Augustus Moore Herring

Augustus Moore Herring (August 3, 1867 — July 17, 1926) was an American aviation pioneer, who sometimes is claimed by Michigan to be the first true aviator of a motorized heavier-than-air aircraft.

Augustus M. Herring was born at Covington, Georgia in 1867 to Cloe Perry Conyers and William F. Herring, a wealthy cotton broker. While attending the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1888, he was building models of flying machines. By 1893 he had built and crashed a full sized glider. Herring built a Type 11-monoplane glider in 1894 based on Otto Lilienthal‘s 1893 German patent.

Herring began his aviation career as an employee of Octave Chanute in 1894. Herring was assisting Samuel Pierpont Langley in 1895. He soon would take up his own aviation experiments and in 1896, Herring applied for what was possibly the earliest patent of its type in the USA, a patent for a man-supporting, heavier-than-air, motorized, controllable, "flying machine".

On 11 October 1898, he flew Template:Convert aboard his biplane glider of his own design with a compressed air engine at Silver Beach Amusement Park in St. Joseph, Michigan. Later flights were witnessed by local newspapers and reported.

However, these claims for fame have been rebutted. According to Phil Scott's book, The Shoulders of Giants: A History of Human Flight to 1919 (1995, ISBN 0201627221), Herring's glider was difficult to steer and because of his two-cylinder, three-horsepower compressed air engine, could operate for only 30 seconds at a time. He was considered having only continued the tradition of hang-gliding, and is thus not considered a candidate for the first flight.

In 1909 Herring created the Herring-Curtiss Company with Glenn Curtiss, then in 1910 left Curtiss and joined with Starling Burgess in Marblehead, Massachusetts to design and build airplanes. He left Burgess in 1911 after disagreements with another Burgess partner Greely S. Curtis.

During World War I he did some design work for the military and after World War I he continued his lawsuit against Glenn Curtiss. He died in 1926 at the age of 59.

He was married to Freeport-born Lillian Mellen.

External links

• History Flies in Michigan. Google HTML version. includes Michigan House Resolution No. 553 (2002) which honors and thanks Herring. Says Herring born in 1867.
• Chanute Exhibit. which mentions Herring work.
• Michigan History -Silver Beach St. Joseph, Michigan. with story of Herring 1898 flight.
• Photo of Augustus Herring's powered biplane
• Langley and Herring 1895.
• Chanute and Herring 1896-8.
• Herring and the Wright Brothers.
• Chanute Papers at LOC. with Herring letters.
• Augustus Moore Herring Papers at Cornell University.
• Herring article. Says family also claims a first flight in an Oct. 11, 1998 South Bend Tribune article.
• Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2009.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Augustus Moore Herring".