Augustus Moore Herring
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Augustus Moore Herring (1865-1926) was an American aviation pioneer, who sometimes is claimed to be the first true aviator of a motorized heavier-than-air aircraft.
Herring had begun his aviation career as an employee of Octave Chanute. 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 1899, he flew 50 feet aboard his biplane glider of his own design with a compressed air engine 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, 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 an candidate for the.
