the 
years 1920-1970 eventually led me to the single sentence above noting the 
riding accident. From there I limited the search to items published in 1955 
and looked for the phrase "instrument development". Google books then 
displayed that sentence plus another half of a sentence. Then I search 1955 
for "dead reckoning instrument". And so on. It's time-consuming but actually 
rather fun. :-)

Finally, just a reminder that there are numerous historical navigation works 
available online these days and books before about 1925 are available in full 
and usually properly OCR'd so that they can be searched for keywords. Here's 
a list of some: http://www.fer3.com/mystic2008/navbooks1.html. There are 
additions on a regular basis, and this list is only a starting point.

-FER


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