Confederate Helicopter?

Most interesting. A photo.
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https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/plans-little-known-confederate-helicopter
 
New one on me. Very interesting. Looking forward to learning more about this one. Thanks for sharing it.
 
Wow, that's great! It looks like a steam punk apparition out of "The Wild Wild West" movie. You wouldn't need bombs or rifles on this thing. If you could make it fly (not possible) you could scare those Yankees to death.
 
This showed up in my news feed....https://nationalinterest.org/blog/b...deracy-almost-developed-helicopter-1862-59322

Sorry, if I'm duplicating any previous same posts
The only minor problem was there would not be any reliable helicopter engines until the 1940s and even then for only very short flights. Germany actually was the first nation to deploy helicopters during WW2 and one can easily Google videos of their use.
The Confederacy had some interesting ideas but ideas sometimes have to wait for technology to catch up to them.
Leftyhunter
 
Yes, it seems always to be the case that science needs to wait for technology to catch up.
 
Most impractical in the form proposed, one must respect the enthusiasm (question the sanity?) the inventors in those days.

Its fun to try and reengineer it though! For instance, prehaps taking it in the direction of making the hull a rigid airship. Heavier than air travel would have been fairly impossible for that day and age, but a rigid zeppelin style craft might have been doable. I’m sure the arcamedes screws would not be great at moving air but I’m not sure they’d be any worse choice than much of the other proposed aeronautical propulsion of the era, and of you made that hull contain just enough gas bags to achieve neutral buoyancy it might have managed a hop flight?

It would make a great piece of art for a steampunk setting as either and airship or maybe a spaceship cavorite sphere style! The Merrimac of the Moon?

It’s truly a southern invention, those big screws would be bird strike city, so you’d get lot of fried chicken out of it. I think they may have accidentally invented the powered hand mixer here, so I suppose you could get a decent cooking use out of the working model as well.
 
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The only minor problem was there would not be any reliable helicopter engines until the 1940s and even then for only very short flights. Germany actually was the first nation to deploy helicopters during WW2 and one can easily Google videos of their use.
There was some close competition with Sikorkski and Bell in the US. Most don't know how the Bell helicopter was invented.

A Princeton graduate, Arthur M. Young, designed and developed a remote-controlled model helicopter. Yes, a remote controlled flying model that used a long wire to power the controls. In 1941, he took his model to Larry Bell of Bell Aircraft. Larry Bell provided a facility and some engineers to help Arthur Young build a full-scale helicopter. While designing it, the engineers could not work out the design of the transmission. Arthur took a drawing of the planetary gear box and blew it up full-scale for the final design.
After flight testing of the Model 30 (I think it was called), Bell received the FAA approval to build the first commercial helicopter (Sikorski's were made for the military). After a few modifications to the cockpit, this became the Bell Model 47.
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Another interesting fact---Arthur Young filmed his model and the experimental helicopter on color film. Google and you will find a YouTube video on the Birth of the Bell Helicopter.

ArthurYoung.JPG

From Wiki article on Arthur M. Young.
 
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The National Interest site just reprinted this article under the headline "Crazy History: The Confederacy had plans to attack the Union in helicopters."

RoadDog
 
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