Marcel Dassault invented a type of aircraft propeller used by the French army during World War I and founded the Société des Avions Marcel Bloch aircraft company.
Background
Born in Paris, where his father was a physician, he was very close to his two brothers - one of whom became a general in the French army and a member of the Academy of Sciences and the other a distinguished surgeon who perished in the Holocaust.
Education
Even as a schoolchild, Dassault was fascinated with airplanes and studied electricity. After graduation he worked in a car factory, where he acquired an appreciation for factory organization and teamwork. He subsequently enrolled in an aeronautical school.
Career
When World War I broke out, Dassault was chosen to design planes and was responsible for building propellers, one of which, the Guynemer, was so successful that it is commemorated in a monument in the Place des Invalides. His work on propellers meant that he received information on all types of planes and his knowledge of French planes was unrivaled. With two colleagues, he constructed the fighter plane SEA 4, which was so successful that a thousand were ordered. Before they came off the assembly line, however, the war ended and the order was cancelled. Dassault was told to use the factory he had built to produce doors, windows, and wheelbarrows. Throughout the 1920s he concentrated on general construction.
In 1930, the French government, realizing that the French airplane industry was lagging behind that of other European countries, commissioned a three-motor plane for the postal services from Dassault. Dassault designed an all-metal plane, but no planes were ordered. Nonetheless he used the knowledge he had acquired to build a first-aid plane which did prove successful. He then built a two-motor plane, the 220, for Air France, which went into operation in 1938. Plans for various other planes were ended by World War II and the fall of France.
During the war, Dassault was arrested as a Jew and deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp. A group of French deportees in a position of relative power secretly assisted other Frenchmen and saved Dassault from deportation to one of the major death camps. In the last days before liberation, he contracted diphtheria. When repatriated from Buchenwald, he flew for the first and only time!
After six months of treatment for post-diphtheric paralysis of the legs, Dassault became head of an aircraft factory and began building a new plane, the Dassault 315, participating in every stage of its creation. The plane was judged outstanding in its category and three-hundred were ordered. His Mystère IV was the first European plane to break the sound barrier. It was followed by the Super-Mystère B2, the Mirage III; the FI, and finally the Mirage G, all of which received international acclaim. Dassault himself considered his greatest successes to have been the civilian plane, the Mystère 20, and the Mirage G, sixty of which were delivered to Israel, making a major contribution to the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. The Société des Avions Marcel Dassault became the outstanding French exporting company, numbering Pan Am among its prime customers.
In 1951, Dassault entered politics, running as deputy and senator, and proposing a law which would enable people of low income to own their own homes. He also founded the journal Jours de France, which concentrated on “good news.”
Politics
a conservative politician