In reply to the OP, the machine guns were synchronized to fire through the propeller without hitting the blades through the use of an interrupter gear. Briefly, the gun could only fire when it was not blocked by a propeller blade. As another poster said, it was an invention by Anthony Fokker. You might liken the problem to that of throwing stones through the revolving blades of a windmill.
Before Fokker's invention, the famous French aviator Roland Garros instead fitted steel plates to the propeller blades to deflect the bullets. As you said, that was dangerous and also tended to weaken the propeller blades.
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TaraDeS
10 years ago
Actually the credits for the development of the gun synchronizer are nowadays attributed to Heinrich Lübbe, who worked for Anthony Fokker:
Heinrich Lübbe (12 January 1884, Nienburg, Province of Hanover – 14 March 1940) was a German engineer working for Dutch aircraft designer Anthony Fokker during the First World War, devised the pioneering Stangensteuerung gun synchronizer which enabled a machine gun to fire through the arc of a fighter aircraft's propeller without the bullets striking the propeller's blades. It was first fitted to Leutnant Otto Parschau's Fokker A.III bearing IdFlieg military serial number A.16/15 in the late spring of 1915, to create the prototype of the entire line of Fokker Eindecker single-seat fighters to come.
In 1921 Lübbe purchased the bankrupt Friedrichshafen naval yards which had manufactured aircraft during the war. In 1925 he renamed the company Arado but his refusal to join the Nazi Party in 1936 led to his removal when Arado was nationalized.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_L%C3%BCbbe
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jd-276
10 years ago
Before Fokker's invention, the famous French aviator Roland Garros instead fitted steel plates to the propeller blades to deflect the bullets. As you said, that was dangerous and also tended to weaken the propeller blades.
Actually, there's more to this story.
Garros fitted his deflector plates (they were wedges, aligned at a shallow angle) to his Morane and used it to some effect but he eventually went down "sausage side" and when the Germans examined his machine, they noted the deflector plates. Anthony Fokker's people went to work on a solution and came up with the interrupter gear.
This is worth a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_gear
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