🚁 Helicopter, from the Greek: helix (‘spiral’ or ‘whirl’ or ’convolution’) + pteron (‘wing’); into French: hélicoptère.

(Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto via Getty Images)

We know that manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight in an aircraft began with the Wright brothers in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—unless that is you accept the audacious alternate candidate, Gustave Whitehead’s flight in Connecticut made two years earlier🅰—but when did the first helicopter get off the ground? The primitive archetype seems to be the brainchild of Frenchman Paul Cornu. Cornu, like the brothers Wright, started off as a bicycle maker before veering off into the nascent field of aerodynamic engineering.

M. Cornu (Photo: FAI)

Getting the concept off the ground
Near Lisieux in northern France in 1907, Monsieur Cornu became the first person to (ever so briefly) pilot an airborne rotary-wing, vertical-lift aircraft. The rotorcraft (using an unpowered rotor in free autorotation to develop lift) from Cornu’s own design was a twin-rotor job, the blades rotating in opposite directions which neutralised the torque. M. Cornu’s craft levitated about 1.5 metres off the ground, hovering for some 20 seconds. The Cornu ”Ur-copter” wasn’t manoeuvrable at all (requiring manpower to hold it in position from the ground) and therefore wasn’t practical, but it is considered to be a forerunner of the modern helicopter.

Juan De la Cierva (Photo: Crouch/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)

De la Cierva and the autogyro
From 1912 on, numerous inventors and engineers were turning their hands to building prototypes of the rotorcraft, but with limited or ephemeral success. Compared to fixed-wing aircrafts, progress with rotorcrafts evolved very slowly, due to intrinsic problems with torque, dissymmetry of lift and control. Sikorsky (below) spent 30 years working on developing helicopters before his breakthrough. Etienne Oehmichen, whose early prototypes included vertically-mounted rotors and a tail rotor, allowing it to fly a distance of one kilometre in 1924! Oehmichen was also the first to carry passengers in his Oehmichen No. 2 helicopter. By the early 1920s Spanish aviator and engineer Juan De la Cierva built the autogyro (sometimes called a “windmill plane” or ‘gyroplane’)… his success advanced the understanding of rotor dynamics. Cierva’s autogiro had air safety in mind, proposing a solution to the craft losing its lift or stalling even at very low speeds. The Spaniard worked out that the autogyro’s rotor function is driven by the speed of the air, cf. the helicopter’s which depends on a motor…in the descent of the autogyro the rotor functioned as a kind of parachute according to Cierva. Ultimately, the helicopter’s superior velocity made it the preferable mode of aerocraft, however Cierva’s principle of the self-turning rotor remained a vital contribution to the later development of functional helicopters. Cierva’s flapping rotor blades has been described as “the single most important discovery in helicopter development” (CV Glines). A countryman of Cornu’s, Louis Bréguet, also experimented with the autogyro in the Thirties, his Bréguet-Dorand “Gyroplane Laboratoire” improving both the craft’s speed to 120km/h and its control capacity.
Another step forward in the evolution of helicopters came from Nazi Germany. Professor Heinrich Focke applied Cierva’s pioneering work on aerodynamics to the task of transitioning from the limitations of the autogyro to the creation of a “pure helicopter”. In 1936 Focke and Gerd Achgelis‘ Focke-Wulf Fw-61 smashed existing helicopter records for range and altitude and demonstrated autorotation descent to landing. This plus a control system much more reliable and robust than earlier rotorcrafts leads many aviation geeks to consider the Fw-61 to be “the world’s first truly functional helicopter”.

Image: http://primeindustriesusa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/prime-industries-history-of-the-first-helicopter-infographic.jpg. ’History of the First Helicopter’.

Sikorsky’s practical copter
What Cornu started, Russian-born American designer Igor Sikorsky brought to commercial fruition. Sikorsky invented the first mass-produced, and in the opinion of many, the first practical helicopter, the VS-300, in Stratford, Connecticut in 1939🅱. In commercial production called the R–4, it would go on to play a significant role in the Second World War. By the war’s end Sikorsky had added the R–5 and the R–6 models, specifically designed for the military and specialising in search-and-rescue missions. Although he didn’t invent the first prototype of the helicopter, Sikorsky is commonly thought of as “the father of helicopters” because “he invented the first successful helicopter upon which further designs were based”. The VS-300 became the model for all modern single-rotor helicopters.

Igor Sikorsky, 1939 test flight

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🅰 see the November 2014 blog on this site, ‘Wright or Not Right?: The Controversy over who really was “First in Flight”’

🅱 Sikorsky’s 1939 flight was actually tethered, so the first ‘free’ copter flight (also by Sikorsky) didn’t take place until the following year, 1940

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Sites and articles consulted:

‘History of Flight: Breakthroughs, Disasters and More’, Aaron Randle, Inside History, 09-Jul-2021, www.insidehistory.com

’Focke-Wulf Fw-61’, Modelling Madness, Brian R Baker,  www.modellingmadness.com

‘World’s First Helicopter — Today in History: September 14’, September 14, 2018, Connecticut History.org, www.connecticuthistory.org

‘History of the Helicopter’, Mary Bellis, ThoughtCo, Upd. 04-Oct-2019, www.thoughtco.com

‘Who Invented the Helicopter? (and When?)’, Aerocorner, www.aerocorner.com

‘Juan de la Cierva: Autogiro Genius’, C.V. Glines, Aviation History, Sept 2012,  www.au.readly.com

‘History of the Helicopter from Concept to Modern Day’, Prime Industries Inc, 31-Aug-2015,  www.primeinustriesusa.com

’Juan de la Cierva and the Autogyro’s Invention’, Javier Yanes, Ventana al Conocimiento, 21-Sep-2015,  www.bbvaopenmind.com