A
short history about helicopters:
The first studies on helicopters were well in advance
of the first airplanes. Leonardo da Vinci is credited with having
first thought of a machine for vertical flight, the "airscrew,"
the design for which, dated 1493, was only discovered in the 19th
century. It consisted of a platform surmounted by a helical screw
driven by a somewhat rudimentary system, not unlike that of rubber-powered
model aircraft. The great Tuscan genius wrote that if this instrument
in the form of a screw were well made of linen, the pores of which
had been stopped with starch, it should, upon being turned sharply,
rise into the air in a spiral. However his design was never put
to any practical use.
The first firm historical evidence of such a machine being built
dates from 1784, when two French artisans, Launoy and Bienvenu,
devised an ingenious toy consisting of two propellers made of
birds' feathers fixed to the tips of a shaft, around which two
strings were twisted, tensioning a spring in a crossbow arrangement.
As it straightened out, the spring caused the propellers to rotate
for a few seconds, sufficient to send the toy spinning a few meters.
The question of vertical flight was confined to drawings and more-or-less
working models for another century, but a number of people were
passionately interested in the subject. In 1842 W.H. Phillips
built a scale jet-propelled helicopter in Great Britain, and a
year later Sir George Cayley, the father of British aviation,
invented his "Aerial
Carriage" which had four "rotors"
arranged coaxially in pairs. This strange vehicle was an improvement
on other contemporary projects, but Sir George did not succeed
in finding a suitable engine, so the machine remained on the drawing
board.
Finding a satisfactory powerplant was long a fundamental problem
with helicopters. At the beginning, steam engines had already
been invented, but only with limited capacity and their weight:power
ratio was prohibitive. Thanks, however, to the efforts of a few
"aeronautical" pioneers, some designs really did fly,
such as the spring-operaterj models by Bright (1861) and Castel
(1878), and the steam-driven ones by the Frenchman Ponton d'Amcourt
(1863) and the German Achenbach (1874), while Alphonse Pdnaud
(1870) tested a series of models of various shapes and with various
propulsion systems.
One of the most ingenious solutions was that adopted by Enrico
Forlanini, who flew a model helicopter in 1877 with a pair of
two-bladed, coaxial, contra-rotating rotors, using a steam engine
fed by a small boiler heated by a stove which also served as a
stand forthe model when at rest.
The helicopter as such was still to come.
About Igor Sikorsky:
Following his frustrated experiments in helicopters before the
First World War, Sikorsky turned his attention to fixed-wing aircraft.
He built the first multi-engine aircraft, the Sikorsky GRAND,
and then went on to the ILYA MORONETS, a great four-engined luxury
passenger airliner that looked like something out of a Jules Verne
novel; it was likely no coincidence that Sikorsky was a big fan
of Verne's writings. The name was that of a tenth-century folk
hero. When the war broke out, Sikorsky built about 79 of these
huge aircraft for the Tsarist government.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, Sikorsky decided he
was on the wrong side of the class struggle and fled to France
in 1918. Failing to find steady work there, he went to the United
States in 1919, inspired by the work of Edison and Ford to seek
his fortune in a land where a person with "ideas of value"
might have a good chance to succeed. After a few lean years, in
1923 he and a few associates founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering
Corporation on Long Island, New York. He finally achieved success
in 1928 with his "S-38" amphibian aircraft, which established
the Sikorsky name and associated with amphibians and flying boats
that would evolve into the great and elegant ocean-spanning Sikorsky
Clippers.
In 1929, Sikorsky moved the Sikorsky Aviation Corporation to Stratford,
Connecticut, where the company was soon brought under the umbrella
of the giant United Aircraft holding company. Although he spent
most of his time working on his seaplanes, he still tinkered with
helicopter concepts in his spare time. He patented one of his
designs in 1931, and by 1935, his son Sergei was building flying
models of his father's helicopters, which Igor would demonstrate
to his engineers or the board of United Aircraft, which by that
time had become a true corporate conglomerate.
In 1938, United Aircraft, suffering under the prolonged Depression,
had to shut down production at its Sikorsky division. However,
in an amazingly far-sighted and generous action, the company allowed
Igor Sikorsky to retain a small development team and work on a
helicopter project on a low-budget basis. Sikorsky was now effectively
out of the fixed-wing aircraft business and into the helicopter
business
full-time; he said later: "It was a wonderful chance to
relive one's life all over again." He claimed the machine
would cost $30,000 USD to build. It would cost much more than
that, but it would still pay off handsomely and UA management
would consider it a bargain.
