Author recounts Octave Chanute flights over Miller Beach at the beginning of modern aviation

In May 1899, Wilbur Wright who with his brother Orville had become interested in manned flight, wrote a letter to the French–born civil engineer Octave Chanute who lived in Chicago, asking advice on aviation.

It had been almost three years since Chanute and several other men had alighted from the train at what was then called Miller Junction and walked the mile or so to the tall dunes that lined the Lake Michigan beach there. Their passing through town created a rousing interest for they carried with them the makings of several gliders.

Over a two-week period, the group, camping on the beach, would perform a series of experiments using, among other inventions, a multi–winged glider with a wingspan of 12–feet that Chanute had designed earlier in the spring. The position and number of wings could be changed to accommodate the wind and ultimately was able to make more than 200 successful glides.

"Made a few jumps in forenoon — best one 55 feet. Wind freshened about noon and made a number of excellent jumps. Best one, Avery, 78 feet.; Herring, 82 feet, 6 inches. Chanute wrote in his diary about the last day before they left Miller on the 6:41 p.m. train. Chanute would continue testing his designs by soaring from the top of the dunes, sometimes doing so himself — even though by then he was in his late 60s — until a bad accident on one of his gliders sidelined him.

Today, when people think of the first flight, they remember the Wright Brothers not Chanute. But Simine Short may help bring Chanute back into the forefront of aviation history. The author of "Locomotive to Aeromotive: Octave Chanute and the Transportation Revolution" (University of Illinois Press 2010; $38), Short has twice been asked to speak at Wright Brothers National Memorial since the book came out last summer and is also scheduled to give a talk at the Dayton Heritage Center in July.

"Yes, people do realize that he contributed to the development of the Wrights," says Short who currently lives in Chicago but is moving to Miller, "but sometimes it is a little forgotten. I think people usually forget what happened 'yesterday'."

Short hadn't heard of Chanute but she knew about Glenn Curtiss, who made the first officially witnessed flight in North America and founded the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company which made aircraft for the Army and Navy before and during World War I.

"Curtiss had built a Chanute–type glider and that triggered my curiosity," she says. "He was an engineer who had to come up with ways to get various things done — and so did I. And I thought he was a fascinating man that was involved with all kinds of different engineering problems — I liked that. So in short, he was a person worth spending time on researching and then writing about."

Indeed, Chanute, who was retired when he first began experimenting with gliders, had solved many difficult engineering quandaries. He's designed the first railroad bridge to cross the Missouri River, a feat deemed undoable until then. He also created the Union Stockyards in both Chicago and Kansas City. Besides that he developed a treatment for preserving timber so that railroad ties wouldn't rot and designed the Kinzua Viaduct in 1882, which at 301–foot high was called the "eighth wonder of the world" and was, for two years, the tallest bridge in the world.

Chanute, a self–taught engineer, lived by the principle "Share what you know and someone else will share his knowledge with you as well. Then you both get ahead in life," believing that a collaborative approach was the best way to grow ideas.

"By bringing people together, publicizing what was discovered, and sharing information, he allowed or guided others to think in the proper direction," says Short. "Thus, he gave guidance to newcomers and anyone who enters the field as a newcomer usually has fresh ideas. This is what Chanute wanted to encourage and distribute. And the Chanute–type biplane structure was a starting point for many future engineers. Until 1896, no one had thought of using a larger surface for the tail structure, which made the aircraft more stable. This is what was needed for the initial breakthrough. I believe that his aeronautical contribution was for real. If you look at the airplanes built around the world during the next decade, almost all were biplane structures, similar to the Chanute–type."

Before his death in 1910, Chanute would see aviation morph from a theory into reality and though his aeronautic creations didn't garner much in the way of profit he had made a major impact and that was important.

"He really did not need to worry about profit as I think he had acquired enough money to live comfortably," says Short. "He just wanted people to remember that it was him who helped in the early days of aviation's beginning. But he did appreciate it, especially in the last few years of his life, when someone thanked him."