Igor Sikorsky — aircraft designer with roots in the Russian Empire
Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire, on 25 May 1889, the youngest of five children. He was educated in St Petersburg and at the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, and from his student years worked on flying machines, including early experiments with helicopters.
In 1913 his S-21 Russky Vityaz, first flown on 13 May, became the first successful four-engine aeroplane. He developed it into the S-22 Ilya Muromets, a large four-engine machine with an enclosed heated cabin, electric lighting and an open promenade deck, built as an airliner and used during the First World War as a heavy bomber.
After the Revolution of 1917 he left Russia and worked briefly as an engineer for the French forces in Russia during the Civil War. When the war ended in November 1918 the French government stopped its military orders, and he decided to go to the United States. He sailed from France on the liner Lorraine on 24 March 1919 and reached New York on 30 March with, by one account, six hundred dollars and no contacts. For a time he worked as a schoolteacher and lecturer.
In 1923 he founded his own company, working at first from a farm on Long Island, and in 1928 he became an American citizen. In the 1930s he built the first of Pan American Airways' ocean-crossing flying boats.
On 14 September 1939, at the Vought-Sikorsky factory in Stratford, Connecticut, he flew the VS-300 in a tethered hover himself, at the age of fifty. It was the first viable American helicopter, and its arrangement of a single main rotor and a single anti-torque tail rotor is the one most helicopters still use. He developed it into the R-4, which first flew in 1942 and became the world's first mass-produced helicopter; it was used for the first helicopter rescue missions in Burma during the Second World War.
He died at Easton, Connecticut, on 26 October 1972, aged eighty-three. The company he founded, Sikorsky Aircraft, continues under his name.
"Left Russia after the Revolution, worked briefly for the French in 1918, and sailed from France to New York, arriving on 30 March 1919; US citizen from 1928."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine)
Born in Kiev (Russian Empire) in 1889 to Ivan Sikorsky, a psychiatrist and professor at Saint Vladimir University, and Mariya Sikorskaya (née Temryuk-Cherkasova), a physician. He left Russia in early 1918 for France, sailed for the United States in March 1919 and arrived in New York on 30 March 1919.
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Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"The work of the individual still remains the spark that moves mankind forward."