Helicopter Theory

The history of the helicopter may be traced back to the Chinese flying top (c. 400 B.C.) and to the work of Leonardo da Vinci, who sketched designs for a vertical flight machine utilizing a screw-type propeller. In the late nineteenth century, Thomas Edison experimented with helicopter models, realizing that no such machine would be able to fly until the development of a sufficiently lightweight engine. When the internal combustion gasoline engine came on the scene around 1900, the stage wa...