Library of Congress
The U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is a major archive with a strong aeronautics collection including French materials.
Notably it holds the papers of
- Louis-Pierre Mouillard – [1]
- Octave Chanute – [2]
- Gaston Tissandier – [3]
- Abbott Lawrence Rotch – [4]
- Alfred Hildebrandt – [5]
- Glenn L. Martin – [6]
- The Wright Brothers – [7]
- John H. Towers – [8]
- Benjamin Foulois – [9]
It also has a collection from L'Aérophile published by Georges Besançon.
The fifteen thousand or so items contained in the 152 boxes of the Library of Congress collection include blueprints and manufactures' information of early French and foreign aircraft and dirigibles, reports of accidents involving flyers and balloonists, aerial photographs from World War I, and a series of French cartoons from the period 1909 - 1912 related to aviation. The collection also contains hundreds of photographs of early aviators and designers, including pictures of Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow being feted in Paris during their European trip of 1933. A large number of L'Aerophile images appeared in the National Air and Space Museum's major exhibition in 2003 celebrating the centennial of the Wright brothers' first flight, titled the Wright Brothers & the Invention of the Aerial Age.
And,
Links
- "Aeronautics" catalog search results
- Come Fly Away with Us: Exploring the Library of Congress Aeronautics Collection – "Join the Library of Congress in celebrating all things aviation with a webinar tour of the Library's world-class history of aviation collections. The presentation will showcase a selection of material from across the Library, in addition to a brief history on how the Library developed these collections with the aid of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics and the Division of Aeronautics." (14 December 2021)
- Aeronautics at the Library of Congress: Forty Years of One User's Experience – 2007 presentation by Tom Crouch
