John Davies realizes that, when most of us think of the beginning of flight or the first airplane, we automatically think of Wilbur and Orville Wright and Kitty Hawk, N.C.
He has no problem with that.
What he wants to do is expand our horizons.
He wants everyone to recognize the important roles in early aviation that also were played by Octave Chanute and Gary, Ind.
If this is a pairing of which you were not aware, don`t be embarrassed. Neither was Davies until five years ago.
Davies is a 48-year-old businessman from northwest Indiana whose enthusiasm for the upper lefthand corner of the Hoosier State, it is fair to say, approaches the fanatical.
In 1987, while seeking to ignite a similar level of civic pride among other residents of the region, he discovered the account of how Chanute, a world-renowned civil engineer and aeronautical pioneer from Chicago, had conducted glider tests along the Indiana shores of Lake Michigan in the summer and fall of 1896, seven years before the Wright brothers achieved the first controlled, powered flights in North Carolina.
Davies further discovered that Chanute became a mentor to the Wrights and that the brothers adapted features of his glider to their aircraft.
In ”A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875-1905,” author Tom Crouch, chairman of the department of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, wrote:
”More than any other figure, Chanute was responsible for propelling American aeronautics from folk technology to the status of an engineering discipline. In doing so, he set in motion a chain of events that led to the
(Wrights`) triumph of Dec. 17, 1903.”
Structurally, Crouch noted, the Wrights` first aircraft was derived from the 1896 glider designed by Chanute and his 31-year-old assistant, Augustus Moore Herring.
Davies also discovered that the first site Chanute chose for his glider flights was inside the city limits of what is now … Gary.
Perfect!
Davies let his imagination soar.
Here was an opportunity to help northwest Indiana escape the persistent shadow of the big, loud, neighboring metropolis of Chicago and to bolster the morale of a community struggling with economic setbacks and a sagging image.
Gary could be promoted as ”the Kitty Hawk of the Midwest,” even though a lot of outsiders probably view it as the heartland equivalent of Newark.
It didn`t matter that the city wasn`t built until a decade after Chanute departed.
The point, Davies says, is that Chanute`s glider experiments are
”inextricably linked” to the Wright flights.
Where it all began
As he declares in a speech he has delivered on numerous occasions:
”While we cannot claim to be the birthplace of aviation, we share in its birth.”
He then issues a call to action:
”Ladies and gentlemen, it is time for those of us in northwest Indiana to claim our rightful place in aviation history!”
Toward that goal, Davies, on a recent Friday afternoon, is standing atop the tallest sand dune in Gary`s Marquette Park, on the northern edge of the city.
”This is where it all began,” he informs a newspaper reporter.
This is also where, it is hoped, hordes of history buffs, students of aviation and ordinary tourists will come some day.
Today, the weather is bleak and the park practically deserted.
Davies is accompanied by Quentin Smith and George Rogge, Gary citizens and colleagues in the Chanute project with Davies, who lives outside Valparaiso and is vice president of Center for Health Excellence, a for-profit provider of occupational medical services in Schererville.
Smith is a retired educator, board president of Gary Regional Airport and a former member of the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed all-black World War II aviation unit. Rogge is the owner of an insurance agency and president of the Gary Park Commission.
Passionate and informed
Smith and Rogge are breathing hard, having together lugged a bulky miniature copy of the Chanute glider up the steep leeward side of the dune so a photographer can take pictures.
The three men face south, toward a series of rolling dunes that were likely the landing strip for the Chanute gliders. At their back is Lake Michigan.
Several hundred yards to the east is a two-story bath house and aquatorium (a place to view bathing) that, if all goes as planned, will be transformed into the Chanute Museum.
Rogge, Smith and Davies are board members of an organization formed for that purpose: the Society for the Restoration of the Gary Bathing Beach Aquatorium and Octave Chanute`s Place in History, whose unwieldly name is, while explanatory, an utter disaster as an acronym, unless someone figures a catchy way to pronounce SRGBBAOCPH.
Society president Rogge, who has a lakeside home nearby, had the idea to connect Davies` fervor for Chanute with his own devotion to the 70-year-old building, which has been closed and in disrepair for several years.
Indeed, Rogge is as passionate and informed about the bath house as Davies is about Chanute.
Built for $150,000 from plans by a protege of Frank Lloyd Wright`s and opened in 1922, the edifice, Rogge says, is architecturally significant because ”it`s the first modular (cement) block building in the world.”
Davies` stories about Chanute are far more compelling.
”If the people in this area knew him at all, they knew him as the Crazy Man of the Dunes,” he says. ”The flying experiments terrified people. Visionaries like Chanute are hard to understand and easy to write off.”
Chanute, Davies says, understood this. Although he felt free to speak of his interest among his contemporaries in engineering and in 1894 had published ”Progress in Flying Machines,” a landmark compendium of aviation research, Chanute knew the public would tend to regard his avocation as foolish.
To protect his privacy, Chanute made no announcement of the expedition to Indiana or its intent.
Impressive feats
Davies reads a passage from Crouch`s book that describes Chanute`s arrival:
”Octave Chanute stepped from a Chicago train onto the platform of a tiny station at Miller, Ind., on the morning of June 22, 1896. With his fringe of gray hair, neatly trimmed goatee and mustache, he resembled William Shakespeare: short, bald and portly, he scarcely cut an adventurous figure. Yet Chanute had come to this isolated spot to pursue one of the great adventures of all time. He had come to fly, or rather, to watch a number of his younger and more athletic assistants fly.”
His companions were Herring; Paul Butusov, a Russian immigrant with his own glider; William Avery, a carpenter and electrician; and Dr. James Rickets, a physician friend.
”Chanute was 64,” Davies says, ”and near the end of a very distinguished career.”
Born in Paris, he had moved to the U.S. at age 6 when his father, a respected French historian, accepted the vice presidency of a college in New Orleans.
The family, Davies says, moved to New York City when young Octave was 12. At 17, too poor to enter college, the lad chose to learn civil engineering as an apprentice to railroad builders.
He became the chief construction engineer for railroads in the East and Midwest, met and married Annie James at age 35 while living in Peoria, and compiled a succession of impressive feats.
”Chanute built the first bridge over the Missouri River and designed the Union Stockyards in Kansas City and Chicago,” Davies says.
While in his 50s, he moved to Chicago, where he owned a company that treated wood with creosote. As the business prospered, Davies says, Chanute was able to devote more hours to analyzing the complexities of heavier-than-air flight.
Panicking the natives
His expertise in ”stress analysis, trussing methods and the strength of materials,” Crouch wrote, ”would prove invaluable” in glider design.
In the mid-1890s, he decided to build a glider based on a model developed by Otto Lilienthal, a German respected for his courage and insights who was killed after a glider crash during the summer of Chanute`s flights.
Word of Chanute`s appearance on the Indiana dunes quickly reached Chicago newspapers. A Tribune reporter was on the scene only a day after Chanute, and on June 24, 1896, this newspaper ran a Page 1 article under the following decks of headlines:
MEN FLY IN MIDAIR
Chicago Experts Make Experiments on Indiana Soil
What Octave Chanute Has Hopes of Accomplishing
HE HAS AN ORIGINAL DESIGN
Satisfactory Use Made of the Lilienthal Aeroplane
HOOSIERS LOOK ON AND MARVEL
The last headline refers to the reporter`s condescending description of
”natives who could not resist the temptation to follow” the Chanute group and who, when they saw Herring ”sail through the air,” reacted in ”panic.” The reporter then offered an observation brimming with urban haughtiness: ” `Jess watch,` tittered one of the natives. `I`ll be bound it won`t be long afore he`ll come down from that thar high hoss.` ”
Success was almost immediate, if limited.
An entry from a record kept by Chanute: ”Operator places himself within and under the apparatus (which is) light enough to carry on the shoulders or by the hands, and to face the wind on a hillside . . .
”Facing dead into the wind (the operator) has to struggle to obtain a poise and in a moment of relative steadiness he runs forward a few steps as fast as he may and launches himself upon the breeze, by raising the front edge of the sustaining surfaces. By shifting either his body or his wings or both he can direct his descent, either sideways or up or down within certain limits.”
Through repairs of damage caused by storms and crashes, several design modifications, disgreements and a move to another location farther east, the Chanute team persisted.
Summing up, Crouch wrote: ”During a single summer, these men had built and flown the most advanced glider in the world.”
On Sept. 25, they broke camp. Although no official log was kept, it`s estimated that perhaps 1,000 flights were made.
New challenges
Many aviation authorities agree that Chanute`s glider was the most significant and influential aircraft of the pre-Wright era.
Now it`s up to Davies and his partners to get their dreams of the future off the ground, a task that, in its way, may be as difficult as the challenges Chanute encountered a century ago.
Davies insists it`s simply a function of educating people about Chanute. When they hear how northwest Indiana can capitalize on what Chanute did and where he did it, the necessary money will flow.
”I want to recreate that moment in history by building a replica of Chanute`s glider and bringing it by barge from Chicago to Gary, just the way he did. This will be in 1996. At the dedication of the museum.”
Sounds like we`ve got another Crazy Man of the Dunes.
