Charles Frederick Page

Charles Frederick Page was an American timber contractor and self-taught inventor, born around 1864 in Louisiana, who designed and built one of the first full-scale airship models in the United States. He filed an airship patent in 1903 which was granted in 1906, shortly before the Wright brothers received their own aircraft patent, making his design one of the earlier documented American attempts at powered, controllable lighter-than-air flight. Page's airship design was distinctive for its use of two balloons rather than a single envelope, combined with a rudder and a gas-powered motor intended to give the craft directional control rather than leaving it at the mercy of the wind, an approach that set it apart from simpler balloon designs of the period. His full-scale model was intended for public display at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis but was stolen while en route to the fair, an incident that limited how widely his work became known at the time even though the underlying patent still stands as an early and specific engineering record of American airship development.