Juan de la Cierva
Spanish aeronautical engineer and pilot; inventor of the autogyro (1895-1936)
Juan de la Cierva y Codorníu, 1st Count of la Cierva ([ˈxwan de la ˈθjeɾβaj koðoɾˈni.u]; 21 September 1895 – 9 December 1936), was a Spanish civil engineer, pilot and a self-taught aeronautical engineer. His most famous accomplishment was the invention in 1920 of a rotorcraft called Autogiro, a single-rotor type of aircraft that came to be called autogyro in the English language. In 1923, after four years of experimentation, de la Cierva developed the articulated rotor, which resulted in the world's first successful flight of a stable rotary-wing aircraft, with his C.4 prototype.
At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, De la Cierva sided with the Nationalist Francoist rebel forces. He used his international connections to help the Nationalist forces acquire arms and other military supplies.
Early life
Juan de la Cierva was born to a wealthy, aristocratic Spanish family, and for a time his father was the war minister. At the age of eight he was spending his pocket money with his friends on experiments with gliders in one of his father's work sheds. In their teens they constructed an aeroplane from the wreckage they had bought from a French aviator who had crashed the plane. The final aeroplane used wood from a Spanish bar counter for the propeller. He eventually earned a civil engineering degree and after building and testing the first successful autogyro, moved to the United Kingdom in 1925, where, with the support of Scottish industrialist James G. Weir, he established the Cierva Autogiro Company.
The public source identifies “Juan de la Cierva” as spanish aeronautical engineer and pilot; inventor of the autogyro (1895-1936). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Juan, Cierva and Spanish.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q354646. VIAF identifies the subject as 57412058. The Library of Congress control number is n86027537. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1895, 1936, 1920 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Juan de la Cierva” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.