Locomotive to Aeromotive: Octave Chanute and the Transportation Revolution

References

References information for any scholarly book comes from many different sources and this book is no different. Possibly the foremost source of information is the University of Chicago library system, which owns the Octave Chanute Collection, donated by the Chanute estate to the original John Crerar Library in 1911. These books, pamphlets, and scrapbooks are now available for research, at either the Crerar or Regenstein Libraries. Chanute’s letters, more scrapbooks, and other personal papers were donated to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., in late 1932; they are part of the Papers of Octave Chanute (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?faid:1:./ temp/~faid_DNpG::) at the Manuscript Division, while the books were incorporated into the general holdings. Dr. Leonard Bruno from the Manuscript Division mentioned to me in 1999 that his division functions as a library rather than a museum, serving any member of the general public doing serious research . With me in the process of gathering background information on Chanute and living more than seven hundred miles away, Len was always available to take a quick look at something specific in the collection and supply me with a copy if the requested page contained pertinent information. His knowledge of the material available at the Manuscript Division was a great help. Chanute’s fragile letterpress books were copied in the 1960s to twenty-four rolls of microfilm and are available through interlibrary loan from the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov/rr/mss/f-aids/mssfa.html#c). These letters were frequently consulted because they reveal much insight into the man and are referenced as the Chanute Papers, LoC. In 2003, the Chanute correspondence with the Wrights became available as part of the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/ wrighthtml/wrighthome.html). They are referenced as Wright Papers, LoC. Len Bruno was responsible for selecting material for this extensive digital collection, providing not only information about the Wright brothers but also Chanute. Thanks are due to Len for helping to make this wealth of information readily available to all of us. In 2006, the Library of Congress created a new presentation, called “The Dream of Flight” (http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/wb-dream.html). Be- 326 References cause Chanute’s album, showing photos of his gliding experiments in 1896 and 1897 and his bird flight studies, is one of the “American Treasures” at the Library of Congress, the photos were scanned and the album is available on their Web site. Chanute’s photos taken at the Wright brothers’ camp in 1901 and 1902 were digitized in 1999 as “The Recovered Legacy” and are now part of the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers. In the 1940s, Pearl I. Young, an employee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (now NASA), began researching Chanute and other aviation pioneers. She interviewed Chanute’s two younger daughters and worked closely with Elaine Chanute Hodges; in 1963 she published a booklet with a three-page bibliography and a listing of some of Chanute’s publications. Under Pearl’s leadership, selected letters from Chanute’s aeronautical correspondence were transcribed in the 1960s; these volumes are at the National Air and Space Museum archives. After her death in 1969, Pearl’s research material was shipped to Elaine Hodges and subsequently donated to the Denver Public Library (http:// eadsrv.denverlibrary.org/sdx/pl/search-s.xsp?q=octave). The National Air and Space Museum owns much information on Octave Chanute, including material from the William Avery family, donated in the 1940s. Finding aids are available and many of the Chanute-related photos have been digitized and are available for sale. In my five years of writing the manuscript, the Internet, with its variety of search engines, became a tremendous help. Information could be retrieved from digitized local newspapers, such as the Brooklyn Eagle (http://www.­ brooklynpublic library.org/digital/), Chicago Tribune (http://pqasb.pqarchiver .com/chicago tribune/), New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/) and from the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/). In the nineteenth century the media focused their interest on “movers and shakers,” and especially those who had built impressive structures and machines. Thus, Chanute was frequently quoted and mentioned in magazines, and I retrieved pertinent information from periodicals, scanned by Proquest, and from Cornell University’s Making of America Web site (http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/) and from the University of Michigan’s Making of...