by Ramona K. Cecil
For the better part of the
last century, Ohio and North
Carolina have battled over the bragging rights to having pioneered
aviation—the former declaring “The Birthplace of Aviation” on their auto
license plates while North Carolina
claims “First In Flight” on theirs. Connecticut, too, has now muscled into the
fray with their own claim of “First Powered Flight,” declaring that
German-born Connecticut aviator Gustave Whitehead took to the air two years
before Ohio natives Wilbur and Orville Wright soared over North Carolina’s
Kitty Hawk in 1903.
While the aforementioned
states battle it out in the “first-in-flight” fight, it’s only fair that my state
of Indiana elbow it’s way into the argument and plant the Hoosier flag alongside the flags of Ohio, North Carolina, and Connecticut in the fertile soil—or
should I say sand—of the ongoing conflict.
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| Indiana State Flag |
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| North Carolina State Flag |
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| Connecticut State Flag |
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| Ohio State Flag |
So what, you might ask,
earns Indiana
any claim to first-in-flight consideration? My answer: Octave Chanute, aka,
Crazy Old Man of the Sand Dunes.
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| Octave Chanute |
Born in Paris,
France in 1832, Chanute
emigrated to America at the age of six when
his father was named Vice-President of Jefferson College in Louisiana. Educated in private schools in New York, Octave grew up to become
a civil engineer. Over his career, he designed and oversaw the construction of
the two largest U.S.
stockyards; Chicago Stockyards and Kansas City Stockyards. He also designed and
built many notable bridges in the U.S. including many rail bridges.
Chanute’s work with railway bridges inspired him to invent a procedure for
pressure-treating railroad ties, increasing the life of the wood. He also
introduced the railroad date nail system to the U.S.; the date on the nail
effectively registering when a railroad tie was installed.
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| Hannibal Bridge over Missouri River, Kansas City, Missouri |
Though he retired from the
Erie Railway in 1883, Chanute was not yet ready to retire from engineering. He
first became interested in aviation while watching a balloon lift off from Peoria, Illinois
in 1856. He began collecting data from flight scientists around the world.
Combining what he learned with his own knowledge of engineering, he published
his findings in 1893 in The Railroad Engineering Journal, which was
re-published the following year in a book titled Progress in Flying Machines.
Too old to do his own
flying, Chanute partnered with aviation experimenters Augustus M. Herring and
William Avery. Together, they experimented with an array of flying machines on
the sand dunes along the shore of Lake Michigan near Miller Beach, Indiana.
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| Augustus M. Herring |
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| William Avery about to launch Chanute-Herring |
The flying experiments of
Chanute and his cohorts soon drew media attention. One local newspaper
described him as a “little man with gray hair and a ‘French style’ beard.” The
locals simply dubbed him Crazy Old Man of the Sand Dunes.
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A twelve-winged glider of Chanute's design
prepared for launch from the dunes of Miller
Beach, 1896 |
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Chanute and his 1896 hang glider, a trailblazing
design adapted by the Wright Brothers |
Over the years, Octave
Chanute corresponded with many aviation scientists around the world including a
ten-year correspondence with Wilbur Wright. Each summer from 1901 to 1903
Chanute was on hand at Kitty Hawk North Carolina
to witness the Wright brothers experiments in flight.
Following Chanute’s death
in 1910, Wilbur Wright wrote “If he (referring to Chanute) had not lived, the
history of human flight would have been quite different from what it has been.”
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| Wilbur Wright |
Today in Marquette Park,
the site of Octave Chanute’s first flights, sits a boulder bearing a bronze plaque
commemorating the man. It reads “Father of Aviation.”
So amid the ongoing
argument of which state is first in flight, I proudly plant the Hoosier flag
along side the flags of Ohio, South Carolina, and Connecticut. It’s the least I can do for the
Crazy Old Man of the Sand Dunes.
Ramona K. Cecil is a poet and award-winning author of historical
fiction for the Christian market. A proud Hoosier, she often sets
her stories in her home state of Indiana.
