Anthony Fokker, the Dutch dropout who built Germany's First World War fighters
Anthony Fokker never finished high school and distrusted trained engineers, yet his factory supplied the German air force with about 700 warplanes, including the triplane flown by the Red Baron. His first homemade aircraft, the Spider, ended its career when a business partner flew it straight into a tree.
Fokker was born on 6 April 1890 in Blitar, in what was then the Dutch East Indies, where his father owned a coffee plantation. At four he was taken back to Haarlem for a Dutch upbringing. He preferred model trains, steam engines and toy aeroplanes to schoolwork, and as a teenager tried to invent a puncture-proof wheel rimmed with metal plates. Wilbur Wright's exhibition flights in France in 1908 turned his head toward flying.
Sent to Germany in 1910 to train as a car mechanic, he switched to a motoring school in Mainz and built the Spider that same year. He earned his pilot's licence in a second version. In 1912 he set up Fokker Aeroplanbau at Johannisthal near Berlin, later moving the works to Schwerin. When war came, the German government took over the factory but kept him as director.
He was a gifted showman in the air. On 13 June 1915 he demonstrated the new Eindecker monoplane at Stenay before the German Crown Prince. Two months earlier the French flier Roland Garros had been shot down, and his captured plane, with steel wedges on the propeller to deflect bullets, spurred German work on firing through the arc of the blades. Fokker's firm produced a pushrod interrupter that let the machine gun fire only when the propeller was clear, launching the period of German dominance called the Fokker Scourge. The popular tale that he devised it in 48 hours has been disproved; his company had been working on it for months.
Historians argue over how much credit was really his. Biographer A. R. Weyl suggests craftsman Reinhold Platz was the true designer of the Dr.I and D.VII, while Henri Hegener, who knew both men, says Platz's role is exaggerated and notes his bonuses often exceeded his salary. Barred by the Treaty of Versailles from building aircraft in Germany, Fokker moved to the Netherlands, where his F.VII trimotor became a successful airliner. He died in New York on 23 December 1939.
Source: Anthony Fokker
