Octave Chanute (18 February 1832-23 November 1910) was a French-American civil engineer and the father of aviation.
Biography[]
Octave Chanut was born in Paris, France in 1832, and he emigrated to the United States in 1838 and was educated in New York private schools before becoming an engineer in 1848. During his career, he built the famous stockyards of Chicago in 1865 and Kansas City in 1871, built the Hannibal Bridge over the Missouri River in 1869 (transforming Kansas City into a major railroad hub), and platted the town of Lenexa in Kansas before retiring from the railroads in 1883. Chanute then turned his attention to aviation, becoming a world expert in gliders and aerial navigation before writing a book about aviation in 1894. The Wright brothers were put in contact with Chanute by the Smithsonian, and he exchanged hundreds of letters with the Wrights from 1900 to 1910. He died in Chicago in 1910.