Robert Esnault-Pelterie
Robert Albert Charles Esnault-Pelterie (8 November 1881 – 6 December 1957) was a French aircraft designer and spaceflight theorist. He is referred to as being one of the founders of modern rocketry and astronautics, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Germans Hermann Oberth, Fritz von Opel, Wernher Von Braun and the American Robert H. Goddard. He was born on 8 November 1881 in Paris to a textile industrialist. He was educated at the Faculté des Sciences, studying engineering at the Sorbonne. He served in World War I and was made an Officier de la Légion d'Honneur. In November 1928, on board the Ile de France while sailing to New York City, he was married to Carmen Bernaldo de Quirós, the daughter of Don Antonio and Yvonne Cabarrus, and granddaughter of General Marquis of Santiago, Grandee of Spain, Head of the Military Household of Queen Isabella II. He died on 6 December 1957 in Nice, France. Esnault-Pelterie developed and manufactured aeroplanes and aero engines under the name REP. His first experiments in aviation were based on the Wright brothers 1902 glider. His first glider design was tested on a beach near Calais, but was not successful. His glider was based upon an incomplete understanding of the Wright glider, and although using a version of the wing-warping which the Wright brothers had used to control their aircraft this did not work properly and was abandoned, since he considered it dangerous. After condemning the Wright brothers' approach, he developed the concept of the aileron, fitting a pair of mid-gap control surfaces in front of the wings. This potentially "initial" example of the use of ailerons of any sort is believed to pre-date all others, after their patent description in 1868 by British inventor M. P. W. Boulton was approved in that year. In 1906 he began his first experiments in towed flight. On 19 September 1906 he flew . He made his first powered flight on 10 October 1907, a distance of with the REP 1. This was driven by a seven-cylinder, 30 hp air-cooled engine of his own design.
