Edward Chalmers Huffaker

(1856-1937) | In 1893, Sevier County native Edward Huffaker submitted his paper entitled “The Value of Curved Surfaces in Flight” to the Congress on Aerial Navigation, his theory of lift based upon Bernoulli’s principle and his observations of soaring birds. Two years later the Wright Brothers wrote the Smithsonian Institution requesting publications on flight. Huffaker joined the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk with his own glider that was destroyed during a storm, so he returned to Tennessee prior to their first flight in 1903.