Railroad civil engineer , 1869 Chanute began his training as a civil engineer in 1848. He was widely considered brilliant and innovative in the engineering profession. He designed and constructed the two biggest stockyards in the United States,
Chicago Stock Yards (1865) and
Kansas City Stockyards (1871). He designed and built the
Hannibal Bridge with
Joseph Tomlinson and
George S. Morison. In 1869, this bridge established
Kansas City, Missouri as the dominant city in the region, as the first bridge to cross the
Missouri River there. He designed many other bridges during his railroad career, including the
Illinois River rail bridge at Peoria, Illinois and
Chillicothe, Illinois, the Genesee River Gorge rail bridge near
Portageville, New York (now in
Letchworth State Park), the
Sibley Railroad Bridge across the Missouri River at
Sibley, Missouri, the
Fort Madison Toll Bridge at
Fort Madison, Iowa, and the
Kinzua Bridge in
Pennsylvania.
Pioneer in wood preservation Chanute established a procedure for pressure-treating wooden railroad ties with an antiseptic that increased the wood's lifespan. Establishing the first commercial plants, he convinced railroad men that it was advantageous to expend funds treating ties to extend their service life, thus reducing replacement costs. To monitor the longevity of railroad ties and other wooden items, he introduced the railroad
date nail in the United States. Chanute retired from the Erie Railway in 1883 to become an independent engineering consultant.
Aviation pioneer hang glider is a trailblazing design adapted by the Wright brothers, who "contrived a system consisting of two large surfaces on the Chanute double-deck plan". in 1904, about to launch a
glider designed by Chanute. Chanute became interested in aviation after watching a balloon ascend in
Peoria, Illinois, in 1856. When he retired from his railroad career in 1883, he devoted some leisure time to furthering the new science of aviation. 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. He published his findings in a series of articles in
The Railroad and Engineering Journal from 1891 to 1893, which were then re-published in the influential book
Progress in Flying Machines in 1894. This was the most systematic global survey of fixed-wing
heavier-than-air aviation research published up to that time. At the
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Chanute collaborated with Albert Zahm to organize a highly successful International Conference on Aerial Navigation. Being 64 years old, Chanute was too old to fly, 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, and of
hang gliders of their own design. The testing was in the dunes along the shore of
Lake Michigan near the town of
Miller Beach,
Indiana, just east of what became the city of
Gary. These experiments convinced Chanute that the best way to achieve extra lift without a prohibitive increase in weight was to stack several wings, an idea proposed by the British engineer
Francis Herbert Wenham in 1866 and realized in flight by Lilienthal in the 1890s. Chanute introduced the "strut-wire" braced wing structure that was used in powered
biplanes of the future, not seriously challenged until the pioneering efforts of
Hugo Junkers to develop all-metal cantilever airframe technology without external bracing
from 1915 onward. Chanute based his "interplane strut" concept on the
Pratt truss, which was familiar to him from his bridge-building work. The Wright brothers based their glider designs on the Chanute "double-decker", as they called it. An updated and improved design of a biplane glider was developed and flown in 1897. Chanute corresponded with many aviation pioneers, including
Otto Lilienthal,
Louis Pierre Mouillard,
Gabriel Voisin,
John J. Montgomery,
Louis Blériot,
Ferdinand Ferber,
Lawrence Hargrave, and
Alberto Santos Dumont. In 1897, he started a correspondence with British aviator
Percy Pilcher. Following Chanute's ideas, Pilcher built a
triplane, but he was killed in a glider crash in October 1899 before he could attempt to fly it. In 1899, Wilbur Wright read
Progress in Flying Machines and contacted Chanute in May 1900. Chanute helped to publicize the Wright brothers' work and provided input and 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. Chanute freely shared his knowledge about aviation with anyone who was interested, and expected others to do the same. He encouraged colleagues to
patent their inventions. His open approach led to friction with the Wright brothers, who believed their ideas about aircraft control were unique and refused to share them. Chanute did not believe that the Wright flying machine patent, premised on
wing warping, could be enforced and said so publicly, including a newspaper interview in which he said, "I admire the Wrights. I feel friendly toward them for the marvels they have achieved, but you can easily gauge how I feel concerning their attitude at present by the remark I made to Wilbur Wright recently. I told him I was sorry to see they were suing other experimenters and abstaining from entering the contests and competitions in which other men are brilliantly winning laurels. I told him that in my opinion they are wasting valuable time over lawsuits which they ought to concentrate in their work. Personally, I do not think that the courts will hold that the principle underlying the warping tips can be patented." The friendship was still impaired when Chanute died, but Wilbur Wright attended Chanute's memorial service at the family's home. Wright wrote a eulogy that was read at the Aero Club meeting in January 1911. When the Aero Club of Illinois was founded on February 10, 1910, Chanute was its first president until his death. ==Death==