The History of Helicopters

The earliest references for vertical flight have come from China. Since around 400 BC, Chinese children have played with bamboo flying toys. The bamboo-copter is spun by rolling a stick attached to a rotor. The spinning creates lift, and the toy flies when released.

In 1754, Mikhail Lomonosov demonstrated a small tandem rotor to the Russian Academy of Sciences. It was powered by a spring and suggested as a method to lift meteorological instruments.

But the first real success was achieved only with the adventof the gasoline engine.

In 1906, two French brothers, Jacques and Louis Breguet, created a machine which successfully took off the ground and floated in the air for a minute. It wasn’t a real helicopter, just a construction which was tied to earth. Also it hasn’t a pilot and was uncontrolled.

The same year a French inventor Paul Cornu designed and built a Cornu helicopter that used two 6 m counter-rotating rotors Antoinette engine. On 13 November 1907, it lifted its inventor to 1 foot (0.3 m) and remained a loft for 20 seconds. It was the first controlled flight.

On 18 May 1911, B.N. Yuriev published the plan of a single-rotor helicopter whose motion was controlled by swash.

In 1922, George de Bothezat created the first sustainably controlled helicopter for the USA army.

On 18 April 1924, Pescara beat world record: flying for a distance of 736 meters.

Nicolas Florine, a Russian engineer, built the first twin tandem rotor machine to perform a free flight. Helicopter designed by Louis Breguet and Rene Doran achieved speed of 100 km/h.

Heinrich Focke at Focke-Wulf was inspired to design the world's first practical helicopter, the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, which first flew on 26 June 1936. The Fw 61 broke all of the helicopter world records in 1937.

In the years of World War II, a Russian-born engineer Igor Sikorsky and W. Lawrence LePagebuilt the XR-1, VS-300 and R-4 late.

Sikorsky's R-4 became the first large-scale mass-produced helicopter with a production order for 100 aircraft. R-4 was replaced by other Sikorsky helicopters such as the R-5 and the R-6. In all, Sikorsky would produce over 400 helicopters before the end of World War II.

In 1951 Charles Kaman modified his K-225 copter with a new kind of engine, the turbo-shaft engine. This adaptation of the turbine engine provided a large amount of power to the helicopter with a lower weight penalty than piston engines.