simple mechanism launched a four-bladed rotor into the air. Today, similar “spinning top” toys may still be purchased. While it was only a toy, this is the first recorded history of what today is known as helicopter flight. Helicopter flight intrigued designers ever since this invention because of its advantages of taking off and landing about anywhere, much like birds. The first recorded design for a helicopter that was not a toy came from Leonardo Da Vinci, whose designs for “spiral” flight were never built into a working model, “Leonardo Da Vinci’s much-vaunted ‘spiral’ design in 1490 has often been cited as the first serious attempt to produce a working helicopter. Da Vinci was in this instance no more than an experimental engineer, putting onto paper age-old principles.”
Throughout the 19th Century, various engineers experimented with rotary-wing flight, or vertical flying devices as they were called. The British Engineer Sir George Cayley built a converti-plane in the 1840s and a man called Bourne flew a model of Cayley’s machine that resembled the Chinese toy and was powered by watch springs in the same era. Yet, one of the biggest obstacles for engineers to overcome was the simple fact that the internal combustion engine had not yet been invented. As a result, vertical flight was not possible because the steam engines that were used to power these early kinds of helicopters were far too cumbersome, “The ideas were most definitely simmering, but all lacked a power source to achieve flight; primitive combustion engines lacked output and were both bulky and heavy.”
Like many of our modern technological discoveries, it was not until the twentieth Century that the real history of modern helicopters originated. In France in 1907, two brothers, Louis and Jacques Breguet, built the first rotary-wing aircraft that lifted vertically two inches off the ground. Another Frenchman, Paul Cornu, reporte...