Octave Chanute

Octave Chanute (born Feb. 18, 1832, Paris, France—died Nov. 23, 1910, Chicago, Ill., U.S.) was a leading American civil engineer and aeronautical pioneer.

(Read Orville Wright’s 1929 biography of his brother, Wilbur.)

Immigrating to the United States with his father in 1838, Chanute attended private schools in New York City. His first job was as a member of a surveying crew with the Hudson River Railroad. He then worked his way up through a series of increasingly responsible engineering positions on western railroads. In addition, he served as chief engineer on a variety of important projects, notably the construction of the first bridge across the Missouri River. Chanute became a leader of major American engineering societies and capped his career by serving as chief engineer of the Erie Railroad Company from 1873 to 1883.

Fascinated by flight, Chanute was determined to interest other technical professionals in the problems of aeronautics. He corresponded with aeronautical experimenters around the world, gathering trustworthy information on the history of flight research that he published as Progress in Flying Machines (1894). Chanute also organized sessions on aeronautics at the meetings of major engineering societies, arranged conferences on flight technology at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1893) and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (1904), and offered assistance to promising young aviation enthusiasts.

Chanute and a handful of assistants tested a series of gliders in the Indiana Dunes at the southern end of Lake Michigan during the summer of 1896. A braced multiplane design successfully flown at this time was the most significant aeronautical structure developed to date. Chanute had applied a trussing system drawn from bridge architecture that enabled an engineer to calculate the strength of the aircraft structure. The Chanute glider provided Wilbur and Orville Wright with a starting point for their own structural designs. Chanute befriended the Wright brothers, pursued an extensive correspondence with them, and visited their camp on the Outer Banks of North Carolina between 1901 and 1903. “No one was too humble to receive a share of his time,” Wilbur Wright noted in 1910. “In patience and goodness of heart he has rarely been surpassed. Few men were more universally respected or loved.”