Huffaker, Edward Chalmers.

Edward Chalmers Huffaker was born in 1856 and graduated from Emory and Henry College, Emory, Va., and earned a masters from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

After teaching in public schools, he became in the 1890s a civil engineer in Bristol, Tenn. During this period, he became interested in problems of flight, becoming a correspondent with Samuel P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution director, and conducting his own observations of birds and air currents around Chuckey, Tenn. From these observations, Huffaker wrote a scientific paper, "The Value of Curved Surfaces in Flight," which applied earlier principles of water flow to air flow and the possibility of flight. This paper caught the attention of Octave Chanute, a wealthy aviation enthusiast, who helped secure Huffaker employment with Langley at the Smithsonian.

In Washington, D.C., Huffaker and Langley worked on developing early airplane models.

The men fell out over design work in 1899, and Huffaker returned to his own experiments at Chuckey. Wilbur and Orville Wright used ideas from an earlier paper of Huffaker in the design to their own aircraft. Huffaker worked with the Wright Brothers on gliders at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1901, but was not present when the Wrights successfully flew a powered plane there for the first time in 1903. Thereafter, Huffaker, one of America's pioneering figures in flight, went into obscurity. In later years, he worked as a surveyor, engineer, and Chuckey postmaster. He died in 1936 and is buried at the Methodist church in Chuckey.