George A. Botezat ( born George de Bothezat ; June 7, 1882 , St. Petersburg , Russian Empire [2] - February 1, 1940 , Boston , USA ) - Russian-American aircraft designer, scientist, inventor and mathematician who built one of the first helicopters.
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Content
Biography
Born in St. Petersburg in the family of the hereditary nobleman Alexander Ilyich Botezat (? —1900) and Nadezhda Lvovna Rabutovskaya [2] [3] . On the paternal side, he came from a Bessarabian noble family, on the mother's side - from a Russian noble family. My father was a graduate of the historical and philological faculty of St. Petersburg University , he served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Empire [4] . In addition to the son of George, two girls also grew up in the family: Vera (1886) and Nina (1884). Until 1900, the family lived in Paris , where the father was sent through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; after the death of his father in 1900, the mother with the children returned to Russia and settled in Chisinau, where the family friend - industrialist and philanthropist Egor Leopoldovich Ryshkan-Derozhinsky - took upon himself the financial expenses in connection with the education of the children [5] .
He graduated from the Chisinau Real College in 1902 . He studied at the mechanical department of the Kharkov Institute of Technology (1902-1905) and at the Electrotechnical Institute Montefiore in Liège ( Belgium , 1905-1907), where he received the title of electrical engineer. In 1908 he received with honors a diploma of a process engineer at the Kharkov Institute of Technology. In 1908-1909 he trained at the University of Gottingen and Berlin. In 1911, at the Sorbonne, he defended his first doctoral dissertation in the field of aviation, “Studies on the stability of an airplane” (Étude de la stabilité de l'aéroplane).
Since 1911 he taught at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute . During the First World War he worked as an expert in various military-technical institutions. In the spring of 1916, together with professors Tymoshenko , Fan-der-Flit and Lebedev, he joined the Technical Committee of the newly created Air Force Administration of the Ministry of War.
In May 1918, having received an invitation to work in the United States, G. A. Botezat left Petrograd and, with the assistance of employees of the American mission, reached Murmansk , then illegally left Russia; arrived in the USA in the same month. [6] [7] [8] He worked as an expert on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics . In 1921, Congress allocated him at that time a huge sum of money of $ 200,000 for the construction of an experimental helicopter and a salary of $ 10,000 a year.
In 1922, Botezat built his four- rotor helicopter at an aviation center in Dayton , Ohio . The device, which had a weight of 1600 kilograms (thanks to an aluminum frame), an engine with a capacity of 170 liters. with. and capable of carrying three passengers, it successfully took off into the air to a height of several meters and was steadily controlled, having completed more than 100 flights in 1922 and 1923. It was the first U.S. Air Force helicopter and the first helicopter to successfully complete a controlled flight. However, the US military preferred to refrain from further financing of helicopter operations, considering their serial production to be premature and giving priority to work in the field of gyroplanes. Butesat switched to the development of aircraft.
Botezat later founded the company for the production of powerful fans supplied to the US Navy , and only in 1936 returned to experiments with helicopters, establishing the company Helicopter Corporation of America. However, he did not achieve much success in this area.
In scientific terms, in addition to research in the field of airplanes and helicopters, Georgy Botezat was engaged in the study of flight paths in the air and airspace, in particular, he calculated the flight path to the Moon, which was later used in the development of the Appolo project. He died in 1940 in Boston after heart surgery. Buried in New York. The archive of George Botezat is stored in the library of the U.S. Air Force Academy.
Family
Sister Vera (married Masineva) [9] , a doctor, was married to the officer of the 142nd Infantry Regiment of the Zvenigorod Regiment Vasily Prokhorovich Masinev, lived in Orel .
Proceedings
- The problem of stability of an airplane., 1912;
- Introduction to mechanics. St. Petersburg, 1912;
- Introduction to the study of the stability of airplanes. St. Petersburg, 1912;
- Description of the automatically stable airplane system of G. A. Botezat. St. Petersburg, 1912;
- The study of the phenomenon of the blade screw. Pg., 1917;
- The theory of a radial blade screw. Pg., 1917;
- Etude de la stabilite de l, aeroplane. Paris, 1911;
- Fan engineering fundamentals. NY, 1935.
Notes
- ↑ SNAC - 2010.
- ↑ 1 2 Who's Who in Engineering (1922)
- ↑ Aviation and Aeronautical Engineering, Volume 4 (1918)
- ↑ House with a story
- ↑ How an American aircraft designer saved his sister and niece in Orel from hunger
- ↑ Error in footnotes ? : Invalid
<ref>; no text is specified for footnotesautogenerated20140125-2 - ↑ The Economist, Volume 62
- ↑ The Flying Octopus (inaccessible link) . Date of treatment January 16, 2014. Archived January 18, 2014.
- ↑ 142nd Zvenigorod Infantry Regiment and its officers (inaccessible link) . Date of treatment September 2, 2017. Archived September 2, 2017.
Literature
- Mikheev V.R. Georgy Aleksandrovich Botezat. 1882-1940. - M .: Nauka, 2000 .-- 158 p. - ISBN 5-02-002378-7 .
- Ivanyan E.A. Encyclopedia of Russian-American Relations. XVIII-XX centuries. - Moscow: International Relations, 2001. - 696 p. - ISBN 5-7133-1045-0 .
- Sobolev D. A. Russian aviation emigration. Biographical essays. - M.: Rusavia, 2008.- ISBN 987-5900078 -58-8.