The Airplane - Jay Spenser [41]
In 1907, Bell made his one contribution to aviation, albeit an indirect one, by chartering a small group that brought younger blood to the challenge of flight. Called the Aerial Experiment Association, this team’s star was Glenn Curtiss, who would take the grand prize at Reims in 1909 and become America’s most successful early airplane manufacturer.
Fortunately for the Wright brothers, Lawrence Hargrave’s other American correspondent did know how to employ the box kite. Retired U.S. railroad engineer Octave Chanute was a flight devotee who for years had applied his structural design and stress analysis expertise to aerial speculations. These he published as a bound set in 1894 under the title Progress in Flying Machines.3
A prolific correspondent and internationally acclaimed lecturer, Chanute had amassed considerable wealth and an international reputation building bridges and other key pieces of the young United States’ developing infrastructure. He loved to keep tabs on flight-related research and experimentation around the world, and in retirement served as a self-appointed clearinghouse for information. Much of what he learned found its way into his influential book.
Generous with encouragement, Chanute cross-pollinated others’ efforts with infusions of new ideas, his own and those of others. Often he visited these isolated pockets of experimentation to observe their efforts firsthand. To those he considered worthwhile, he even occasionally provided financial assistance.
Chanute was particularly impressed with Hargrave, whom he came to know through letters. When Hargrave described the box kite to him, Chanute instantly appreciated this invention’s potential. “If there be one man, more than another, who deserves to succeed in flying through the air,” he proclaimed some years before meeting the Wrights, “that man is Mr. Lawrence Hargrave of Sydney, New South Wales.”4
That support meant a great deal to Hargrave because not everyone in Australia shared his belief in aviation. “The people of Sydney who can speak of my work without a smile are very scarce,” he admitted to Chanute. “I know that success is dead sure to come, and therefore do not waste time and words in trying to convince unbelievers.”5
Now it was the eventful summer of 1896. Otto Lilienthal was gliding in Germany, Samuel Langley’s steam-powered model had flown a kilometer in May, and in general a surging sense of optimism prevailed that the challenges of manned, powered, heavier-than-air flight might actually be solved.
Chanute shared Lilienthal’s view that unraveling aviation’s secrets required actually attempting to fly. With this in mind, he convened a group of younger enthusiasts and hosted them at the southern tip of Lake Michigan in Indiana, some 30 miles southeast of his Chicago home. Living in tents in that pristine area (soon to become the steel-mill city of Gary), this group tested a variety of gliders.
In his mid-sixties, Chanute left the flying to others and looked on. He was keenly disappointed when his Katydid glider, with its six tiers of pivoting wings, proved an outright failure. With it went the civil engineer’s hopes of automatic stabilization in flight. Other more conventional craft, including a Lilienthal glider copy flown by young engineer Augustus Herring, flew passably well but contributed no new knowledge.
In August word arrived of Lilienthal’s death. This sad news from overseas did not stop the Chanute team’s forays to the Indiana dunes, which continued into the fall. This gentlemanly experimentation culminated in a significant glider developed collaboratively