Sikorsky: the man and his machines

Stratford, CT - 28 April: Our afternoon was spent in the company of a veteran employee at the Sikorsky helicopter factory, learning about the history of the eponymous founder, and visiting the assembly lines on the factory floor. Today 13000 people work for the company, a highly sophisticated production facility that had humble beginnings in Tzarist Russia more than a century before. A 1909 photograph shows the founder of the company, Igor Sikorsky, sitting in a rudimentary helicopter constructed in his back garden in Kiev. He grew up as an auto-didactic, a self educated individual, who read Jules Vern and applied intuition and reason to feed his fascination with Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance sketches of rotary wing aircraft. The tumultuous Bolshevik Revolution forced an emigrated to France, then to the US, where he taught Mathematics and Astronomy briefly before diverting his interest away from helicopters towards building a variety of fixed wing aircraft. In the early days Sikorsy became best known for his large amphibious aircrafts. In 1928 he sold his company to United Technologies Corporation but stayed on as their Chief Engineer, and turned his humble genius towards the challenges of producing viable lines of helicopters. He has 66 recognised patents in the US. Although the contemporary Sikorsky icon, namely the Black Hawk, is primarily a military aircraft, Sikorsky himself valued the helicopter as a life saving instrument. In the lobby of the visitors centre, it is this statistic, the number of people across the world whose lives has been rescued thanks to Sikorsky helicopters, that the company chooses to celebrate.