CINDERELLA - OCTAVE CHANUTE GLIDER INVENTOR SOUVENIR SHEET OF FOUR

Full gum on reverse, never hinged souvenir panel of four views honoring Octave Chanute, whose early wing designs helped develop the first airplanes.  A must for any airplane, aeronautics collector. Octave Chanute immigrated to the United States in 1838. He attended private schools in New York and began his training as a budding civil engineer in 1848. He was widely considered brilliant and innovative in the engineering profession. Chanute first became interested in aviation watching a balloon take off in Peoria, IL, in 1856. 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. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Chanute organized in collaboration with Albert Zahm a highly successful International Conference on Aerial Navigation. Chanute was too old to fly himself, so he partnered with younger experimenters, including Augustus M. Herring and William Avery. 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. 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. Chanute introduced the "strut-wire" braced wing structure that would be used in powered biplanes of the future. The Wright brothers based their glider designs on the Chanute "double-decker," as they called it. A new design of a biplane glider was developed and flown in 1897. Chanute was in contact with the Wright brothers starting in 1900, when Wilbur wrote to him after reading Progress in Flying Machines. Chanute helped to publicize the Wright brothers' work, and provided consistent encouragement, visiting their camp near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1901, 1902, and 1903. The Wrights and Chanute exchanged hundreds of letters between 1900 and 1910. When the Aero Club of Illinois was founded on February 10, 1910, Chanute served as its first president until his death in November 1910.