LOUIS BLÉRIOT SHORTLY AFTER COMPLETING HIS TRANS-CHANNEL FLIGHT
Great credit must be given to Chanute because it was in great part through his advice that the Wright brothers achieved final success, and all biplanes to-day are known to the technical side of the aviation world as Chanute type machines. Chanute and Herring started experiments with gliders among the sand dunes on the southern shore of Lake Michigan, and, after some indifferent success with the Lilienthal monoplane type of glider, made a flier of five surfaces one above the other. The rudder was in the rear and the pilot hung below the machine. One by one experiments pared down the number of planes to three and then to two. The planes were arched, as they are in modern aeroplanes. The rudder extended behind the contrivance and had both horizontal and vertical blades. The whole machine weighed 23 pounds and had 135 square feet of plane surface.
The biplane was eminently satisfactory and Herring decided to make an engine for it and sail in a power-driven flier—or a dynamic aeroplane, as the scientists call it. His motor was a compressed air machine and he proposed to go into the air as if for a glide and then start the engine. According to newspaper accounts, he accomplished this and his compressed air engine drove him forward seventy-three feet in eight or ten seconds against a strong breeze. The flight was not given very much consideration, however, for lack of authoritative witnesses.
This brings us around again to the activities of the Wright brothers, who started their work with the glider built along the lines laid down by Octave Chanute. They had the active support and aid of this inventor throughout their three or four years of experiments, although many other scientists were inclined to discredit their work.
While the brothers were going ahead with their practical flier the European scientists were developing with rapid strides and Prof. John J. Montgomery of Santa Clara College, Santa Clara, Cal., who was killed in a glider accident in 1911, was astonishing the far West with gliding experiments of great importance.
Montgomery's best glider was a tandem monoplane with a device by which the pilot could change at will the amount of curvature of any of the wings. This gave him the tremendous advantage of being able to vary the lifting power of the wings independently of each other and hence a means of maintaining side to side balance. Professor Montgomery made his own flights until injuring his leg in alighting, and then he hired trained aeronauts to glide from great heights. As it turned out it would have been better had he never resumed flying himself. He used balloons to carry up the gliders and when they reached the required altitude the operator cut the cable. Daniel Maloney, a daring parachute jumper, and two other aeronauts, named Wilkie and Defolco, carried on these hair-raising experiments.
Flights were made at Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, San José, Oakland, and Sacramento, in 1905. The balloon would take up the aeroplane, and aviator, who sat on a saddle like a bicycle seat between the tandem planes and manipulated the wing control and rear rudder with hand levers and a pair of stirrups for his feet. In April of that year a forty-five-pound glider, such as the one described, with Maloney in the seat, was taken up four thousand feet. When the aviator cut loose he glided to earth, making evolutions never before made by man in the air, and finally landed as lightly as a feather on a designated spot.
Shortly afterward Maloney while making a sensational glide was killed. As the balloon was rising with the aeroplane, a guy rope switched around the right wing and broke the post that braced the two rear wings and which also gave control over the tail. Those below shouted to Maloney that the machine was broken, but he probably did not hear, and when he cut loose the machine turned turtle.
One of the saddest of all the many aeroplane fatalities was the accident early in the fall of 1911, in which Professor Montgomery was killed while experimenting with his glider.