Flight on the Horizon: The Pivotal Year of 1896

In the stunning rush of inventions at the end of the 19th century, the year 1896 held events remarkably significant for the development of the airplane and aeronautics in the early part of the 20th century. The three major figures responsible for those pioneering aeronautical events were the German mechanical engineer Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) and two Americans: Samuel P. Langley (1834-1906), a self-educated physicist and Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and Octave Chanute (1832-1910) an eminent civil engineer best known for his participation in development of the railway system in the midwest United States but in 1896 devoting his energies almost totally to invention of the flying machine.