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If you watch the French Open each year, you will note that it is played in Roland Garros Stadium.
Who was he? Garros was an early aviator who became a popular hero in France for being the first to fly non stop from Europe to Africa. When WW I erupted, he naturally joined the infant French military air arm.
In those early days, when engines were not very powerful and weight was a prime consideration, all sorts of things were tried for knocking enemy airplanes out of the sky. Some tried throwing darts or bricks, some took hunting rifles or pistols up with them for potshots, some tried to mount machine guns but of course that required someone other than the pilot to be firing it and two men plus a machine gun meant the plane could not get very high into the air or move very fast while up there.
There was a general recognition of what was needed...a single seat plane with a machine gun that could be fired by the pilot. The only way a pilot can aim a machine gun is if it is pointed forward so that when the pilot aimed the nose of the plane, he was also aiming his weapon. But if it was mounted forward, it shot off the plane's propeller, which wasn't good.
Garros was the first to come up with a solution. He fixed two metal wedges to the propeller of his aircraft so that bullets would strike these deflectors rather than chopping up the wooden propeller. He took to the skies with this device and in a matter of days, he had shot down three German planes. This made him a sensation in France and the scourage of German pilots who took to fleeing from all French planes because they feared it might be Garros.
But....then one day Garros experienced engine failure and was forced to make an emergency landing behind German lines. He tried to burn his plane, but was capatured before he could do so. The Germans discovered the secret of his success and they took the device to the young Dutch designer, Anthony Fokker, and told him to duplicate it for German planes. Fokker examined the deflectors and realized that this was not the solution. Sooner or later the deflectors would cause a bullet to richochet into the plane's engine, or the plane's pilot, which wasn't good.
So instead of duplicating the Garros gadget, Fokker's team of engineers came up with an interupter device. This was a cam shaft connected to the machine gun's trigger, which stopped the machine gun fire whenever the propeller was alligned so that it would be hit.
Fokker mounted a machine gun with the interupter gear on one of his Fokker Eindekker aircraft and suddenly all was reversed. This was the start of the "Fokker Scourage" which pretty much swept the French and Britsih from the air for half a year.
And of course eventually a German plane with the interupter gear was captured, the device copied and it was the birth of the dogfight age.
As for Garros, he remained a prisoner of the Germans until February of 1918 when he made an escape. He rejoined the French air arm, but was shot down and killed in October, a month before the war ended.
He frequently gets described as the worlld's first air ace, but that designation came to mean someone who had shot down five or more enemies. Garros never got past his first three.
I was born in 1896. After Graduating from Berkely then MIT, I became a famous racer. After winning 3 of my sports most prestigous races I retired. I pioneered many advances in aviation & served in WWII. My exploits have been chronicled in no fewer then 3 seperate movies.
A native Carolinian, I was a middle-aged doctor in a Union state by the time of the civil war. Seeing returning war wounded inspired me to develop a revolutionary kind of weapon. It was the favorite weapon of kids in the front row of the matinee, who cheered wildly when my weapon was brought into action. Kids all knew the name of the weapon, which was named after me. The principle of my invention fell into disuse with modern acvances in weaponry, but it was brought back when it was found useful in aircraft combat.
I am a 19th Century figure who was chiefly responsible for making another man the most famous in our nation, and one of the most famous on two continents over a period of several decades. I first attempted to do this with another man who also was quite famous, but he pulled a gun on me and told me I had 24 hours to get out of town. Stubborn, I decided to continue without authorization from my subject. While in the process of traveling to try and gather information about him, I became fascinated by one of his friends whom I was interviewing. I switched my plans to him and within a very short period of time, we were a mega success which expanded. Never truly liking one another very much, we remained together but a few years and then parted ways. I returned to my original profession, but never had as much success again. My partner's fame continued to blaze and he remains famous to this day.
Location: Finally escaped The People's Republic of California
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You have me thinking of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill... I think you might be thinking of Ned Buntline, the dime novelist who helped make them famous...and whom the Buntline revolver is named after???????
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