Renard

   Lieutenant Charles Renard never succeeded in building a full-scale flying machine, but his experiments were noteworthy. In 1872 he showed a 10-winged model glider with a streamlined fuselage, aileron stubs on each side of the fuselage, and a cruciform tail. Renard tested his model from the tower at St Eloi in 1873, but the pendulum effect from hanging the fuselage from the tower of wings was opposite to his expectation, and the model first glided and then spiraled in.
   In 1903 he was a colonel, and published the results of his studies on what he called sustaining screws - that is, propellers designed to lift weight directly. He also proposed an arrangement whereby a machine could lift itself off as a helicopter, and then proceed to fly as an aeroplane; unfortunately it was never built. In 1904, however, he did build at least one nearly full-sized model of his helicopter, with 2 rotors of 2.5-meter diameter, driven by twisted belts running bicycle rims, in turn driven by a vertical shaft from a small motor set into the apex of the inverted V that formed the frame.