Cornu helicopter

The Cornu helicopter emerged because a French bicycle maker from Normandy believed that vertical flight was possible—and on November 13, 1907, he proved it for exactly 20 seconds.

Paul Cornu was born in 1881 in Glos-la-Ferriere, France, one of thirteen children. His family moved to Lisieux, where his father owned a bicycle and automobile shop. Like the Wright Brothers—bicycle makers who achieved powered fixed-wing flight just four years earlier—Cornu was a mechanic who dreamed of flight. But where the Wrights pursued forward motion with wings, Cornu pursued vertical lift with rotors.

His design was an open-framework structure built around a curved steel tube carrying a rotor at either end, with the engine and pilot in the middle. A 24-horsepower Antoinette engine provided power, transmitted to both rotors via drive belts that spun them in opposite directions—countering the torque that would otherwise spin the aircraft itself. Cornu planned to control the craft by altering the pitch of rotor blades and by steerable vanes directing the rotor downwash.

On November 13, 1907, at Coquainvilliers near Lisieux, the Cornu helicopter lifted approximately 1.5 meters (about 5 feet) off the ground and hovered for roughly 20 seconds. This was the first free flight of a rotary-wing aircraft—previous attempts, including the Breguet-Richet Gyroplane, had required men on the ground to stabilize the craft.

The flight was enough to reveal fundamental problems. The control systems Cornu had designed were ineffective. The craft made a few more short hops but proved essentially uncontrollable. Cornu abandoned the machine soon thereafter, recognizing that helicopter flight required solutions he couldn't yet provide.

Paul Cornu died in 1944 when his home in Lisieux was destroyed during the Allied bombardment accompanying the Normandy landings. In 2007, engineering students built a replica of his machine for the centennial celebration at the Louvre. The original helicopter exists only in photographs and patents, but it demonstrated that vertical flight was achievable—even if controlled vertical flight would require decades more development.