Montgomery, Louis Blériot, Ferdinand Ferber, Lawrence Hargrave, and Alberto Santos Dumont. A new design of a biplane glider was developed and flown in 1897.Ĭhanute corresponded with many aviation pioneers, including Otto Lilienthal, Louis Mouillard, Gabriel Voisin, John J. The Wright brothers based their glider designs on the Chanute "double-decker," as they called it. Chanute based his "interplane strut" concept on the Pratt truss, which was familiar to him from his bridge-building work.
Chanute introduced the "strut-wire" braced wing structure that was used in powered biplanes of the future, not seriously challenged until the pioneering efforts of Hugo Junkers to develop all-metal cantilever airframe technology without external bracing from 1915 onwards. These experiments convinced Chanute that the best way to achieve extra lift without a prohibitive increase in weight was to stack several wings one above the other, an idea proposed by the British engineer Francis Wenham in 1866 and realized in flight by Lilienthal in the 1890s. In 1896 Chanute, Herring, and Avery tested a design based on the work of German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, as well as hang gliders of their own design in the dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan near the town of Miller Beach, Indiana, just east of what became the city of Gary. This was the most systematic global survey of fixed-wing heavier-than-air aviation research published up to that time.Īt the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Chanute organized in collaboration with Albert Zahm a highly successful International Conference on Aerial Navigation.Ĭhanute was too old to fly himself, so he partnered with younger experimenters, including Augustus M.
Octive photostack series#
He published his findings in a series of articles in The Railroad and Engineering Journal from 1891 to 1893, which were then re-published in the influential book Progress in Flying Machines in 1894. Applying his engineering background, Chanute collected all available data from flight experimenters around the world and combined it with the knowledge gathered as a civil engineer in the past. When he retired from his railroad career in 1883, he decided to devote some leisure time to furthering the new science of aviation. Ĭhanute became interested in aviation after watching a balloon ascend in Peoria, Illinois, in 1856. let us hope that the advent of a successful flying machine, now only dimly foreseen and nevertheless thought to be possible, will bring nothing but good into the world that it shall abridge distance, make all parts of the globe accessible, bring men into closer relation with each other, advance civilization, and hasten the promised era in which there shall be nothing but peace and good-will among all men. As a method to monitor the longevity of railroad ties and other wooden structures, he introduced the railroad date nail in the United States.Ĭhanute retired from the Erie Railway in 1883 to become an independent engineering consultant.
Establishing the first commercial plants, he convinced railroad men that it was commercially feasible to make money by spending money on treating ties to extend their service time and reduce replacement costs. He designed many other bridges during his railroad career, including the Illinois River rail bridge at Chillicothe, Illinois, the Genesee River Gorge rail bridge near Portageville, New York (now in Letchworth State Park), the Sibley Railroad Bridge across the Missouri River at Sibley, Missouri, across the Mississippi River at Fort Madison, Iowa, and the Kinzua Bridge in Pennsylvania.Ĭhanute also established a procedure for pressure-treating wooden railroad ties with an antiseptic that increased the wood's lifespan in the tracks. Morison, which was the first bridge to cross the Missouri River in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1869 and established Kansas City as the dominant city in the region. He designed and built the Hannibal Bridge with Joseph Tomlinson and George S. During his career he designed and constructed the United States ' two biggest stockyards, Chicago Stock Yards (1865) and Kansas City Stockyards (1871). He was widely considered brilliant and innovative in the engineering profession. Octave Chanute began his training as a budding civil engineer in 1848.
0 kommentar(er)
