Flight Not Improbable,
Octave Chanute Tackles Aeronautics as a Civil Engineer

After a successful career in civil engineering, the 51-yearold Octave Chanute resigned his high-paying position as chief engineer and assistant general superintendent at the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad Co. in 1883 to start a private consulting practice. He had told fellow American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) members in 1880, “If engineers desire to take a higher rank than they now occupy in this country, they must study new paths for themselves, and be no longer men of routine, ordered hither and thither by promoters of schemes and the magnates of Wall Street.”[1]  He believed that visionary engineers were responsible for technical developments and inventions, and that they could solve just about any technical problem.

Early in his working life, Chanute had become interested in manned flight; he had watched Silas Brooks inflate his balloon in Peoria, Ill., in August 1856 and watched with amazement as the balloon and its passenger drifted away. Then his father, living in Paris, France, mailed him a 32-page pamphlet on the history of balloons and aerial locomotion,2 describing not only the many attempts to fly during the past centuries, but also howsome inventors used the power of nature as they tried to achieve manflight.

Seeing writeups and images of various flying machines probably made him smile at times, but not knowing any better, Chanute clipped and filed everything on aeronautics in unlabeled wooden storage boxes, placed neatly in his bookcases. He compiled a nine-page manuscript on “Mechanical Flight” in late 1878 and another one in 1882; neither manuscript was finished and thus not published. In the interest of his career and his (or his family’s) social standing, this topic was taboo, to be discussed only behind closed doors and away from the general public. . . .

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