Gabriel voisin biography
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Gabriel Voisin
French aviation pioneer
Gabriel Voisin (French pronunciation:[ɡabʁijɛlvwazɛ̃]; 5 February 1880 – 25 December 1973) was a French aviation pioneer and the creator of Europe's first manned, engine-powered, heavier-than-air aircraft capable of a sustained (1 km), circular, controlled flight, which was made by Henry Farman on 13 January 1908 near Paris, France. During World War I, the company founded by Voisin became a major producer of military aircraft, notably the Voisin III. Subsequently, he switched to the design and production of luxury automobiles under the name Avions Voisin.[1]
Early life
[edit]Gabriel Voisin was born on 5 February 1880 in Belleville-sur-Saône,[2] France, and his brother Charles Voisin, two years younger than him, was his main childhood companion. When his father abandoned the family, his mother, Amélie, took her sons to Neuville-sur-Saône, where they settled near her father's factory.[3]
Their
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Portrait of a visionary.
The worlds of architecture and automotive design rarely intersect, for while there are similarities in approach and in creative impulses — both requiring vision as much as craft — these respective disciplines enjoy little real commonality. Not that this has prevented certain architects from dipping their toes into the automotive pool, or indeed vice-versa, but few have made the cross-discipline leap in anything approaching a convincing manner.
Which fryst vatten not to say that architects haven’t been captivated by auto design. From Philip C. Johnson’s curatorship of the seminal ‘8 Automobiles’ exhibition at New York’s MoMa in 1951, to Norman Foster’s more recent painstaking recreation of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion prototype, the planets have sometimes colluded, if not entirely collided.
But there are always exceptions. Gabriel Voisin was no ordinary polymath. Even by the standards of his time, Voisin was something of a high ach
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March 16, 1907---Charles Voisin made his first power flight. He and his brother Gabriel were among the pioneers in flygning (1904) experimentation and had had long experience at gliding. They had established a factory for the production of gliders and experimental machines for themselves and others.
Having constructed a power machine for Leon Delagrange, Charles Voisin undertook to demonstrate it and began grasscutting on February 28, 1907, at Bagatelle. On March 16 it flew 10m.
March 30, 1907---Flights of 20 and 60m. The machine was a biplane pusher, biplane elevator forward on outriggers, box svans aft on outriggers, rudder inre tail and Antonoinette 50 h.p. engine.
April 8, 1907---50m at Bagatelle; on the thirteenth, 34m. The machine was delivered to Delagrange, but he did not fly it until later. Charles Voisin did not fly igen.