Re: Joe's 1937 Dreams.

Helicopters came into existance a very long time BEFORE 1937.

... on November 13, 1907, the French pioneer Paul Cornu lifted a twin-rotor helicopter into the air entirely without assistance from the ground for a few seconds. In the early 1900's Henry Berliner created the first powered rotor craft that successfully made a controlled flight.... and before that..

A U.S. Confederate soldier, William Powers, designed an attack helicopter in 1862 that made use of Archimedes' screws powered by a steam engine that was to propel it vertically and forward. He intended to use it to break the Union's siege of the southern ports. He constructed a non-flying model but did not construct a full-size craft.

In France, an association was set up to assemble the many helicopter models and designs that had proliferated during the 1860s. In 1863, the Vicomte Gustave Ponton d'Amecourt built a model helicopter with counter-rotating propellers and a steam engine. He patented it in France and Great Britain and exhibited it at the 1868 London Aeronautical Exposition. This machine failed, but another model using spring propulsion had better luck. He called his machines "helicopteres," which was derived from the Greek adjective "elikoeioas," meaning spiral or winding and the noun "pteron," meaning feather or wing.

In 1870, Alphonse Penaud constructed several model helicoptére that he fashioned after the Chinese top. They had two superimposed screws rotating in opposite directions and set in motion by the force of twisted rubber bands. Some of his models rose to more than 50 feet (15 meters). In 1871, Pomes and De la Pauze designed an apparatus that had a rotor powered by gunpowder, but it was never built.

In 1877, Emmanuel Dieuaide, a former secretary of the French Aeronautical Society, designed a helicopter with counter-rotating rotors. The engine boiler was on the ground and connected to the machine by a flexible tube. Also that year, Melikoff designed and patented a helicopter with a conical-shaped rotor that doubled as a parachute for descent.

In 1878, Castel, a Frenchman, designed and built a helicopter driven by compressed air with eight rotors on two counter-rotating shafts. This model did not work, but a smaller one built by Dandrieux between 1878 and 1879 and driven by elastic bands did.

Also in 1878, Enrico Forlanini, an Italian civil engineer, built another type of flying steam-driven helicopter model powered by a 7.7-pound (3.5-kilogram) engine. This model had two counter-rotating rotors and rose more than 40 feet (12 meters), flying for as much as 20 seconds.

In the 1880s, Thomas Alva Edison experimented with small helicopter models in the United States. He tested several rotor configurations driven by a gun cotton engine, an early form of internal combustion engine. However, a series of explosions that blew up part of his laboratory deterred him. Later, Edison used an electric motor for power, and he was one of the first to realize from his experiments that a large-diameter rotor with low blade area was needed to give good hovering efficiency. Edison's scientific approach to the problems of vertical flight proved that both high aerodynamic efficiency of the rotor and high power from an engine were required for successful vertical flight.

At the end of the nineteenth century, inventors had not solved the inherent aerodynamic and mechanical complexities of building a vertical flight aircraft. The hundreds of failed helicopter inventions had either inadequate power or control or experienced excessive vibration. Some of the better-designed early helicopters managed to hop briefly into the air, but they did not attain sustained flight with control. Steam engines were just too heavy for a full-scale helicopter. Not until the internal combustion engine was invented and became available could inventors develop full-sized models.

A number of technical problems challenged the early developers of helicopters. These included limited knowledge of the aerodynamics of vertical flight, the lack of a suitable engine, the inability to keep the weight of the structure and engine low enough, the problem of excessive vibration, the inability to deal with the torque created by the propellers, and the inability to achieve adequate stability and control.

—Judy Rumerman

References and Sources:

Gablehouse, Charles. Helicopters and Autogiros; A History of Rotating-wing and V/STOL Aviation. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1969.

Lightbody, Andy and Poyer, Joe. The Illustrated History of Helicopters. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International, 1990.

On-Line References:

Chanute, Octave. Progress in Flying Machines. M N Forney 1894, Lorenz & Herweg 1976, Dover 1997 also at http://hawaii.psychology.msstate.edu/invent/i/Chanute/library/Prog_Contents.html.

"Helicopter." http://www.britannica.com.

"History of Helicopters – an Epic of Man's Desire to Find Freedom in Flight." Hiller Copter-News. http://www.hiller.org/exhibits/copter-news-v3n8/copter-news.html.

Leishman, J. Gordon. "Evolution of Helicopter Flight." http://www.flight100.org/history/helicopter.html.