Nicolas Florine

Nicolas Florine, born Nikolay Florin (19 July 1891 – 21 January 1972), was an engineer who settled in Belgium. He built the first tandem rotor helicopter to fly freely in 1933. He was born in Batumi, Georgia.

Nicolas Florine was born to Anatole Victorovich Florin (1856-1936) and Aimee Lioubov (1862-1935) and had a sister Olga (30 oktober 1893 -) and a brother Victor Anatolyevich Florin (07 december 1899 - 1960). He spent his childhood and youth in St. Petersburg, to which his parents had emigrated in the early 20th century. There, he studied mathematics at the university. He completed his military service in 1914. After the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Florine took refuge in Germany before returning to the Soviet Union. His family background (of minor Russian nobility) and his status as an engineer trained under the Tsar put him under threat from the communists, from which he fled by raft across the Gulf of Finland to a refugee camp in Helsinki before settling in Belgium in 1920, the only country (of the 26 to which he applied) to accept his asylum application.

Nicolas Florine worked at l'Administration de l'aéronautique, based in the buildings of the Hotel des Monnaies in Saint-Gilles (Brussels). In 1926 he was responsible for initiating the Centre d'aérodynamisme located in Rhode-Saint-Genèse, on the outskirts of Brussels, whose first director was Professor Émile Allard. He was involved in the creation of Belgium's first wind tunnel, together with the initiators, Alfred Renard and Emile Allard. From wind tunnel installations there the Stampe SV.4, by Jean Stampe, a school and acrobatics aircraft used in Belgium, France and many other countries, was begun, as well as the prototype Alfred Renard R.35 tri-motor pressurized airliner. Today, the center has been renamed as the 'von Karman Institute of Fluid Dynamics'.

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