Anthony Fokker

Anthony (Tony) Fokker was born in Blitar, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), to Herman Fokker, a Dutch coffee plantation owner and Johanna Hugona Wouterina Wilhelmina Diemont. Some sources say that he was born in Kediri. At that time, Blitar was a part of the "Kediri Residency", a colonial administrative division, the capital of which was Kediri. He was a cousin of the physicist Adriaan Fokker.

When Fokker was four, the family returned to the Netherlands and settled in Haarlem in order to provide Fokker and his older sister, Toos, with a Dutch upbringing.

Fokker was not a studious boy and did not complete his high school education. However, he showed an early interest in mechanics, and preferred making things, playing with model trains and steam engines, and experimenting with model aeroplane designs.

As a high school student, he devoted considerable effort to the development of a wheel that would not suffer from punctures; basically a wheel with a perimeter formed by a series of metal plates.

On 25 March 1919, Fokker married Sophie Marie Elisabeth von Morgen in Haarlem. This marriage ended in divorce in 1923. In 1927, he married Canadian Violet Austman in New York City. On 8 February 1929, she died in a fall from their hotel suite window. The original police report said her death was a suicide, but this was later changed to "vertigo victim" at the request of her husband's staff. On the subject of his marriages, Fokker wrote, "I have always understood airplanes much better than women. I had more love affairs in my life, and they ended just like the first one, really, because I thought there was nothing that could be more important than my airplanes... I have now learned, by bitter experience, that one must give a little too; in love one has to use one's brain just as much as in business, and perhaps even more".