Roland Garros
Today, meet Roland Garros. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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World War One produced so many heroic pilots. Names like von Richthofen, Rickenbacker, Bishop. But here’s one you’re less likely to know: a French pilot: Roland Garros. He died at age twenty-nine, just a month before the Armistice. And, having shot down only four airplanes, we cannot even call him an ace.
Roland Garros in front of a 1910 Demoiselle Airplane. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
But that’s just the tip of an iceberg. Let’s see what lies beneath: Garros was the rare pilot who entered that early air war as an experienced airman. He’d first flown in a Santos Dumont airplane just six years after the Wright Brothers. Two years later he was first to reach an altitude of almost thirteen thousand feet. Things moved that fast. Two years later, he was first to fly the Mediterranean Sea, from France to Tunisia.
Then his France was plunged into World War One. He joined the army and immediately turned his attention to seeing how an airplane might shoot straight ahead. The pilots of the best early airplanes sat behind a whirling propeller. So machine guns commonly rode on the upper wing of a biplane. There they could only aim the airplane itself.
A leading French airplane was then a Morane Saulnier fighter – a monoplane. It was another version of the plane he’d used to fly the Mediterranean. Aerial dog fighting would soon turn in favor of the nimbler biplane. But, for now, a workable gun had to shoot through the propeller.
1914 Morane Saulnier “N” fighter at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. Photo by JHL
The French tried to create means for stopping the machine gun each time a propeller blade moved past it. They failed. So Garros installed metal deflectors on his propeller to keep bullet hits from damaging it.
Garros’ bullet deflector on the Morane Saulnier propeller at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome. Photo by JHL
It worked, with a shortcoming. Hammering the propeller’s deflectors eventually bent an engine’s crankshaft. Still, Garros took to the air and shot down the first enemy to fall victim to a bullet that’d gotten by a whirling propeller. After two more ariel victories, he was brought down and taken prisoner.
Worse yet, the Germans saw how he’d been shooting straight forward. Their airplane builder, Anthony Fokker, immediately went back to work and developed means for pausing the gun as a propeller blade passed by it.
And Garros? Well, he managed to escape after three years, and find his way back to his escadrille in France. By this time, the French were flying one of the most effective fighter designs of the war – the SPAD XIII.
Garros shot down another German. Then, three days later, a leading German airman brought him down. And so he died – having spent nearly a third of his life in the sky. He’d been the rare, maybe the only, WW-I pilot who’d actually pioneered the airplane from its early days.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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Roland Garros (aviator) - Wikipedia
From Air to Clay: The Story of Roland Garros - Aero Online
About the Fokker interrupter mechanism: Fokker's Interrupter Mechanism | The Engines of Our Ingenuity
Peter Mersky, “One of the Greatest: The Story of Roland Garros,” Flight Journal, February 2009, pp. 40–49.
This Episode first aired September 21, 2026.