Eyewitness to Octave Chanute’s Aviation Experiments

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My plan about that, said our host, is the press will sleep in shifts, the overflow sleeping in the daytime.

That will be hard on the afternoon papers, rejoined Macbeth.

All four reporters were soon well broken in on the routine of camp life and kept as busy as hired men. All helped tug gliders back up the slope, run errands to camp for tools and equipment and measure the distance of flights. We really paid for our keep. Stories of the expedition were now running in the papers, conservatively written, telling the facts of the experiments free from romance, so they did not get much space or position.

Almost every day one of the press boys returned to town to connect with his office, deliver copy for the others to their respective papers and bring back supplies. It did not look like anything very sensational was going to happen unless an aviator broke his neck. Operators were at liberty to spend Sunday in the city, and the reporters went also. I was the only one who stayed to keep the Chanutes company.

I had begun to feel that I occupied a privileged position in camp by right of prior discovery and that I really belonged there. Sometimes I wondered if the rest of the press were not overstraining hospitality a little by staying on with us so permanently, but the host’s unruffled urbanity made it appear that no such idea was troubling him. It was agreed by the press that we had never known such a perfect gentleman. We had observed that, in offering a cigar, our host always took pains to present two cigars so the recipient might take his choice. He was so given to formal etiquette that we believed he probably would refrain from giving a cigar if he could not offer two. New reporters from the afternoon papers had been coming as daylight visitors ever since the morning papers broke the first flying news.

On Monday of the second week, a mild sensation broke that had the smell of mystery. A considerable pile of gliders or something at camp, entirely covered under a tarpaulin, had escaped our curiosity and came up for explanation.

Now I can rely on your discretion, explained Mr. Chanute, I can give you my full confidence. That is supposed to be a flying machine, but not mine-it belongs to our Mr. Paul, and he calls it his Albatross. While I do not believe it will fly, I have agreed to make it possible for him to give it a trial flight if we get the right wind conditions. Boys, please keep this little confidence under your hats till the trial has been made.

Paul was a quiet man we had taken for a hired worker, who kept busy helping others and did little talking.

This man says he is a sailor and got the idea of his flying machine while lying in his hammock under the bowsprit of a slow-sailing schooner, watching the flight of seagulls. He figured out, he says, that a flying boat ought to be shaped like a seagull. That same thought has suggested itself to many. Paul is ignorant, has no knowledge of mathematics, and I, of course, cannot believe him when he says he once built such a boat and that its trial flight was successful.

He says he tried it out in a lonely valley near Mammoth Cave, launching his ship off a cliff for a cruise of two miles and returning safely, and that he then destroyed his model to keep anyone from stealing his invention. It seems preposterous, of course, fantastic; but one fact keeps me from branding the sailor a fraud. He gave me a rough drawing of his craft with the position marked where he says he stood to steer, and I found by calculation that it was at the exact center of gravity of the structure. It seems scarcely likely an ignorant fellow could hit on that fact by guesswork.

This gives him the benefit of a slight doubt. The man seems sincere and honest, and sticks to such a straight story that I decided at length to let him try out his idea under my auspices, skeptical as I was, and still am. My opinion is that he suffers from an illusion which he has come to believe to be the truth.

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Tags: Aircraft, Aviation History, Flight Technology, Social History

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