Wilbur and Orville Wright2
“Within three weeks we will sail into Chicago in the first of our air ships,” declared E. J. Pennington, at the Grand Pacific Hotel, Chicago. Mr. Pennington, who is the principal inventor of the air ship soon to be tried for the first time, had gone to Chicago to attend a meeting of the stockholders of the Mount Carmel Aeronautic Navigation Company, that convened at the hotel December 10th. It was virtually the first meeting of the stockholders of this corporation, which, it is alleged, has already a paid-up stock of $20,000,000. It is proposed to invest this great sum in the manufacture of ships for traveling in the air.
Mr. Pennington, a neatly dressed, intelligent and studious-looking man of about thirty years of age, explained that the first of the ships was nearing completion, and that the plans for a trial trip over the country had already been completed. This trial will occur in about three weeks. The ship, he said, will start from the place of its manufacture at Mount Carmel and travel to St. Louis, a distance of 185 miles. From there it will sail up to Chicago, and from there to New York. Mr. Pennington and his associate, Mr. R. H. Butler, propose to make the trip, taking with them a half dozen newspaper representatives and any of the stockholders who wish to accompany them. The vessel with which the first trial will be made is two hundred feet in length. The cabin will be made of aluminium.
1. Dayton Tattler, December 27, 1890, 1. Reprinted with the permission of the Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection, Dayton and Montgomery County Public Library, Dayton, Ohio.
2. This article appeared with no byline, but very likely one or the other of the Wrights wrote it, or at least discovered it, and offered it to Paul Laurence Dunbar for the Dayton Tattler, since the Wright brothers were printing the newspaper.