Anton Herman Gerard "Anthony" Fokker was a Dutch airplane designer and builder.
Background
Anton Herman Gerard "Anthony" Fokker was born on April 6, 1890, at Blitar, Indonesia to Herman Fokker, a Dutch coffee plantation owner. In 1895 his father, a coffee planter, retired and settled his family in Haarlem, The Netherlands, where the boy showed his mechanical talent by making model engines, ships, trains, and gliders.
Education
Fokker was not a studious boy and did not complete his high school education.
Career
Fokker completed his first airplane in the winter of 1910-1911, an inherently stable V-shaped monoplane, taught himself to fly it, and obtained his pilot certificate early in 1911. He offered his ideas to various governments without success until German Army officers asked him to teach military flying in that country and showed an interest in his self-stabilizing plane. Still in Germany at the beginning of World War I, Fokker was impressed as a German citizen, though he considered himself a neutral throughout the war.
His pursuit planes, particularly the triplane used by such fliers as Baron Manfred von Richthofen, were maneuverable and deadly, and 8, 000 of them were made in Fokker's and other factories. After the Germans captured the airplane of Roland Garros, the French flier, equipped with a machine gun firing through the propeller, Fokker quickly perfected the synchronizing mechanism, and 42, 000 of these were made during the war. After the armistice, by a colossal smuggling operation, Fokker transferred six trainloads of his airplanes, engines, and equipment to the Netherlands and established a factory at Amsterdam. In 1922 Fokker transferred his activities to the United States.
Fokker wrote and was widely quoted on aviation, both civil and military, and he had considerable influence upon the design of streamlined, multiengined airplanes.
Achievements
Connections
On 25 March 1919, Fokker married Sophie Marie Elisabeth von Morgen in Haarlem. This marriage ended in divorce in 1923. In 1927, he married Canadian Violet Eastman in New York City. On 8 February 1929, she died in a fall from their hotel suite window. The original police report said her death was a suicide, but this was later changed to 'vertigo victim' at the request of her husband's staff.
On the subject of his marriages, Fokker wrote, "I have always understood airplanes much better than women. I had more love affairs in my life, and they ended just like the first one, really, because I thought there was nothing that could be more important than my airplanes. .. I have now learned, by bitter experience, that one must give a little too; in love one has to use one's brain just as much as in business, and perhaps even more".