User:Trblmkr/Sandbox

place holder for user TRBLMKR working on Discopter page

The Discopter, a circular-shaped flying machine, is the invention of Alexander Weygers and was patented in 1945 - two years before the term "flying saucer" was coined (though images of saucer shaped unidentified flying objects date back to at least the 13th century.)

Weygers, trained as a ship engineer in Holland, saw the helicopter being developed in the late 1920's and considered the design to be unstable and dangerous. Weygers envisioned shrouding or enclosing the blades in order to better control the flow of air from them utilizing a series of louvers built into the shrouds.

Other notable differences from the helicopter were two counter-rotating blades for centrifugal stability which rotated around a hub rather than on a spindle. This circular hub design allowed the pilot and passenger's cabin to be located in the center of the spinning blades as well as below.

Weygers envisioned many different scenarios for his invention's use, from small single-pilot commuter to large cruise ship-sized vehicles. Weygers also designed port facilities for several cities including San Francisco and Chicago.

During WWII Weygers, provisional patent in hand, approached several war-time manufacturers with detailed schematics of his invention but the Discopter was never actually produced. He then produced more artistic but still detailed renderings of his designs to explain his concepts to the general public. In the 1950's and 1960's during the UFO craze, Weygers gained some notoriety when his Discopter renderings were prominently featured in a number of newspaper articles. Weygers designs received more credence in the following two decades as he was consulted by several inventors working on hover-craft vehicles of their day.

In 1984 Weygers' renderings were included in the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service show "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past visions of the American Future" and the accompanying book of the same name. When the traveling show came to the Oakland Museum, near Weygers' home in Carmel, CA, the section on his designs was expanded by of the museum which had in its holdings the original drawings as well as collected correspondence about the designs' patent and his attempts to get it produced during WWII. In 1983 Weygers licensed three of his fifteen renderings for limited commercial production of museum quality prints to accompany the exhibition.

Weygers, an artist by temperament, had many other interests and went on to become known as one of the fathers of "modern" blacksmithing, publishing a number of seminal books on the subject.