Sébastienne Guyot

Sébastienne Marie Henriette Guyot (26 April 1896 – 21 August 1941) was a French engineer who specialised in aerodynamic flying. She worked on the designs for aircraft and helicoptors and she was credited on several patents. A top athlete, she participated in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam in the 800 meters and was French Cross Country Champion in 1928. Arrested by the Nazis when returning from an attempt to rescue her brother from a prison camp in 1940, she died in 1941 in Paris as a result of her imprisonment. It is planned to add her name to the Eiffel Tower.

Early life Sébastienne Marie Henriette Guyot was born 26 April 1896 at Pont-‘l’Abbé in Finistère, Brittany. Her father worked as a mounted policeman, ultimately being promoted to the role of Adjutant-Chef. She had one elder brother George (1894-1982) who became a pilot in the First World War and decorated with the Légion d’Honneur in 1917. Her two younger brothers were Roger (1901- 1980) and René (1903–1977).

Education

In the spring of 1917, Sébastienne Guyot was working as a teacher. Turning twenty-one meant she was now legally an adult and able to make her own decisions, financial or otherwise. She gave up teaching and in October 1917 enrolled at the Lycée Jules Ferry in Paris, which ran classes to help women to prepare for the 1918 competition for entry into Central School of Paris, which had just permitted women to join their classes (as long as they sat in the front row). She came fifty-seventh out of 425 successful candidates passing the examination to enter the Central School of Paris. She chose to study mechanics, which included electrical engineering. By the end of the first year only 262 engineering students remained, with only 243 actually graduating in 1921. She ranked 45th of 243 graduates. Guyot worked on the company's small twin-engine aircraft, launched in 1924, although much of the company's work was to undertake aeronautical research projects for the French government.

In 1929 Guyot moved to work as an aeronautical engineer at the "Hydravions Lioré & Olivier", a much larger company, which designed and manufactured seaplanes and military aircraft, including the LeO 45. She remained there until 1935, working on fuselages and hulls of several seaplanes, and in collaboration with designers, Paul Asantchéef and André Violleau, who thought highly of her.

Around 1932 Guyot started working on the engineering of rotary blades for rotor craft. A 1933 record of a helicopter named "Loth-Guyot" survives in the Air Section of the Historical Defence Service at Vincennes. Between 1932 and 1939, Guyot took out six patents in conjunction with engineer and entrepreneur William Arthur Loth (1888-1957), concerned with improving the lift of the rotator blades. One involved the stabilisation of rotating lifting systems, another a swivelling screw propeller. Sébastienne Guyot, winner of the French women's cross-country championship on 3 March 1929 in Saint-Cloud. In 1936, the Arsenal de l'Aéronautique (usually called the Arsenal), a national military aircraft manufacturer, was established by the French Government at Villacoublay. In the dossier compiled by her brothers in 1947, making the case for her Resistance Medal, Sébastienne Guyot was described as "Head of the Helicopter Service at the Arsenal de l'Aéronautique", although details of her role there remain sketchy.

Attempt to rescue brother On 7 July 1940, Sébastienne Guyot learnt that her younger brother René had become a prisoner of war earlier that month. He was held at the Mulsanne camp and Guyot decided to try to rescue him, leaving Toulouse on 9 July.

Despite the prison staff being French and visits from a chaplain, Guyot fell ill in prison and did not receive proper treatment. When her brother George arrived to pick her up at the end of her sentence in January 1941, he learned that she had just been hospitalised as an emergency. He discovered her in a skeletal state in the hospital, with gangrenous frostbitten hands. George rushed her to Paris where a surgeon saved her hand, but the disease progressed and she died in great pain at the Broussais Hospital on 22 August 1941.

Guyot is the only woman whose name is on the war memorial of the Ecole Centrale. Since 2010, an annual scholarship in her name has been awarded to five young Ecole Centrale students to fully fund their studies at the School.

In 2015, one of the eight streets in the new university area of Moulon in Gif-sur-Yvette, was named after Sébastienne Guyot. The area will accommodate CentraleSupélec in 2017, following the merger of Centrale Paris and Supélec.

In 2026, was announced as one of 72 historical women in STEM whose names have been proposed to be added to the 72 men already celebrated on the Eiffel Tower. The plan was conceived by a student and tour guide named Bernard Rigaud and it was announced by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo following the recommendations of a committee led by Isabelle Vauglin of Femmes et Sciences and Jean-François Martins, representing the operating company which runs the Eiffel Tower.