It was 8 p.m. on a cold Thursday, Dec. 17, 1903, when a telegram arrived at the North Side Chicago home of Octave Chanute, a semi-retired civil engineer.
The message was terse, almost as if it were in code: “Boys report four successful flights today from level against twenty-one mile wind. Average speed though air thirty-one miles. Longest flight fifty seven seconds.”
Thus Chanute, as he sat in his study and scanned the telegram, became the first person in Chicago and one of the few in the world to learn that the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright had flown a heavier-than-air machine on the sands at Kill Devil Hill near Kitty Hawk, N.C. The telegram had been from the Wrights’ sister, Katharine, in Dayton, Ohio.
As is often the case in great discoveries, the importance of what the Wrights had done wouldn’t dawn on much of the rest of the world for years. The Associated Press spiked a press release from the Wrights’ family, and the only coverage was in five newspapers that had picked up a third-hand and largely erroneous account from the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot.
But Chanute knew immediately the importance of what had happened. He was the grand old man of aviation before aviation existed. In 1900 he was the man Wilbur Wright sought out for advice when he was contemplating building a flying machine.
For almost 20 years, Chanute had watched and documented the successes and failures of young men the world over struggling to conquer the air. He tested his own hang gliders with varying degrees of success on the dunes at Gary in 1896 and had been on the beach at St. Joseph, Mich., Oct. 11, 1897, when colleague Augustus Herring failed to get his tri-plane powered by a compressed air engine off the ground.
“At the turn of the century, he [Chanute] was the most influential man in world on the subject of heavier than air flight,” said Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
When Wilbur Wright, became frustrated by his unsuccessful glider experiments in 1901, Chanute brought him to Chicago for a pep talk.
Chanute visited the Wrights several times on the dunes near Kitty Hawk and had been present just a month before the epic flight in 1903 but had been forced to flee by the blustery weather.
He was one of the few people in which the sometimes secretive Wrights confided. But their 10-year relationship was at times strained. The Wrights were bicycle shop owners of modest means who wanted to make money on the machine they invented. Chanute, who was wealthy, believed that powered flight belonged to all of mankind.
“He remained their close friend to the end,” said Crouch. “Wilbur didn’t have many close friends.”
Probably because he hid his interest in aviation for fear of ridicule, it is not certain when Chanute got hooked on solving the problem of flight. Crouch thinks it may have in 1875 at 43, when he visited his native Europe. (He had been born in Paris in 1832 and immigrated to the U.S. with his father six years later.) At the time of Chanute’s return to Europe, Wilbur Wright was 8 years old and Orville was 4.
However, Simine Short, a glider enthusiast who has assembled a considerable file on Chanute as a private research project, said the Crerar Library at the University of Chicago has aviation clippings dating from 1852 in its Chanute collection.
What is certain is that Chanute for years subsumed his interest in aviation to his principal job of designing and building railroads, especially railroad bridges. It is no coincidence that the airframe of the glider he tested in 1896 in Indiana and the two-winged machine the Wrights flew in 1903 have a structural resemblance to the trussed railroad bridges Chanute threw up all over the country. He also designed Chicago’s Union Stockyards and completed a study that led to the building of New York’s elevated rapid transit system.
By the time Chanute in the 1880s seriously took up the problem, the technology of flight in heavier-than-air machines hadn’t progressed much since Sir George Cayley in England in 1804 had tested a flying glider model. But in such scattered places as Algeria, Egypt, Australia, Germany, England, Washington, Chicago and San Diego, individuals operating for the most part independently began to tinker with gliders. And Chanute quietly began compiling their research.
The chain of events that led to the Wrights’ triumph in 1903 had been set in motion more than a decade earlier when Chanute, who never considered aviation anything more than an avocation and as far as is known never flew in an airplane, decided to publicly discuss what he had learned. His first remarks at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Buffalo in 1886 were rather noncommittal.
But after more research, Chanute in 1890 predicted in a speech to engineering students New York’s Cornell University “the present generation will yet see men safely traveling through and on the air at speeds of 50 to 60 miles an hour.”
A year later he began publishing a series of 27 articles summarizing the aviation experiments that had been conducted around the globe. The series, which amounted to mankind’s accumulated knowledge of flying to that time, was published as a book in 1894. That book, “Progress in Flying Machines” is perhaps the most influential work on aviation ever written.
In it, Chanute finally predicted man would fly in airplanes:
“The first apparatus to achieve a notable success will necessarily be somewhat crude and imperfect. It will probably need to be modified, reconstructed and re-adventured [modified] many times before it is developed into a practical shape.” And airplanes will eventually fly at 100 to 150 m.p.h., and, he ominously predicted, their first practical application will be in war.
Achieving fame
Chanute was on a roll. He helped organize a successful seminar on aviation held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and it attracted the attention of the world press.
After that he was considered the world’s authority on aviation and could never quite shake the press. When he and several associates in 1896 tried to conduct secret glider experiments on some Indiana dunes, a Chicago Tribune reporter was on the scene within 24 hours to watch. One of the glides on Sept. 11, 1896, was for 359 feet. In contrast, Orville Wright’s first powered flight in 1903 was only 120 feet long though an hour and a half later Wilbur flew for 852 feet.
Chanute became engrossed in creating a self-stabilizing glider and never got around to attaching an engine. He wanted a stable machine that would automatically right itself in flight when hit with a gust of wind.
“Most historians seem to downplay Chanute’s contribution because they are missing the point that a glider, an aircraft without an engine, is the first step in the evolutionary process of inventing an airplane,” said Short. “He did not attempt to build a powered machine because he wanted to achieve automatic stability first.”
Relationship with Wrights
Such was his fame that on May 13, 1900, a bicycle maker in Dayton by the name of Wilbur Wright wrote him for advice on where the winds would be most favorable for testing gliders in September through January each year. That was the time the Wright brothers could spare from their bicycle business.
Wilbur wrote again a few months later with another question. Chanute, who couldn’t resist corresponding with, encouraging and financing young aviators, was interested. An exchange of letters followed–435 in the next 11 years. Chanute also became something of a family friend, visiting Dayton and Kitty Hawk from time to time and having Wilbur Wright visit him in Chicago.
When the Wrights in October 1900, returned to Dayton from Kitty Hawk after their initial glider experiments, they quickly wrote Chanute with the details. He was intrigued, especially with the flights in which the pilot rode in a prone position to reduce drag instead of dangling from the hang gliders that had been the practice to that day.
Chanute wanted to mention their experiments in a magazine article he was preparing for Cassier’s Magazine, but the brothers were reluctant for him to divulge details of their glider. Ultimately, Chanute sent them a portion of the manuscript that boiled down their experiments to one paragraph.
He visited the brothers in Dayton on June 26-27, 1901, and they invited him to their planned glider experiments in Kitty Hawk later than summer. He showed up Aug. 5 to learn the Wrights were disappointed that the 1901 tests with a new machine were not going as well as they had the previous year with the machine they had abandoned on the beach.
After they had returned to Dayton that month contemplating abandoning their quest to fly, Chanute asked Wilbur to address the prestigious Western Society of Engineers in Chicago. The speech to an enthusiastic crowd of 70 members of the society was followed by Chanute’s pep talk.
Chanute was convinced that despite the perceived problems in 1901, the Wrights had progressed beyond anything else that had been done. The following spring (1902), Chanute spread their name far and wide with magazine articles published as far away as Europe, publicity that irked the secretive Wrights.
Thus began a period of bittersweet relations between the three men that would last until Chanute’s death. Chanute aggravated the situation by showing up at the brothers’ camp in Kitty Hawk Oct. 4, 1902, with Herring and a copy of their 1896 glider. Chanute left camp Oct. 15 and went to Washington, where he convinced aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley that he should see what the Wrights were doing. The brothers refused to invite their potential rival, citing the lateness of the season.
It was Chanute’s April 3, 1903, speech to the Aero-Club de France, a group of balloonists in Paris, that was to cause the greatest friction. Though Chanute did not reveal the details of their wing-warping technique of maintaining stability in flight or any other technical details of the machine, the speech had an enormous effect on the French, who realized they had fallen behind in the quest to fly.
The idea that some American amateurs were about to conquer the skies with a heavier-than-air machine offended Gallic sensibilities. They had led the world in aeronautical technology since the French brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel Montgolfier sent the first balloons aloft in 1783.
The Wrights, in turn, were offended by the insinuation that they were Chanute’s pupils, he had subsidized them and he in 1900 had provided them with the details of wing warping developed by Pierre Mouillard in Egypt. Wing warping was a precursor of the aileron, which controls the stability of modern aircraft. Chanute to his death apparently believed wing warping predated the Wrights and their contribution was to successfully refine it.
Chanute in his speech had called the Wrights “dedicated collaborators.” The comment was widely interpreted in French aeronautical circles as meaning he considered the brothers to be his disciples. Whether the comment was intentional, innocent or misinterpreted, it made the Wrights even more disenchanted with Chanute. The situation did not improve any when the brothers learned a French publication, L’Aerophile, had printed a picture of the Wright’s 1901 glider misidentifying it as a “Chanute machine.”
Chiding, reconciling
Despite their deteriorating relations, the Wrights invited Chanute back to Kitty Hawk in late 1903 to watch their attempts at flight with a powered machine. He arrived Nov. 6 but found the weather so cold and windy that he left a week later–a full month before the Wrights flew their airplane. Chanute, then 71, was at his Chicago home at 1138 N. Dearborn St. when the telegram arrived.
Once they succeeded, the Wrights became preoccupied with obtaining and protecting their patents and the commercial value of their invention. Chanute, as always, viewed the invention of the airplane as an evolutionary process in which the Wrights took the final step. In a paper read before the mechanical engineering section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in St. Louis two weeks after the Wright’s first flight, Chanute was speculating in a professorial manner about the future of the airplane:
“Flying machines promise better results as to speed, but yet will be of limited commercial application. They may carry mail and reach inaccessible places, but they can’t compete with the railroads as carriers of passengers or freight. They will not fill the heavens with commerce, abolish customs houses or revolutionize the world, for they will be too expensive for the loads which they carry, and subject to too many wind contingencies. Success, however, is probable.”
Though he visited the Wrights in Dayton in early 1904, and continued to correspond with them, alerting them in September 1907, that onetime balloonist Albert Santos-Dumont had made a 726-foot flight in the airplane “14-bis” in Paris, Chanute didn’t see an airplane fly until September 1908, when he attended a public exhibition by Orville Wright at Ft. Myer, Va. He was present Sept. 17 when Orville crashed, injuring himself and killing his passenger, Army Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, the first fatality in an airplane crash in the U.S. Chanute, who stayed to help and advise Katharine Wright during her brother’s convalescence, correctly surmised the crash resulted from a broken propeller.
Chanute and the Wrights had debated the possibility of flying exhibitions as a source of income soon after the brothers first flew in 1903. The old man in his Jan. 22, 1904, visit to Dayton suggested the brothers enter their airplane in an aeronautical meet at the St. Louis Exposition, a world’s fair scheduled for later in the year, but they demurred. About $200,000 in prizes was being offered, and Chanute spent $1,400 to have Avery rebuild one of his biplane gliders to enter. Avery made 46 flights in the glider in St. Louis between Sept. 23 and Oct. 26, 1904.
As late as 1910, Chanute was still chiding the brothers, who by that time were actively entering competitions. ” . . . I told you . . . that you were making a mistake by abstaining from prize-winning contests while the public curiosity was so keen and by bringing patent suits to prevent others from doing so.”
“Chanute did think they had turned greedy. He had always seen the pursuit of aviation as a charitable endeavor, something you owed the world. To the Wrights it was more of a business,” said Crouch.
Then in 1910 Wilbur suggested they bury the hatchet. “We prize too highly the friendship which meant so much to us in the years of our early struggles to see it worn away by uncorrected misunderstandings . . . ,” Wilbur wrote Chanute on April 29, 1910. The old man replied a few days later that he had been ill and would write after returning from Europe.
Chanute, by then a widower, was planning to visit a spa to help him recover his health. However, his conditioned worsened, and he was hospitalized in Paris. He returned to Chicago with a nurse attending him on the trip, but died Nov. 23, 1910, in his home.
The family telegraphed the Wrights, and Wilbur caught the night train for Chicago. His written tribute appeared a few months later:
“If he had not lived, the entire history of progress in flying would have been other than it has been, for he not only encouraged the Wright brothers to persevere in their experiments, but it was due to his missionary trip to France in 1903, that the Voisins, Bleriot, Farman, De Lagrange and Archdeacon were led to take the revival of aviation studies in that country, after the failure of Ader and the French government in 1897 had left everyone in despair . . .
“His private correspondence with experimenters in all parts of the world was of great volume. No one was too humble to receive his share of time. In patience and goodness of heart he has rarely been surpassed . . . “
