The early history of the autogiro is essentially a history of one man, a young, Spanish inventor and civil engineer, Don Juan de la Cierva. Cierva was intrigued by this new technology after the Wright brothers first demonstrated their flying machine, and design to build his own airplane. His first attempt at building an autogiro was the C.1.

Unfortunately, this design never flew because the balance in lift and torque caused the machine to tilt to one side. However, when it was tested, in October 1920, it did demonstrate successfully the principles of autorotation while taxiing on the ground. In 1923, Cierva decided to use hinges in his rotor design by combining a conventional fixed wing aircraft's engine and fuselage with an overhead mast and three bladed rotor system, and on January 17, 1923, the C.4 flew, marking the first controlled flight of an autogiro. In August of 1933, after plenty of modifications, the C.30 proved to be the most popular production of an autogiro ever designed with more than 180 of them being built and sold. Igor Bensen was impressed with the idea of this flying machine and in 1953 saw the rebirth of interest in the gyroplane with his patented "Gyrocopter".
Igor Bensen formed his own company and began to work. The first aircraft to bear his name was his model B-7 introduced in 1955. It had an airframe made of round aluminum tubing, wooden rotor blades, a 42 horsepower Nelson, two-stroke engine, mounted in a pusher position behind the pilot. This two-bladed gyrocopter used the teetering hub-bar and rotor-head to equalize the lift from opposing side of the rotor disc. Bensen built several models of his gyrocopter, and his 1957's model was the basic aircraft produced by the Bensen Aircraft Company for three decades. Today's gyrocopters have other refinements and variations of the Bensen design, but the principle is same and most of them follow the basic Bensen Gyrocopter principles.