Lentorama 2022: It Happened on Easter

Day 15: Anthony Fokker is born

Anton "Anthony" Fokker was born on April 6, 1890, in the Dutch East Indies, where his father owned a coffee plantation. The family moved back to the Netherlands when Fokker was four, and as he grew up he showed an interest in mechanical things but not much interest in school.

Fokker was sent to Germany as a young man to become an auto mechanic, but he had been interested in flying ever since seeing Wilbur Wright's flying demonstration in France in 1908. He transferred to a company that also made airplanes, and started to build and design his own models. After showing success he opened up his own company and started building his own planes. 

At the outbreak of World War I, the German government took over his factory, and Fokker started to build the warplanes that made him famous. Though his status didn't come without controversy, as he was seen as a less than ethical businessman, a designer who took credit for others' work, and he had issues with planes failing in flight due to problems with production or design (though he would argue that interference by German engineers and the military caused some of these problems). He also helped develop an interrupter gear that timed machine gun fire so it wouldn't hit the propeller, though it also had mechanical issues that caused crashes.

After the war, with Germany banned from rearming itself, Fokker moved his business (and most of his remaining stock) to the Netherlands. He expanded his business by moving to the US in the 1920s, where his planes were the choice of aviators and explorers like Richard Byrd and Amelia Earhart. That good publicity dimmed when Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne died in a Fokker plane crash. Fokker would later take his company public, which led to its acquisition by General Motors and his eventual resignation from the company. Fokker would die in the US in 1939 from pneumococcal meningitis.