I almost skipped it.

It was three sentences, buried in the Corning Daily Observer on July 8th, 1926, filed as a United Press wire dispatch out of Mexico City. A Mexican inventor named Manuel Carlos Reyes had developed a gyrocopter for airplanes which he claimed would enable them to land vertically. He called it the "heliocoplano." He had left for San Antonio to demonstrate the machine.

That was it. No follow-up. No outcome. No record, as far as I can find, of what happened when Reyes arrived in Texas or whether anyone showed up to watch.

I kept reading anyway, because the dispatch mentioned something in passing that stopped me: the heliocoplano was reported to differ from the La Cierva invention in Spain and not to conflict with La Cierva's patents. Which meant that in the summer of 1926, a wire service reporter in Mexico City assumed readers in Corning, New York would know who La Cierva was, what he had invented, and why patent conflicts with his work were a relevant concern. Vertical flight was not a niche topic. It was the kind of thing that showed up in three-sentence dispatches in small-town Ohio newspapers because everyone, apparently, was paying attention.

I started pulling on the thread.

To understand why so many people were racing to build a helicopter in 1926, you have to understand what aviation actually looked like at that moment. The Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk in 1903. By 1926, commercial air travel was beginning. Transcontinental mail service existed. The airplane had proven itself in a world war. But for all of that, the airplane had a fundamental limitation that hadn't been solved and that seemed, to anyone who thought about it carefully, like an enormous problem: it needed a runway. To go anywhere, it first had to find a flat, cleared, sufficiently long strip of ground, accelerate down it, and hope nothing went wrong. Cities didn't have those. Farms didn't have those. Ships didn't have those. Mountains didn't have those. The airplane was extraordinary, and it was also profoundly dependent on infrastructure that most of the world didn't have and couldn't build.

A machine that could rise straight up from any surface, hover in place, and land in a confined space would change all of that. It could land on rooftops, on ships, in fields, in the middle of cities. It would make the airplane's runway requirement look like what it was: a significant constraint that everyone had simply accepted because there was no alternative. The helicopter, if someone could actually build one, wouldn't just be a new kind of aircraft. It would be a different idea about what flight was for.

This is why the problem attracted the people it did, and why it attracted so many of them at once.

Spain's Juan de la Cierva had come closest to a working answer, and his answer was only partial. His autogyro used a freely rotating unpowered rotor mounted above a conventional fuselage to generate lift, which made it more stable than a standard airplane and allowed it to fly very slowly without stalling. The British government had ordered one and was testing it at the Hamble aerodrome in early July 1926, the very week these papers ran, and a Wide World photograph of the machine in flight appeared in newspapers across the English-speaking world. It looked like the future. But it wasn't a helicopter. It still needed forward motion to take off. It couldn't rise vertically from a standstill, which was precisely the point, and La Cierva knew it, and he kept working on the problem for the rest of his life.

In Britain, the man who had come closest to a true helicopter was not British. Louis Brennan had been born in Ireland in 1852, raised in Melbourne, and had built his reputation on two earlier inventions: the Brennan torpedo, one of the earliest wire-guided missiles, which the British Army bought for £110,000 in the 1880s, and a gyroscopic monorail that had so impressed Winston Churchill that Churchill spent years trying to get it adopted as the future of rail travel. By 1919, Brennan had convinced the Air Ministry to fund a helicopter project at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, and he spent the next seven years on it. The machine made approximately 70 flights between 1924 and 1926. It hovered. It transitioned to forward flight. It never solved its stability and control problems, and in October 1925 a rotor blade touched the ground during a test and caused serious damage. The Air Ministry, which had spent heavily and seen limited progress, withdrew funding in 1926.

An Australian newspaper, the Barrier Miner, ran Brennan's portrait and a brief dispatch that March under the headline "AIR MINISTRY HONORS AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR." The honor was a pension. The language was the language of a project being wound down. Brennan, the caption noted, had "devoted much time towards work on a helicopter machine which would rise vertically from the ground." Past tense. He was devastated, and he vowed to continue on his own, and he never did solve it.

In Washington, Emile Berliner had approached the same problem from a different angle. Berliner was already famous for inventing the flat disc gramophone record, which became the foundation of the modern recording industry, and he had spent two decades thinking about vertical flight alongside his primary business interests. His son Henry did most of the engineering, demonstrating a working helicopter to the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics in 1922 and to Army engineers at McCook Field in 1924, reaching fifteen feet of altitude and forty miles per hour in forward flight. The Smithsonian accepted one of the machines. And then Henry concluded, honestly and correctly, that their design approach couldn't solve the fundamental control problems, and by 1925 the project was finished and the Berliners had moved on.

Which brings us back to July 8th, 1926, and W. Newman in Wales, holding a model he had worked on for years and telling the Western Mail that his dual-rotor design had great advantages over the inventions of both Brennan and La Cierva. His machine, he said, could also be converted to fly as a conventional airplane by turning a switch. The photograph shows an older man in a dark suit, looking up at his model with an expression that is difficult to read but not difficult to recognize. He had been at this for a long time. He believed he had found something. The paper ran his photograph and his caption and then, as far as the record shows, nothing else ever happened.

While there’s still argument who was truly ‘first’, Igor Sikorsky had been thinking about helicopters since 1909, when he built his first attempt in Kiev and it failed to lift off the ground. He spent the next thirty years in aeronautical engineering, building conventional aircraft, running companies, surviving a revolution, immigrating to the United States, and continuing to think about the control problems that had defeated everyone else. In September 1939 he flew the VS-300 prototype in Stratford, Connecticut, tethered to the ground for safety, underpowered and difficult to handle. By 1942 the design had been refined into the R-4, the first production helicopter, which the U.S. military used in the final years of the Second World War for exactly the kinds of missions the helicopter's advocates had always imagined: rescues, reconnaissance, operations in places where no runway existed or could be built.

Most of the men who had been racing in 1926 never saw it. Berliner died in 1929. La Cierva died in a plane crash in 1936. Brennan was struck by a car in Montreux in January 1932 and died two weeks later, still working on the problem, still certain the solution was within reach. Reyes vanished from the record entirely after the wire dispatch that sent him toward San Antonio. Newman disappeared after the photograph in the Western Mail.

The caption on Newman's photograph called it "the problem of vertical flight." Not the invention. Not the machine. The problem. That framing, from a Welsh newspaper in 1926, is the most precise thing anyone wrote about this subject that week, and possibly that decade. It was a problem. It had a solution. And the men holding their models and heading to Texas and winding down their government contracts in 1926 were not the ones who found it.

See you tomorrow. – Chris

Sources
Corning Daily Observer, July 8, 1926
The Western Mail, July 8, 1926
The Barrier Miner, March 8, 1926
Evening Star / Washington Times, July 1, 1926

Secondary sources:
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — "Berliner Helicopter, Model 1924"
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — Emile and Henry A. Berliner Collection
Wikipedia — "Brennan Helicopter"
Wikipedia — "Juan de la Cierva"
U.S. Patent No. 1,361,222 — Emile Berliner, "Helicopter or Gyrocopter," patented December 7, 1920 (public domain)