You might, just might, possibly have been reading a reference to Octave Chanute. He was a very successful engineer who, after a successful career building railroad bridges . took a strong interest in heavier-than-air flight in the later 1800's. When the Wrights began their experiments, he gave them a lot of encouragement and help. He had been in touch with many other aviation pioneers, like Otto Lilienthal, Louis Bleriot, and Alberto Santos-Dumont, and seems to have been very much the aeronautical ambassador, spreading news and information among the scattered airplane inventors. Wilbur Wright wrote to him in 1900, after reading his book Progress in Flying Machines, and as the Wrights had been somewhat isolated, in Dayton Ohio, Chanute would become quite important to their connecting with others, and helped to publicize their efforts.

Chanute's managed to get a glider to fly a short distance in 1894. He also transmitted some useful ideas to the Wrights, like the use of a biplane wing, which gave more lift and greater rigidity for the less weight of the wing, compared to single wings. But though he and the Wrights would fall out ( the Wrights were prickly, and felt that Chanute had , in one paper, claimed too much credit for himself) he did not succeed in ever building a flying machine. And, actually, the Wrights have a pretty clear title to building the first airplane. Not so much for getting someone off the ground- various people, especially Lilienthal, had been getting airborne in gliders. The Wrights clearly showed controlled flight for the first time. While various machines had gotten dozens of yards and flown for seconds, even a minute, the Wright flyer could just keep going until it was out of gas.

Chanute's Progress in Flying Machines (1894) is on Google books here, and a posthumous work, a 1912 book on construction of flying machines written after the Wright Flyer is here on Project Gutenberg . Chanute contributed the first chapter.