Octave Chanute

Octave Chanute , actually Octave Alexandre Chanut , (born February 18, 1832 in Paris , † November 23, 1910 in Chicago , Illinois ) was an American railroad engineer and aviation pioneer.

Life

The Chanute-Herring double-decker glider 1896

Chanute was the son of Joseph Chanute and his wife Elise de Bonnaire. In 1838 he emigrated to the USA with his father and settled in New York . On the occasion of the award of the US citizenship in 1854, Chanute had his name officially changed to Octave Chanute . In 1857 he married Annie Riddel James. Octave Chanute died in Chicago on November 23, 1910 at the age of 78. The Chanute Peak , a mountain in Antarctica, bears his name since the 1960s.

Civil engineer

Octave Chanute began training as a civil engineer in 1848. While working as an engineer, he designed and built the Union Stock Yards in Chicago (1865) and the Kansas City Stockyards (1871), two of the largest storage yards in the United States. In 1869 he designed and built the Hannibal Bridge, the first bridge to cross the Missouri in Kansas City . He designed many other railroad bridges, including the Illinois River Railroad Bridge at Chillicothe, the Genesee River Gorge Railroad Bridge near Portageville, the Missouri Bridge at Sibley, the Mississippi Bridge at Fort Madison, Iowa, and the Kinzua Bridge in Pennsylvania .

Flight technician

Chanute systematically collected information about the worldwide development of flight technology. From 1891 he published this in a series of articles on Aeronautics in the American Engineer and Railroad Journal . The series formed the basis of the volume Progress in Flying Machines published in 1894 . From 1896, Chanute designed and built glider planes together with Augustus Herring , whom he had hired as an assistant, and tested them in air camps on Lake Michigan in 1896 and 1897 together with a replica of a glider by Otto Lilienthal .

With the help of his publications, the Wright brothers deepened their knowledge of flight dynamics. There was a lively exchange of letters and visits by Chanute to the brothers' attempts to fly. Chanute was already in correspondence with Lilienthal from 1893. Chanute can be seen as a crucial link between Lilienthal's findings and those of the Wright brothers.

Works

The Kansas City Bridge . - New York, Van Nostrand, 1870
Progress in Flying Machines , Courier Dover Publications, reprint 1997 of original (New York 1894). At Google books.

literature

Octave Chanute in Otto Lilienthal's aeronautical correspondence - Otto Lilienthal Museum Anklam, 1993

Web links

Commons : Octave Chanute - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

personal data
SURNAME	Chanute, Octave
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Chanut, Octave Alexandre
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American railroad engineer and aviation pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH	February 18, 1832
PLACE OF BIRTH	Paris
DATE OF DEATH	November 23, 1910
Place of death	Chicago , Illinois