Spanish Aeronautical Engineer 1895–1936

Juan de la Cierva Codorniu was born in Murcia, Spain, in 1895. Today he is remembered as the inventor of the autogiro, a forerunner of the helicopter. For six years he attended the Escuela Especial de Ingenieros de

Juan de la Cierva Codorniu's trip across the English Channel was a world-famous international flight.

Caminos, Canales y Puertos in Madrid, Spain, where he studied theoretical aerodynamics. Following this, he entered a competition to design military aircraft for the government and built a biplane bomber with an airfoil (the part of a plane that provides lift) that he designed mathematically. The plane was tested in May 1919, but it crashed when the pilot stalled it.

Cierva believed that fixed-wing aircraft were unsafe, so he experimented with a rotary-wing design, and the world's first working autogiro* flew 200 yards on January 19, 1923. Two days...