author
William G. Krueger
An early aviation experimenter and inventor, he is remembered for a rare 19th-century lecture that explored whether human flight could be achieved by design rather than dream. His surviving work offers a glimpse into the curiosity and mechanical imagination that shaped the earliest age of flight.
1 Audiobook
Lecture on Artificial Flight Given by request at the Academy of Natural Sciences
by William G. Krueger
About the author
Very little biographical information appears to survive in readily available public sources, but William G. Krueger is identified by LibriVox as William Gottfried Krueger, a German-American inventor who died in 1882.
He is best known for Lecture on Artificial Flight, a talk delivered at the Academy of Natural Sciences in San Francisco on August 7, 1876. In it, he discussed the problem of artificial flight with reference to a model of his own invention, placing him among the many 19th-century thinkers and tinkerers who were trying to understand how controlled flight might become possible.
Because so little else could be confirmed from reliable sources found here, the strongest picture that remains is of a practical-minded inventor working at the edge of an idea that would later transform the world.