AVIATION: Uncle Igor & the Chinese Top

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Russian-born Igor Ivanovich Sikorsky, the eminent early birdman and aircraft designer, has never forgotten a monumental nosebleed he suffered as a boy of ten in the Czarist city of Kiev. As he sat with cold compresses on his neck and waited miserably for his veins to close, he fell prey to an alarming thought: if his condition became chronic, he might never be able to become a flyer. One night a little later he dreamed of coursing the skies in the softly lit, walnut-paneled cabin of an enormous flying machine—a cabin he recognized with a start 30 years later when he went aboard one of his own four-engine Sikorsky Clippers to inspect a job of interior decoration done by Pan American Airways.

Both the nosebleed and the dream occurred before the airplane had been invented, and although he is an extremely modest and practical man, Sikorsky cannot help but brood about them. There are times, in fact, when he experiences an uneasy amazement at his own mental processes—particularly at a sense of intuition that has nudged him to many a successful engineering conclusion that neither he nor the science of aerodynamics could explain rationally until years afterward.

The Earthbound Greeks. Sikorsky the man allows his mind to range widely when he meditates upon these mysteries inherent in Sikorsky the designer and inventor. He cannot understand, for instance, why man's conquest of the air was not begun by the early Greeks or Romans. Both, he feels, were perfectly capable of inventing and flying gliders; both, to his way of thinking, produced minds which could have grasped the scientific conquests involved; both had carpenters and artisans capable of building such machines, and both made the fabrics, paints and materials needed for their construction. "But they didn't," he sadly concludes, "even invent the hot-air balloon."

Why, on the other hand, he asks, did Otto Lilienthal, the Wright Brothers, Santos-Dumont, and a hatful of other pioneer airmen—among them, Igor Sikorsky —come into a wingless world lusting to fly and apparently equipped with some kind of built-in mental equipment which helped them do so? Sikorsky never goes so far as to conclude that he is an instrument of Divine Providence, but neither can he, as a deeply religious man, avoid-wondering how else to explain some of his own rarer moments of intuition.

This curiosity about his own brain, and his grave sense of responsibility and hope for its products, would be understandable enough if only for its most recent series of convolutions—the experiments in which he planned, built and flew the world's first really workable helicopter,* and more recent work in which he has helped bring the device to its present state of windmilling efficiency. Today, at 64, he is not only an honored pioneer of the brave, oil-spattered world of pre-Sarajevo aviation but also the paramount prophet of a completely new era of flight.