Ernst Heinkel, founder of Heinkel Aircraft Works, was born in the German province of Swabia in 1888. He began his technical career as an apprentice, working for a year in a machine shop and then taking a job in a foundry. He then supplemented this hands-on experience by attending a technical institute in the city of Stuttgart. He fell in love with aviation in 1908, inspired by the flight of Count Zeppelin's earliest dirigibles. He learned what he could from his school in Stuttgart, and then set out to learn more.
An international flying exhibition was to be held in Frankfurt in 1909. To raise money for the train fare so he could attend the show, Heinkel pawned a cherished book, The Elements of Machinery. The next year, he built his own airplane, working from blueprints prepared by France's Henri Farman. In 1911, his plane crashed and left him seriously injured. Even so, he now was one of the few people in Germany who had actually built and flown an aircraft. This meant that there was demand for his talents.
Heinkel won a position as an engineer at a newly formed company, LVG. He soon became chief designer at the firm of Albatros, a leading builder of fighter planes during World War I. In 1914, he joined the Brandenburg Aircraft Works, where he soon attracted attention from a wealthy industrialist, Camillo Castiglioni. During the war, he designed some 30 aircraft that went into production, including most of the warplanes used by Austria-Hungary, Germany's principal ally.
Defeated in 1918, Germany was stripped of its aviation industry by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Heinkel set up a small factory that built electrical equipment, but he was eager to return to building airplanes. Then, in 1922, the victorious Allies began to lift their restrictions, allowing Germany to build aircraft as long as their speeds did not exceed 105 miles per hour (169 kilometers per hour). Heinkel soon established his own firm: the Ernst Heinkel Aircraft Works.
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