Alexander Nikolaievich Prokofiev de Seversky
Alexander Nikolaievich Prokofiev de Seversky. Born in Tbilisi in 1884, he entered a military school at age 10. Seversky’s father was one of the first Russian aviators to own an aircraft (a modified Blériot XI built by Mikheil Grigorashvili) and by the age of 14, when Seversky entered the Imperial Russian Naval Academy, his father had already taught him how to fly. Graduating in 1914 with an engineering degree, Lieutenant Seversky was serving at sea with a destroyer flotilla when World War I began then completed naval aviator training in 1915. Losing his right leg below the knee in an attack on a German destroyer in the Baltic, he returned to flight status nontheless and show down a claimed 13 German aircraft, making him Russia’s leading naval ace of the Great War. He managed to escape the Civil War by being sent to the U.S. on a naval mission in early 1918. Becoming American, he filed no less than 364 patents including the first gyroscopically stablized bombsight which he sold to Sperry, founded the Seversky Aircraft Corporation (which was renamed Republic in 1939) and became one of the biggest air power advocates in the U.S. prior to WWII and worked in and out of the War Department for decades. He passed in NYC in 1974, aged 80.