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You may be surprised to learn that in 1894,
nine years before the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, Chicago's Octave
Chanute designed and built a two-winged glider and flew it several times
at the Dunes near Wells Beach on Lake Michigan. Chanute experimented with several designs and wrote extensively on "flying machines," publishing his findings in several scholarly journals. When the Wright Brothers first began thinking about flying machines, they contacted the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and asked to be sent all the information on file about the subject of flying machines. The Wright Brothers received Chanute's articles, called Chanute and brought him in to advise them on the best winged configuration for their proposed airplane. Chanute was present with the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, when Chanute's two-winged design successfully lifted off the ground. |
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The Chanute glider lifts off the ground in one of the test flights at the Lake Michigan Dunes in 1894. |
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The Chanute-Herring group had taken the South Shore from Chicago to the Dunes to experiment with various designs of aircraft wing configuration. At one point, the two-winged glider flew more than 584 feet, lifting off and taking flight in the gentle breezes off of Lake Michigan. |
Octave Chanute