Progress in Flying Machines

by O. Chanute
Table of Contents*


Note: The full text is now online, but only about two-thirds of the pictures have been scanned in. Although I have already made thousands of corrections to the text, lots of errors remain, and the index is mostly a wreck. Your patience is appreciated.


* A note about this Table of Contents: Chanute did not provide a table of contents for his book. Indeed, the book had only five sections: a brief Introduction, a section covering Wings and Parachutes (onithopter approaches to flight), one on Screws to lift and propel, a very large section on Aeroplanes, and a final Conclusion>. Two more appendices appeared in the book form, one by Thomas Moy, the other by Otto Lilienthal. Although it would be easy for me to just put the whole book in one massive HTML file, this does not seem reasonable for people who want to look at the book, but don't care to download the whole thing at once, or even just one of the 160-page sections.

Rather than imposing some arbitrary division on Chanute's text, I exploited the original publication of this material as a series of articles that appeared in The Railroad and Engineering Journal. The sections in this table of contents reflect the 27 articles that appeared in the original journal. Unfortunately, these sections did not have separate titles, so I have simply identified them by number. The only exception is the Conclusion, which was split between two months. These sections have been combined into a single section. You can get some feel for the contents of various sections by looking at the hyper-linked Index of illustrations, and can look up material through the hypertext index. Note, the index will be the final item to come online. It's really hard work, as it involves tagging all of the original source material, finding the right section, etc. Anyone stupid enough to want to help, please send mail.

As usual, Cory Kotowsky scanned the original text, while Gary Bradshaw did HTML conversion, scanned in images, and worked on tables, footnotes, and the index.