Some background to the Roland Garros story:
http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/show...82#post2302882
Eugène Adrien Roland Georges Garros made a name for himself flying Bleriot monoplanes in several air races in 1911. In September of that year he set a new altitude record of 5,610 meters (19,410 feet). On September 23, 1912 Garros became the first man to fly across the Mediterranean Sea, leaving Frejus at St. Raphael at 0545 and arriving in Bizerte, Tunisia at 13:45, a distance of 453 miles.
When war was declared Garros was giving demonstration flights in Germany. He convinced his mostly German ground crew to help him take off after dark, when the plane was not guarded. One version of the story has him pretending to be drunk.
On July 15, 1913 Swiss-born Franz Schneider, lead designer for the German Luftverkersgesellschaft (LVG) company was issued the first patent for a machine gun interrupter gear, designed to let the gun fire through the propeller. Details of this design were published in the September 1914 issue of Flugsport magazine.
Raymond Saulnier of the Morane-Saulnier company in France took out a similar patent in April 1914.
There are also stories of a pair of brothers in England, named Edwards, but no source seems to supply their first names or a copy of the patent.
In all cases the main failure was the unsuitability of the gun involved.
A Russian Lieutenant named Poplavko came up with a synchronizer that equipped Sikorsky's S.VIX fighter.
In March 1915 Roland Garros and his personal mechanic Jules Hue visited Raymond Saulnier in Paris. There are sources which claim that Garros and Hue were responsible for what followed, but there is some evidence that Saulnier had already given up on the interrupter/synchronizer and was already experimenting with steel deflector plates. Whatever the truth, the three of them worked together to create such a system and by April Garros was ready to try it out.