Background
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.
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.
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's principal contributions as a designer were his use, as early as 1916, of a thick wing (12 percent of the chord) without bracing wires and of the welded steel tube fuselage. His later airplanes used fully cantilever wooden wings, and his butt-welded fuselage was generally adopted in the United States and most of the countries of Europe. Fokker wrote and was widely quoted on aviation, both civil and military, and he had considerable influence upon the design of streamlined, multiengined airplanes.