The Bell 47 is the helicopter everyone can draw: a glass bubble, an open lattice tail, two men sitting in what looks like a goldfish bowl on skids. It is the machine in the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and for a generation it was simply what the word helicopter meant.

It was also the first helicopter in the world that a civilian could legally buy and fly, and it was designed by a man who spent twelve years alone on a farm building models, and who later founded an institute for the study of consciousness.

Twelve years in a barn

Arthur Middleton Young graduated from Princeton in 1927 and then withdrew to his father’s farm in Pennsylvania, where he spent roughly twelve years building helicopter models. He was not an aeronautical engineer. He was a philosopher who had decided that the rotary-wing problem was worth solving, and he approached it the way a philosopher would — by isolating what actually made the thing unstable.

His answer was a stabiliser bar: a short weighted bar mounted beneath the rotor and at right angles to it, with streamlined counterweights at each tip, linked into the cyclic control. Gyroscopic inertia keeps the bar — and therefore the rotor plane — steady while the fuselage moves around underneath it. It also adds inertia for autorotation, which is a nice way of saying it makes engine failures survivable.

He took his models to Bell Aircraft in Buffalo in 1941, got the patent that year, and moved his five-man team to a garage at Gardenville for secrecy. The Model 30 flew in July 1943, and the Model 47 that followed took to the air on 8 December 1945.

Certificate number one

On 8 March 1946 the Model 47 received the world’s first civil certification for a helicopter. The first commercial delivery followed on the last day of that year.

That sounds like a formality and it was not. Certification is the moment a machine stops being an experiment and becomes a product — something a police force or a farmer or a flying school can insure, finance and operate. Every civil helicopter in the world traces its legal ancestry to that piece of paper.

The bubble came slightly later. The 47D introduced the moulded canopy, and the 47G of 1953 made it definitive. Young described the manufacturing method with obvious pleasure.

Korea, and the thing it is actually famous for

In US military service the Bell 47 became the H-13 Sioux, and in Korea it acquired a nickname: Angel of Mercy. Fitted with a stretcher pannier on each skid, with an acrylic shield to keep the slipstream off the wounded man, it flew casualties directly from near the front line to mobile surgical hospitals.

The numbers deserve care, because this story is routinely inflated. The US Army’s own official medical history records roughly 17,700 casualties carried by dedicated medical helicopters across the war — and notes in the same breath that this was only three and a half to four percent of all hospital admissions. Its author is unsentimental about it.

And yet the effect on the men it did carry was real. The post-evacuation death rate fell from 8.5 percent in the First World War to 4 percent in the Second, and to 2.5 percent in Korea. A seriously wounded soldier who reached a mobile surgical hospital alive had better than a 97 percent chance of leaving it alive.

What the helicopter changed was not how many men were moved but how fast the worst cases arrived. That is the whole of modern trauma medicine in one sentence, and the Bell 47 is where it starts.

US Army H-13 Sioux medical evacuation in Korea, 1951.

Korean War film of H-13s working into a mobile army surgical hospital.

Everything else it did

Because it was cheap and simple, the 47 went everywhere. It sprayed crops and dusted orchards. It flew for police forces, including the NYPD. On 4 July 1958 a Bell 47 carried KTLA’s Telecopter, the world’s first television news helicopter — the previous day’s attempt having failed, whereupon the inventor climbed out onto the skid at 1,500 feet to inspect the transmitter.

NASA used them as lunar-lander trainers; Gene Cernan put one into Florida’s Indian River in 1971. And it holds a record that still stands: on 17 September 1952 the Bell pilot Elton J. Smith flew 1,217 miles non-stop from Texas to Buffalo, the piston-helicopter distance record.

One record it does no hold, despite frequent claims: Dick Smith’s first solo round-the-world helicopter flight, begun in August 1982, was flown in a Bell 206 JetRanger, not a 47.

Twenty-eight years, and still flying

It stayed in production from 1946 to 1974 because it was cheap, mechanically simple, endlessly re-engined and licence-built on three continents. The Museum of Modern Art put one in its permanent collection, which is not a distinction many aircraft can claim.

The type certificates passed to Scott’s Helicopter Services around 2009, and an attempt at a turbine-powered revival with a Rolls-Royce engine and composite blades was announced in 2013 and has since lapsed. As of the last published figure there were still over a thousand registered in the United States.

Eighty years after Arthur Young’s bar solved the stability problem, the machine he built around it is still the picture in most people’s heads when someone says helicopter.

Arthur Young explaining his own design, in his own words.

Sources: Albert E. Cowdrey The Medics’ War (US Army Center of Military History), Heli-Archive, Arthur M. Young archive, FAI record files, King & Jatoi in the Journal of the National Medical Association