Fantasy to Reality

While da Vinci worked in verrochio’s studio, his first work for Medici was Cosimo de Medici’s tomb. The circle inside square was a motif repeatedly used for this tomb. This motif was later used in his famous drawing, the vitruvian man. At 19 years old, leonardo saw the mounting of the 2 ton ball cap on the Florence duomo. He made detailed drawings of the machines used and designed by Brunelleschi to hoist the ball into place. To construct the ball cap, the copper was soldered together with the intense heat of the sun. Leonardo was so fascinated by the concave mirrors used to focus the sun’s rays to weld the copper sheets together that he drew them in his sketchbooks.

There seems to be a lot of fantasy in Leonardo’s drawings.... this sense of fantasy wasn’t frivolous. The medicis would sponsor lavish pageants to display their power and wealth. To that end, Leonardo filled his notebooks with drawings for theatrical events, machinery for set changes turning stages, hooks and pulleys to lift actors. After seeing the Archimedes screw that allows people to transport water from low to high areas, Leonardo was inspired to design a helicopter. In this fantasy of flight design, now on display at the Louvre's exhibition, a spiral wing is rotated by a rotor pushed by 4 men running in a circle. The platform the men ran on used ball bearings to rotate smoothly. Although the helicopter probably wouldn’t have lifted off the ground, Leonardo’s proposed ball bearings in machines predated Englishman inventor Philip Vaughn’s formal ball bearing patent in 1794 by 300 years.

400 years later in 1889 Kiev.... Like his father, sikorsky’s mother was a doctor. Although she never practiced professionally, she shared a great interest in art and in the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci which stimulated her son’s early interest in experimenting with model flying machines; when he was 12 years old, he made a small rubber-powered helicopter that could rise in the air. Sikorsky was inspired to make helicopters after seeing leonardo’s drawing.

At 21, Sikorsky made 2 helicopter prototypes that failed to lift off. Over the next few years he would work on plane designs. In 1913 Sikorsky rolled out the 4,000-kilogram Russkiy Vityaz the first four-engine plane ever successfully flown. As World War I loomed, the plane’s nearly one-ton lifting capacity caught the eye of Russia’s tsar. Sikorsky followed up with the mighty Ilya Muromets, which was named after a Slavic folk hero. The Ilya Muromets so impressed Tsar Nicholas II that he gifted the young designer this gold watch and ordered a fleet of the heavy bombers for the Imperial Russian Air Service.

After a tip-off that his name was on a Bolshevik hit list, the famous aircraft designer fled Russia into exile, eventually landing in America with little remaining money and few prospects. After three years surviving as a tutor of math and physics, in 1923, with the help of fellow Russian emigres -- including a $5,000 loan from famed Russian composer Sergey Rachmaninoff -- he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation. His first U.S. plane was constructed on a friend’s chicken farm. the mechanical simplicity of Sikorsky’s use of a tail rotor to counter the twist of the main rotor laid the foundations of the modern helicopter.

In 1939, Igor Sikorsky successfully lifted off in his VS-300. It was the world’s first “practical helicopter.” Since then, Sikorsky helicopters, like the famous Blackhawks have become icons of U.S. military presence.. and various Sikorsky choppers have transported every U.S. president from Dwight Eisenhower to Donald Trump.