L.Opdyke French Aeroplanes Before the Great War (Schiffer)
Deleted by request of (c)Schiffer Publishing
Dumoulin
Dumoulin was a pastry-cook with little knowledge of either physical or aeronautical science: he devoted much of his small income to the development of ill-fated designs based on the flat cardboard roundels used under cakes - he threw them to make them fly.
In 1902 he worked with the Viscount de Cazes on a large helicopter rotor made of many thin blades; in 1904, in Agen, in southern France, in the hangar of the Comte de la Rochefoucault, he built a strange "tracteur pour la navigation aerienne." Above a high wooden frame was mounted a circular wing on a vertical axis; just below turned 2 Archimedean screws mounted side-by-side along horizontal semicylindrical cowlings. The wing turned on its axis, and the pilot sitting under a second fixed circular wing worked the screws himself. Subsequently - perhaps it should have been done earlier - he built models to study the gyroscopic effect of propellers, and built a propeller-driven bicycle. In 1911 he patented an "aeroplane gyropendulaire," and built a model of it - he called it Saturnian - in 1912, but did not complete it until 1921. It was based on a turning circular wing and 2 tractor propellers. Dumoulin died in 1923 age 57, always hopeful, always unsuccessful.