A few lines if I may.
Jean de Chappedelaine or, to use his full name, Jean Marie Louis Olivier de Chappedelaine was born on 27 September 1893 at Le Mans. He served in the French artillery between August 1915 and September 1919.
De Chappedelaine began to think about a centrifugal force-based vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (VTOL) no later than 1921. His theory received a polite hearing at a June meeting of the Association française aérienne. As mentioned above, a model of his gyroptère, which he soon renamed gyraptère, with an A, as a result of some negative comments, was on display at the 1928 Salon d'aviation. The photo shows him with a working model of the lifting device he had developed.
As early as 1931, de Chappedelaine used the term turbavion to describe a project he was working on at the time. Whether or not the turbavion and the gyraptère were one and the same is uncertain but likely. Incidentally, de Chappedelaine was in Montréal, Québec, in 1931 and spoke to one or more journalists about his invention.
De Chappedelaine resurfaced in 1934 with an announcement that construction of a prototype of a Magnus force-based VTOL aircraft fitted with a rotor, known as the aérogyre, was under way in the shops of the Société anonyme des avions Caudron. Said prototype was developed in cooperation with a respected aeronautical engineer by the name of R.G. Desgrandschamps. De Chappedelaine's prototype actually got off the ground more than once (while tethered??) in the summer and early fall, if only briefly on each occasion. The aérogyre crashed in October 1934, killing its pilot, Roger Rigaud.
De Chappedelaine was in the United States in 1940 as part of a French mission when his country was invaded by Germany. In 1943, he began to work on a helicopter project whose rotor blades sucked in the boundary layer. Working in cooperation with Die and Tool, de Chappedelaine tested his idea using a scale model of his rotor. He went on to supervise the construction of a full scale proof of concept prototype. De Chappedelaine made a number of tethered flights on this machine. Sadly, the hub of the rotor failed during a test, throwing the blades against the walls of Die and Tool's factory. Lacking the resources to keep going on what it deemed to be a rather expensive project, Die and Tool decided to call it quits. Unable to keep going on his own, de Chappedelaine moved to Montréal, where he got a job at the International Civil Aviation Organization.
De Chappedelaine died on 23 February 1950, at age 56, in Cheboygan, Michigan. At the time, he may have called himself Count de Chappedelaine.
He was seemingly a cousin of Count Louis Marc Michel de Chappedelaine (1876-1939), a minister in various French governments between 1932 and 1939 (Merchant Marine (three times), Colonies and Navy).