Étienne Œhmichen

Étienne Œhmichen, May 1924

Étienne Œhmichen [ e.tjɛn ømiʃɛn ] (born October 15, 1884 in Châlons-sur-Marne , † July 10, 1955 in Paris ) was a French engineer and helicopter designer.

Life

Œhmichen N ° 2, 1924

Etienne Œhmichen was born as the son of Colonel Artillery Frédéric Edmond Œhmichen and the pastor's daughter Claire Peugeot. He came from a long- established family in the Montbéliard area. In 1908 he completed his studies at the École Centrale Paris .

He began his career at the locomotive manufacturer Société alsacienne de constructions mécaniques (today Alstom ). Later he entered into a cooperation with Peugeot , in connection with which he became interested in the further development of generators . After taking part in the Trench Warfare in World War I, he worked at Peugeot on the construction of armored cars.

On February 18, 1921, he completed his first successful flight in a helicopter and on November 11, 1922, he first took his Œhmichen No.2 into the air, probably the first reliably flying, man-carrying vertical take-off , which is considered the first quadrocopter . Here he also used small vertically mounted rotors, which counteracted the four large horizontally lying rotors and thus achieved the stabilization of the aircraft. This idea later led to the development of the tail rotor . On April 14, 1923, he set the distance record with a flight of about 358 m. A year later, on May 4, 1924, he succeeded for the first time with a helicopter after a circular flight path with a length of about one kilometer after about 7 minutes and 40 seconds to land again in the same place. For this he received the advertised prize money of 10,000 French francs .

Œhmichen was also a biologist and studied the functional principle of insect wings, especially dragonflies. At the end of the 1930s he was appointed professor of biology at the Collège de France in Paris , where he taught until his retirement.

His observations of bird and insect flight, recorded in writing and photographically, serve today's biomechanics scientists as a basis for further research in the construction of flexible rotor blades .

Individual evidence

1. ^ E. Debuisson: Les grands Centraux: Étienne Œhmichen (1884–1955) - Centrale-Histoire - École centrale Paris. (pdf; 1.1 MB) Retrieved October 29, 2013 (French). 

Web links

• Literature by and about Étienne Œhmichen in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Oehmichen at planet-wissen.de
• “Professor Oehmichen's flying machines” on ARTE