Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Planes were good but could only do so much. But a helicopter could open up the world of aviation. We could reach so much more with helicopters. There was just one problem: The idea of a helicopter, was still out of reach.
It all started with a Chinese top that spun into the air. It consisted of a shaft with feathers on one end. By spinning the shaft between your hands rapidly, the top would spin into the air.
In 1754, a Russian by the named of Mikhail Lomonosov decided to give the top a power boost. He designed a small rotor on the design of a Chinese top, then used a windup spring to power the device.
About 30 years later, a French naturalist named Christian de Launoy built a similar rotor using turkey feathers mounted to both ends of an axle. A string, wound round the axle and tensioned by a crossbow, generated the power. When the tension was released, the counterrotating blades generated lift and carried the device vertically.
Most of the previous designs I showed you were more toy than transport. But that was all about to change.
Some of the greatest minds in the history of science and engineering were working hard to make vertical-lift flight something humans could enjoy as pilots. Leonardo da Vinci created elaborate sketches for several flying machines, including one he called the "aerial screw". The contraption consisted of a linen wing wrapped around an axis, or screw. Four pilots aboard the machine would turn the axis using a pumping action. As the screw turned, so da Vinci thought, the machine would lift from the ground. Perhaps if the design were lighter, it would have.
Over time, engines evolved enough to move helicopters from the theoretical to the practical. Thomas Edison, who experimented with several helicopter designs in the early 1900s, demonstrated that both high aerodynamic efficiency of the rotor and serious power from an engine were required for a successful vertical flight. Other innovations and design changes quickly followed. The first generation of engine-powered helicopters, (known as hoppers) emerged between 1904 and the 1920s. The engineers who built these machines came from France, Great Britain, Russia and the Netherlands, their inventions could make short, tethered flights of just a few seconds. Some of the machines carried pilots, while some were unmanned. Almost all of them were unreliable and were difficult to control.
It was Igor Sikorsky, a Russian-born aeronautical engineer, who developed the first machine with all of the qualities we associate with modern helicopters. Interestingly, Sikorsky's early helicopters such as the circa 1910, were failures, and he abandoned his efforts so he could focus on fixed-wing airplanes.
After emigrating to the United States and starting Sikorsky Aviation Corporation in Bridgeport, Conn., he once again turned his attention to vertical flight. In 1931, Sikorsky submitted a patent for a modern-looking helicopter design featuring a single main rotor and tail rotor. Eight years later, the first incarnation of this design -- the VS-300 -- lifted Sikorsky into the air. The VS-300 featured a 75-horsepower Lycoming engine connected to a main rotor with three blades and a two-bladed tail rotor. It also provided mechanisms to control the machine's flight. Two inputs, known as the collective and cyclic-pitch sticks, enabled a pilot to change the orientation of the blades to produce lift and enable lateral movement.
This was the first practical helicopter, but it still needed some refinement so it didn't ride like a bucking bronco. Sikorsky continued to make improvements, and on May 6, 1941, the VS-300 broke the world helicopter endurance record by staying aloft for 1 hour, 32 minutes and 26.1 seconds.
Howstuffsworks.com