Anton Flettner

  General Notes:

Engineer and inventor Anton Flettner was born on November 1, 1885.

Flettner was born in Germany. He taught physics and math to high school students, and in 1905 took a job at the Zeppelin company.

During World War I, Flettner developed a device that allowed airplane pilots to raise or lower a plane's nose for better control. It evolved into a mechanism called the "trim tab" which is still used on all airplanes. Flettner also made several improvements to military tanks, and he apparently designed a guided torpedo which was never built.

In the 1920s, Flettner's interest in aerodynamics led him to build one of history's strangest boats: a schooner with two tall rotating cylinders that looked like smokestacks, but were actually sails.

In 1926, Anton visited the US arriving in New York on 20 Apr 1926, on the SS Hamburg. He sailed from Hamburg was returned to visit his brother Andreas in Berlin.

Flettner is best known for designing and building many of the helicopters used by the Nazi military during World War II. He headed the Flettner Aircraft Corporation and built several models of helicopters, some with two rotors. German manufacturers couldn't make them fast enough to meet demands.

in 1947, Flettner and his wife moved to America. He started a new Flettner Aircraft Corporation. Now working for the U.S. military, he built helicopters with improved efficiency and control, including some models big enough to carry troops.

Flettner remained directly involved in his company's research until just a few months before his death in December 1961 at the age of 76.

Favorite Quotes

Only he who, by nerve wrecking struggle extending over years, has almost forced upon the engineering community an idea of his own which is considered impracticable, can understand how an inventor feels when, after his efforts have led to a certain degree of success, he reads criticism of his work in which a competent engineer proves that the invention represents nothing but a very obvious technical operation.

From Wikipedia:

World War I

During World War I, Flettner developed the servo tab / anti-servo tab, and working under the aegis of Graf Zeppelin, he worked on remote control and pilotless aircraft. This work culminated in the prototype Siemens Schuckert Werke 1000 kg wire guided air to surface missile of 1918.

The servo, or trim tab, is used in the control surfaces of aircraft and boats. It is important for large boats, that are able to move very large rudders with vastly reduced power. Trim tabs in airplane rudder are a basic part of most modern planes

Following World War I, Flettner directed an aeronautical and hydrodynamic research institute in Amsterdam.

In the 1920s, he bought a schooner and added two rotating 50-foot cylinders onto it, and thus was the first to build a propulsion system based on the Magnus effect. He came upon the idea while at the beach with his wife. He used sand, flowing over his rotating hand, to describe the Magnus effect and realized its potential on sail propulsion. The ship was named Baden-Baden and crossed the Atlantic in 1926. It could outsail normal schooners under moderate to heavy winds, but was destroyed by a storm in 1931. A commercial ship, the Barbara, was also built, and sailed to the United States.

World War II

During World War II, he headed Anton Flettner, Flugzeugbau GmbH, which specialized in helicopters.

Anton Flettner was also noted for his invention of the famous Flettner rotary ventilator, widely used on buses, vans, boats, campervans and trucks to assist cooling without the use of energy '97 modern derivatives of his ventilator are still manufactured in Britain by Flettner Ventilator Limited.

The helicopter invention was accomplished from his wealth from the ventilator business, whose success also depended on the skill of his wife, Lydia Freudenberg Flettner. Although Anton Flettner built his helicopters for the German military, primarily for navy spotter use, his wife was Jewish. He held a personal relationship with Himmler who in turn had a lower ranked officer and his men escort her family safely to Sweden for the duration of World War II. His partner and confidant was Dr. Kurt Hohenemser, a brilliant and thorough engineer who developed the details necessary for the helicopter's success. Dr. Hohenemser's father was also Jewish, yet the pair remained unharmed during their tenure together throughout the war as they worked to develop the helicopter for military use.

While the final product, the Flettner Fl 282 Kolibri ("Hummingbird"), could be factory-assembled, Flettner and Hohenemser insisted that they were the only ones who were capable of assembling the complex intermeshing rotor gearbox assembly.[citation needed] However, plans for mass production for 1,000 examples by BMW were made, which were disrupted by the destruction of the designated factory by allied bombing.

Postwar

Upon the war's conclusion, Anton Flettner was held in the "Dustbin" interrogation camp at Kransberg Castle. According to his partner, Dr. Kurt Hohenemser, Anton Flettner was of "the first regular German immigrants after the war". After 1945, Flettner, along with many other aviation pioneers, was brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip.[1] He started Flettner Aircraft Corporation, which developed helicopters for the U.S. military. Flettner's company in the U.S. was not commercially successful, but his work was shared with the USAAF. Many of the Flettner design concepts are found in Kaman helicopters of later years. Flettner became the chief designer of Kaman. Flettner died at age 76 in New York City on December 29, 1961.[2]

Anton married Lydia Helena Freudenberg on 4 Oct 1910 in Eddersheim, Frankfurt, Hessen, Germany. (Lydia Helena Freudenberg was born in 1893 in Frankfurt On Mein, Germany and died in 1976.)