• Timeline
• Birth: January 27, 1884
• Parents:  Edward Henry Bates and Cora (Ballard) Bates, pioneer residents of Clear Lake, Iowa.
• High school: Clear Lake High School, graduated in 1903.
• College graduate from the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago.
• 1898 monoplane hang glider at age of 14
• 1899  Chanute-type biplane glider  against parental objections
• 1905 power-plane piloting learning
• Built more gliders (1905-06).
• 1907: Bates Aeroworks established
• 1907-11 designed, built and flew biplanes and monoplanes
• 1907: built his first powered airplane
• 1907-17: manufactured aircraft motors
• 1912: He sold out to E. B. Heath Aerial Vehicle Company   (Edward Bayard) (aka Heath's 26 Airplane Trading Post) Caution: There seems to be a discrepancy about the dates of the founding of the Edward Bayard Heath Aerial Vehicle Company; one source has 1913; this would put the "1912" item in question for Bates. (There is a keen note about a 7 hp on "Feather" airplane ...compare this to the 15 hp on some 2008 powered hang gliders.)
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Notes:

• Inductee in 2002 Iowa Aviation Museum Hall of Fame
• Age 14: first hang glider.  1898. Towed by horse.
• Chicago Sunday Tribune, Sept. 18,1910, had Bates as "designer and constructor of flying machines"
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Death: August ____, 1956

First hang glider. He towed up by use of horse power.

Links of reference:

• http://www.flyingmuseum.com/halloffame.aspx
• http://www.dot.state.ia.us/kidspages/carlbates.html

Carl Sterling Bates was born in Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1884. At age fourteen, he built and flew the first gilder to be flown in Iowa. This was accomplished by having the glider towed by a horse. Carl attended the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago where he continued his work with gliders under the tutelage of pioneer aviator Octave Chanute. He set up a workshop to build airplanes. When an engine was not available he built one himself, designing a lighter, two-cylinder, 10 to 12 horsepower motor with a smaller, faster propeller. Improving on the designs of the Wright brothers and Chanute, he devised a single rear vertical rudder and a single horizontal rudder in front and used a tricycle landing gear with a swivel front wheel that made taxiing easier. The new design allowed aircraft, for the first time, to be able to take off from any surface without using a railroad-type track. He took one of his new aircraft to Daytona Beach, Florida where he won by default the first ever airplane race, and on the same day lost the first ever race between a car and an airplane. Bates wrote many articles for Popular Mechanics and aviation magazines. After World War I he initiated a business called Creative Engineering and designed and built several innovative products for industry, home and pleasure. Carl Bates died in August, 1956.