Igor Sikorsky

Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was born on 25 May 1889 in Kyiv, then in the Russian Empire. He studied engineering in Paris and at the Kyiv Polytechnic and, before the First World War, designed some of the first large multi-engine aircraft, including the Russky Vityaz and the Ilya Muromets bomber-transport. After the 1917 revolutions he left Russia, reached the United States in 1919, and in 1923 founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation on Long Island with help from fellow émigrés, among them the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. Early factory work was done in a converted farm building in Roosevelt, New York.

The firm first built flying boats used on transoceanic mail and passenger routes, including the S-38 and the later Clipper types sold to Pan American. In 1939 Sikorsky flew the VS-300, a practical single-rotor helicopter with a tail rotor; the R-4 that followed became the first helicopter produced in series and used by Allied forces. He remained a senior designer at what became Sikorsky Aircraft, later part of United Aircraft. He died in Easton, Connecticut, on 26 October 1972. The site’s 12-year cycle, applied to a May date well after any Chinese New Year, reads the 1889 birthday as Ox/Gemini.

The charcoal portrait on this page is a 1928 public-domain drawing released by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery under CC0.