CHANUTE, Octave.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Gliding Experiments. First edition, offprint issue, of this paper reporting the development of the first modern aircraft structure, a key influence on the Wright brothers' Flyer. This copy was presented by James Means (1853-1920), a lifelong aviation enthusiast and friend of Chanute: in 1908, he, Chanute, and Alexander Graham Bell founded the American Aviation Prize Fund to support and international sporting contest for flying machines. Octave Chanute (1832-1910) leveraged his professional engineering experience with railroad trusses to produce a series of gliders with a strut-wire braced wing design that informed all subsequent designs from the early days of flight - including the Flyer - and that continues to underpin modern biplane design. Chanute and his assistants tested these designs in a series of experiments in mid-1896, piloting the gliders across the sand dunes on the shores of Lake Michigan. The present offprint reports their results, while the extensive half-tone photographs illustrate the on-the-fly revision of the designs from an unwieldy four-wing arrangement to an elegant biplane structure.Chanute himself was a prominent mentor to the Wright brothers, and his designs from 1896 provided them with a starting point for their own structural designs. He visited their camp at Kitty Hawk many times, the last coming one month before their historic flight on the Flyer. In 1879, Francis Blake (1850-1913) patented a carbon microphone design that Bell quickly optioned for

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