The Pioneers : An Anthology : Stefan K. Drzewiecki (1844-1938)

Stefan K. Drzewiecki (1844-1938)

Stefan Drzewiecki (1844-1938)
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Stefan Drzewiecki, pioneer airplane constructor. At first interested in submarines, he then studied the flying behavior of birds and developed the propeller theory.

His disertation, "Theorie generale de l'helice" (1920), was honored by the French Academy of Science as a fundamental work in the development of modern propellers.

Stefan Drzewiecki (1844-1938)
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Polish author, journalist, engineer, constructor, inventor, and aviation pioneer. Born on July 26, 1844 in the village of Kunka in the Hajsyn district of Podole, he left Poland at an early age. He completed his education in France. One of his early inventions was the kilometric counter for cabs. Following the Vienna Exhibition in 1873, he moved to St. Petersburg at the invitation of Grand Duke Constantine, where he constructed an instrument which automatically drew on a map the route traveled by the ship at sea.

He then devoted himself to the problems of undersea travel. In 1877, during the Russo-Turkish War, he made trials in Odessa with a submarine moved by a propeller. His submarines had periscope towers and evolved from one carrying a single person to one carrying four people. Because his inventions were not accepted by the Russian government, he turned to the study of air travel. He started by studying the flight of birds. He delivered a lecture on this subject in 1885 to the Imperial Technical Society.

In 1887 he collected his observations in a book in Russian entitled Aeroplanes in Nature. In the same year he also published in the French periodical, Aeronature, an article entitled, The Birds Considered as Animated Aeroplanes. He then moved to France. In his first work about gliding in the air, he established a close relationship between the suspension of a bird in the air and his horizontal speed. The law, deduced by Drzewiecki were later utilized in the construction of airplanes. In his book, The Gliding (Paris, 1891), Drzewiecki devoted himself exclusively to the gliding of birds.

He was the first to outline a theory of propellers for ships and airplanes. In 1892 he submitted to the French Society for Maritime Navigation a treatise explaining the method to compute the dimensions of constituent parts of naval propellers. In 1912-1913 he concerned himself with the automatic equilibrium of planes, and he exhibited a model, which had been tested in flight, that met requirements for automatic balance. But he constantly returned to the study of the propeller.

His treatise, "Theorie generale de l'helice" (The General Theory of Propellers) was awarded a prize by the Academy of Sciences in 1920. In it he set forth a complete theory about the moving propeller based directly on the general laws of the resistance of fluids. His works furnished the solution to two problems concerning aviation: namely the construction of a plane with a motor and the structure of the propeller. He died in Paris on April 23, 1938