George de Bothezat was born in 1882 in
Saint Petersburg, His father Alexander Il'ich Botezat belonged to a family of
Bessarabian landlords, graduated from the department of history and philology of the
Saint Petersburg University and worked in the
Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, first in Saint Petersburg and then in
Paris. Mother, Nadezhda (Nadine) L'vovna Rabutovskaya, belonged to
Russian nobility. After the father's death in 1900, the family returned to Russia and settled in
Kishinev, where the family friend and local manufacturer Egor Ryshkan-Derozhinsky supported the educational expenses of all three children: George and his sisters Vera (born 1886) and Nina (born 1884). After graduating the School of Exact Sciences (
Realschule) in
Kishinev in 1902, he started attending the
Kharkov Polytechnic Institute, then
Montefiore Electrotechnical Institute in
Liège,
Belgium (between 1905 and 1907), and graduated as
engineer from Kharkov Polytechnical in 1908. In 1911, he joined the Faculty of Shipbuilding from the
Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University, In 1914, de Bothezat accepted the position of director at the Polytechnical Institute in
Novocherkassk, but the outbreak of World War I compelled him to return to Saint Petersburg and join the Technical Commission of the
Imperial Russian Air Force. In 1915, de Bothezat published standard bombing tables for the Air Forces, and in 1916 he was appointed chief of the
Main Airfield in Saint Petersburg – Russia's first flight research facility. He managed the design team of the DEKA aircraft plant in Saint Petersburg, and was credited with the design of a single-engined aircraft that was tested in 1917. In 1921, the US Army Air Service hired de Bothezat to build a prototype
helicopter. The
quadrotor helicopter, known simply as the
de Bothezat helicopter, was built by de Bothezat and
Ivan Jerome in the hangars of
Wright Field near
Dayton, Ohio. In 1922, their "flying octopus" flew many times, although slowly and at low altitudes. In fact, its horizontal motion was induced by wind more than by the pilot's controls. The US Army, now more interested in
autogyros, cancelled the underperforming project. The company's axial fans were installed on US Navy cruisers, but this was as far as de Bothezat would go in dealing with the government. He continued publishing essays on topics ranging from flight dynamics to economics of the
Great Depression. Einstein personally refuted de Bothezat's claim at a public lecture given by de Bothezat at Princeton on 15 June 1935. He worked for the film industry, designing mechanical
special effects props for
Dudley Murphy's
The Love of Sunya (1927). In 1938 de Bothezat returned to designing and building helicopters. His new company was incorporated as Air-Screw Research Syndicate and later renamed Helicopter Corporation of America.
Boris Sergievsky, former test pilot of
Sikorsky Aircraft, became de Bothezat's partner and test pilot. De Bothezat's new helicopter was a
coaxial design, with the engine mounted
between two rotors. The first machine, SV-2, was built and tested on
Roosevelt Field in 1938; after the tests de Bothezat and Sergievsky rebuilt it into a heavier SV-5. However de Bothezat, who was also designing a one-man "
personal helicopter" for infantrymen, died before the SV-5 could be properly tested. The new machine proved to be unstable and crashed; Sergievsky escaped unharmed. ==See also==