Octave Chanute

Octave is named for Octave Chanute, the civil engineer who helped the Wright brothers achieve powered flight.

Chanute spent his career building railroads and bridges across the American West, including the first bridge to span the Missouri River at Kansas City. In his sixties he turned to the problem of flight. He gathered every scrap of aviation research in the world and published it openly in Progress in Flying Machines (1894), then ran his own glider experiments on the Lake Michigan dunes. The biplane structure his team developed became the basis for the Wright Flyer.

When two bicycle makers from Dayton wrote to him in 1900, Chanute answered. He exchanged hundreds of letters with the Wrights, visited their camp at Kitty Hawk, and encouraged them through the failures. In December 1903, the Wrights flew.