George de Bothezat

George de Bothezat (Gheorghe Botezatu, Георгий Александрович Ботезат, 7 June 1882 – 1 February 1940) was a Romanian-Russian American engineer, businessman, and pioneer of helicopter flight. George de Bothezat was born in 1882 in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, to Alexander Botezat and Nadine Rabutowskaja. 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. He then continued his postgraduate studies at the University of Göttingen and Humboldt University of Berlin (1908–1909), and received, in 1911, his Ph.D. at Sorbonne, for a study of aircraft stability (Étude de la Stabilité de l`aeroplane). In 1911, he joined the Faculty of Shipbuilding from the Saint Petersburg Polytechnical University, and continued theoretical studies of flight along with Stephen Timoshenko, Alexey Lebedev and Alexander Vanderfleet. His scientific interests gradually moved from general aerodynamic theory to applied studies of propellers. 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.