The basic idea of a helicopter flight through rotating horizontal wings or ‘rotors’, goes back at least 1,500 years, through a simple invention known as the ‘Chinese top’ that still survives today in different forms. That toy eventually made its way from China to Europe, where it appeared in paintings dating as far back as 1463. Not long after that, in 1483, Leonardo da Vinci illustrated a more sophisticated ‘rotary-wing’ toy in his famous notebooks. In 1784, two Frenchmen, the naturalist Launoy and the artisan Bienvenu, demons-trated a rotary-wing toy that improved on the Chinese top. Their device consisted of a shaft with rotors on each end, with a string under tension that could be wound around the shaft. Once wound up, the toy then flew into the sky. In the 1860s, a Frenchman named Viscount Gustave de Ponton d’Amecourt experimented with small flying coaxial rotary-wing aircraft models. D’Amecourt’s ingenious and competent models used springs for power, and he even designed one that ran on steam power, though that one didn’t get off the ground. He named his machines ‘helicopters’, after the Greek phrase for ‘spiralling wing’.
Helicopter
