Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
He corresponded both with Chanute and with the Wrights, and in the end he was commissioned by the French Ministry of War to undertake the journey to America in order to negotiate with the Wright Brothers concerning French rights in the patents they had acquired, and to study their work at first hand.
But Maxim, after spending $100,000, abandoned the work; the Ader machine, built at the expense of the French Government, was a failure; Lilienthal and Pilcher were killed in experiments; and Chanute and many others, from one cause or another, had relaxed their efforts, though it subsequently became known that Professor Langley was still secretly at work on a machine for the United States Government.
While Pilcher was carrying on Lilienthal's work in England, the great German had also a follower in America; one Octave Chanute, who, in one of the statements which he has left on the subject of his experiments acknowledges forty years' interest in the problem of flight, did more to develop the glider in America than with the possible exception of Montgomery any other man.
The American Aeronautical Annual for 1897 contains these plans; Chanute confessed that some movement on the part of the operator was still required to control the machine, but it was only a seventh or a sixth part of the movement required for control of the Lilienthal type.
In the summer of 1901 we became personally acquainted with Mr. Chanute. When he learned that we were interested in flying as a sport, and not with any expectation of recovering the money we were expending on it, he gave us much encouragement.
Octave Chanute, himself a leading exponent of gliding, gives the best description of Le Bris's experiments in a work, Progress in Flying Machines, which, although published as recently as I 1894, is already rare. Chanute draws from a still rarer book, namely, De la Landelle's work published in 1884.
Chanute has a further word to say about the possibility of making balloons navigable. He considers that their size will have to be great to the verge of impracticability and the power of the motor enormous in proportion to its weight.
And thereafter we made glide after glide, sometimes following the ground closely and sometimes sailing high in the air. Mr Chanute had his camera with him and took pictures of some of these glides, several of which are among those shown. 'We made glides on subsequent days, whenever the conditions were favourable.
When dried they retain only about 1 1/4 lb. of the material with which they have been treated. Mr. Octave Chanute, of Kansas City, Missouri, United States, erected the works for the Union Pacific Company, and has an interest in the patents under which the process is carried out, which is a modification of Sir William Burnett's process.
Chanute waxed enthusiastic over the possibilities of gliding, concerning which he remarks that 'There is no more delightful sensation than that of gliding through the air. All the faculties are on the alert, and the motion is astonishingly smooth and elastic.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking