If Not The Wright Brothers, Then Who?

[TFSmith121]

True enough...

Chanute is a fascinating character. He's another of the superb self-taught engineeers this country produced in the later 19th century. By the time he caught the aviation bug, he had so many engineering projects going that he maybe didn't spend as much time on practical flight as he might have for himself. He was a great collaborator with and a mentor for the Wrights and others.

A what-if is for him to be born a few years later, where he gets the aviation bug as a younger man and commits his career to flight. He might have been the guy with the Flyer in the atrium of the Smithsonian.

True enough...

One thing that could have sped up aviation generally - first LTA and then HTA - would have been a mid-to-late Nineteenth Century where the strategic situation involving the great powers was focused more on direct confrontation, rather than the various imperial scrambles and the focus on carving up what was left of the Eastern Hemisphere that didn't have a European nation state's flag already planted on it...

Especially one in which the Western Hemisphere was generally united and active in international affairs, diplomatically and ... otherwise.

Best,

 

[Driftless]

True enough...

One thing that could have sped up aviation generally - first LTA and then HTA - would have been a mid-to-late Nineteenth Century where the strategic situation involving the great powers was focused more on direct confrontation, rather than the various imperial scrambles and the focus on carving up what was left of the Eastern Hemisphere that didn't have a European nation state's flag already planted on it...

Especially one in which the Western Hemisphere was generally united and active in international affairs, diplomatically and ... otherwise.

Best,

Are you thinking of the pace of difference between aviation advancement 1911-1913 compared to 1914-1916, for example?

With the Lighter-Than-Air developments, Henri Giffard flew his 3hp steam powered one-man semi-dirgible in 1852. He had some directional control, but the 3hp engine didn't have enough propulsion to overcome more than a slight breeze.

Count Zeppelin rode as a passenger in 1863 on an American Civil War balloon and got the flying bug - but that took forty years before he got real traction. There were other balloonist/airship flyers in that middle stretch of the 19th century, but very limited advancement till the 1870's and more so in the 1880's and the availability of internal combustion engines. Lack of money and support were an issue for many of the would be aviators. Balloons were expensive enough, but the much more ambitious, larger and controllable airships were (and remain) extremely costly. Most privately funded inventors just couldn't afford failure. To borrow from NASA's Gene Kranz: "Failure was not an option" Early airships would have benefitted from a healthy and sustained subsidy.

*edit* There was plenty of good solid forward thinking by knowledgable scientists & engineering types going on from mid 19th century into the turn of the century. They often lacked the means for converting those ideas to reality. Some of it was the level of technology available, more often it was the lack of funds to develop the ideas.

1852
* 24 September – French engineer Henri Giffard flies 27 km (17 mi) from the Paris Hippodrome to Trappes in a steam-powered dirigible,[20] reaching a speed of about 10 km/h (6.2 mph).

1853
* Late June or early July – Sir George Cayley's coachman successfully flies a glider, designed by his employer, some proportion of the distance across Brompton Dale in Yorkshire, becoming the world's first adult aeroplane pilot.[21] Unimpressed with this honour, the coachman promptly resigns his employment.

1861
* 16 June – Floating 500 feet (152 meters) above the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the balloon Enterprise with a telegraph key wired directly to the White House, Thaddeus Lowe sends a telegram to President Abraham Lincoln to demonstrate the value of balloons in military reconnaissance. It is the first telegram to be sent from the air.[7][25] The Union Army Balloon Corps will be formed under Lowe* '​s command, for observation and artillery direction, and balloons will see major use in the American Civil War over the next four years

1862
* Late March – Civilian aeronaut John H. Steiner takes United States Navy officers aloft in an observation balloon from the deck of a flatboat on the Mississippi River so that they can direct the fire of U.S. Navy mortar boats against the Confederate-held Island Number Ten It will be the last aerial guidance of naval gunfire anywhere in the world until 1904.[28]

1863
* Dirigible airship flown by Solomon Andrews over Perth Amboy, New Jersey.

* John H. Steiner takes Ferdinand von Zeppelin, an officer from the Army of Württemberg assigned to the Union Army as an observer, aloft in a balloon. Zeppelin later will credit this ascent as his inspiration to create the rigid airship, which he first flies in 1900.[28]

1865
* German experimenter Paul Haenlein takes out a patent for the "Earliest Known Airship With a Semi-rigid Frame," envisioned to have a coal-gas-burning engine which draws its fuel from the craft* '​s envelope, which is filled with coal gas. He later will construct the craft in Germany.[31]

1866
* Foundation of the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain later to become the Royal Aeronautical Society, the world's oldest society devoted to all aspects of aeronautics and astronautics.[33]

1870
* Balloons are used by the French to transport letters and passengers out of besieged Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. Between September 1870 and January 1871, 66 flights – of which 58 land safely – carry 110 passengers and up to three million letters out of Paris, as well as 500 carrier pigeons to deliver messages back to Paris.[35] One balloon accidentally sets a world distance record by ending up off the coast of Norway.[36]

1876
*Alphonse Pénaud and Paul Gauchot apply for a patent for a power-driven aeroplane with a retractable undercarriage, wings with dihedral and joystick control.[42]

1879
* The British Army gains its first balloon, the Pioneer

* American scientist Edmund Clarence Stedman proposes a rigid airship inspired by the anatomy of a fish, with a framework of steel, brass, or copper tubing and a tractor propeller mounted on the front of the envelope, later changed to an engine with two propellers suspended beneath the framework. The airship never is built, but Stedman* '​s design foreshadows that of the Zeppelins of World War I.

1883
* The first electric-powered flight is made by Gaston Tissandier who fits a Siemens AG electric motor to a dirigible. Airships with electric engines (Tissandier brothers, Renard and Krebs).

* The Berlin-based "German Society for Promoting Aviation" publishes a magazine, the "Zeitschrift für Luftschiffahrt" (Magazine of Aviation).

1884
*9 August – The first fully controllable free-flight is made in the French Army dirigible La France by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs. The flight covers 8 km (5.0 mi) in 23 minutes. It was the first flight to return to the starting point.

* Englishman Horatio Phillipps has a patent issued for curved aerofoil sections

1889
* Otto Lilienthal publishes in his book Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (Bird Flight as the Basis for the Art of Aviation) measurements on wings, so called polar diagrams, which are the concept of description of artificial wings even today. The book gives a reference for the advantages of the arched wing

1890
* 9 October – The first brief flight of Clément Ader's steam-powered fixed-wing aircraft Eole takes place in Satory, France. It flies uncontrolled approximately 50 metres (160 feet) at a height of 20 cm (7.9 in) before crashing, but it is the first take-off of a powered airplane solely under its own power.

1892
* February – The first contract is awarded for the construction of a military airplane: Clément Ader is contracted by the French War Ministry to build a two-seater aircraft to be used as a bomber, capable of lifting a 75-kilogram (165-pound) bombload

1894
* Railway engineer Octave Chanute publishes Progress in Flying Machines, describing the research completed so far into flight. Chanute's book, a summary of many articles published in the "American Engineer and Railroad Journal", is a comprehensive account on the stage of development worldwide on the way to the aeroplane.

1895
* In the book L'Aviation Militaire, Clément Ader writes ...an aircraft carrier will become indispensable. Such ships will be very differently constructed from anything in existence today. To start with, the deck will have been cleared of any obstacles: it will be a flat area, as wide as possible, not conforming to the lines of the hull, and will resemble a landing strip. The speed of this ship will have to be at least as great as that of cruisers or even greater...Servicing the aircraft will have to be done below this deck...Access to this lower deck will be by means of a lift long enough and wide enough to take an aircraft with its wings folded...Along the sides will be the workshops of the mechanics responsible for refitting the planes and for keeping them always ready for flight

1896
* 6 May – Samuel Pierpont Langley flies the unmanned Aerodrome No. 5 from a houseboat on the Potomac River a distance of 3,300 ft (1,000 m), the first truly successful flight of one of his powered models

1898
* March – Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt calls for the creation of a four-officer board to study the utility of Samuel P. Langley* '​s "flying machine," the Langley Aerodrome. Roosevelt asserts that "the machine has worked." It is the first documented United States Navy expression of interest in aviation

1900
* 2 July – Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin pilots his experimental first Zeppelin, LZ 1, over Lake Constance, reaching an altitude of 400 metres (1,300 feet) with five men on board. Although the flight lasts only 18 minutes, covers only 5.6 kilometers (3.5 mi), and ends in an emergency landing on the lake, it is the first flight of a truly successful rigid airship.[74]

*12 September – The Wright brothers arrive at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to begin their first season of glider experiments there

Plenty of activity, but even bigger ideas going on.

 

[Julius Vogel]

Interesting info! I've always been interested in this pioneering era of flight, and most of the published histories focus on European & North American aviators. Like so many inventors, a lot of these guys were secretive about their work - in some cases, that was the nature of their personality; in other cases, they didn't want another inventor poaching their ideas. Unfortunately, that out-of-public-view approach very often prevented their achievements from being recognized.

Richard Pearse Airport used to be my local airport, for some time.

It is basically one large building, like a shed.

Then of course, there is Peter Jackson's documentary on the matter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Silver