06/04/2026
Tennis, anyone?
Roland Garros Stadium in Paris, home of the French Open tennis tournament, is not named after a famous tennis player, but rather an aviation pioneer.
Roland Garros was already a household name in France when World War One started in 1914, having flown in air races and set altitude records.
Early in the war, air crews shot at enemy aircraft using rifles, which were either hand-held or affixed to the fuselage at an angle, to avoid making the propeller look like swiss cheese.
Flying and fighting this way was rather tricky; shooting down an enemy aircraft was next to impossible.
While the French and Germans both tinkered with the idea of synchronizing the engine to the movement of the propeller, so as to shoot through the propeller arc, Garros and his mechanic came up with a more immediate, if crude, fix: he attached metal triangles to the prop, to deflect the odd bullet that might hit it.
Eventually, the Germans (via Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker) were first to put an “interrupter gear” into action.
Roland Garros was later shot down and killed one month before the end of the war.
