Birth Anniversary: Luigi Stipa — November 30, 1900

Luigi Stipa (Appignano del Tronto, 30 November 1900 – 9 January 1992), an engineer who worked in aeronautics, hydraulics and civil engineering, devised the «ducted propeller»: an airscrew enclosed in a barrel-shaped fuselage to compress its airflow and raise its efficiency. From that idea came the Stipa-Caproni of 1932, the «flying barrel», regarded as a conceptual ancestor of the turbofan. Anniversary documented by Cultural Heritage Online.