Word: cierva
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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When Inventor Edison saw and applauded the Pitcairn-Cierva autogiro at Newark last September many guessed, because it was only his second visit to any airport, that he had little knowledge of aeronautics. But Thomas Edison, like Leonardo da Vinci, attacked the problem of aerodynamics early in his inventive career. About 1880 he devised an airplane engine powered by nitroglycerin. A roll of ordinary ticker-tape, turned into guncotton, was fed between two copper rolls into the cylinder and exploded electrically. But when the engine itself exploded and injured an assistant, Edison abandoned the project. In 1910 he secured...
...Penaud. Experiments were made with slight success in 1905 by the Dane, Ellehammer; in 1906 in France by the Brazilian, Santos-Dumont, in 1907 by M. Bréguet. By 1923 Austria had its Petroczy; Great Britain its Brennan; France its Damblanc, Oemichen and Pescara; Spain its la Cierva. In the U. S., meanwhile, Henry Berliner, Baltimore aircraft builder, had spent a fortune in a decade's experiment, and Rumanian Professor Georges de Bothezat was conducting researches at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. For all of that labor, no helicopter was born...
Autogiro. Not to be confused with the helicopter is the Cierva Autogiro which, while capable of vertical descent, cannot take off without a short run and cannot hover indefinitely (TIME, Sept. 2). Officials of Pitcairn-Cierva Autogiro Co. of America declared last week that commercial production would be begun at Willow Grove, Pa., in August or September...