Getting mankind off the ground involved brave engineers testing their theories in some far off places. Some worked, most didn’t but things were eventually sorted out. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
The printing of this stamp really lets it down. The color barely lets you see the autogiro over Madrid. The autogiro was invented in Spain and must have created quite a stir in the 20s. I generally find the elaborate colors of modern stamps clownworthy, but in this case better printing and color choices would have helped. If Cierva had invented the autogiro in Argentina under Peron, the stamp engravers there would have known how to handle it.
Todays stamp is issue AP30, a 20 Centavo airmail stamp issued by Spain in January 1939. It was part of a 7 stamp issue in various denominations that honored Juan de la Cierva, the inventor of the autogiro. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 40 cents used. There are overptints of this issue denoting airmail or a stamp show in San Sebastian in 1948 that were applied privately and so do not effect value. There is also an imperferate version that is real and ups the value to $40.
Juan de la Cierva was born in 1895. By his late teens he was obsessed with a theory of sustained flight by the lift effect of the auto rotation of a rotor. This would allow the craft to take off without a runway to build speed and airflow around wings like a conventional airplane. An autogiro differs fom a helicopter in that an engine propeller provides the airflow to turn the rotor rather than powering it directly. The flight controls are more like a conventional airplane and Cierva thought this a big advantage over a helicopter.
There were many issues around how to achieve the tilting of the rotor and how to transmit the engine torque. So several generations of flying prototypes were built. Cierva then moved to Britain after successfully demonstrating a prototype to the Air Ministry. With the help of Scottish industrialist and flight enthusiast James Weir, Cierva set up an aviation company. With this he was able to license his technology to others working in the Netherlands and Germany and incorporate their advances. In 1936, Cierva was killed in a plane crash of a KLM DC2 on the way from Croydon to Amsterdam. Work on Cierva’s designs ended at the outbreak of World War II.
Post war, the company tried to continue where it had left off, only now with conventional helicopters. The prototype of the then largest helicopter in the world with 3 rotors on outriggers crashed in 1948 killing the pilots who were also the executives of the company. Juan de la Cierva was made a Spanish Count and a member of the aviation hall of fame posthumously.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast Juan de la Cierva. Come again tomorrow for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting.