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1834 - 1906

 

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Langley Aerodrome Mounted On TheOverhead Launching Apparatus Atop A House-Boat, Potomac River - 1897

Samuel Pierpont Langley

Samuel P. Langley had been interested in flight, he said, "...as long as I can remember anything." He began aerial experimentation in earnest early in 1887 while employed at the Allegheny Observatory in Pennsylvania, where he had taught physics and astronomy, as well as being director of the observatory. While at Allegheny he built a large whirling table upon which he began a series of "Experiments In Aerodynamics." By mid-January of 1887, Langley was living in Washington, D.C., employed as Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and as of that April he was building rubber band powered model "rubber-pull aerodromes". Langley and his assistants eventually built and tested over 100 of the model "aerodromes" and managed to secure flights of from 6 to 8 seconds and distances of between 80 and 100 feet. On the death of the head of the Smithsonian in November of 1887, Langley assumed the top post of Secretary. In 1889 he tested stuffed birds on the whirling table; a frigate bird, a California condor and an albatross, with the result that none of them would lift as a live bird ought.

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Paintings Of The Langley Aerodrome No. 6 - 1897

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In 1891 Langley experimented with steam-engine powered Aerodromes, beginning the series which would lead to the human-carrying machine of 1903. The first of these was designated Aerodrome No. 0 and proved a failure. The second machine, Aerodrome No. 1, was powered by a carbonic acid gas and later by compressed air. Aerodrome No. 2, also built in 1891 was also a disappointment. Aerodrome No. 3 (1892) was of stronger construction and was modified a number of times. A better means of heating the steam was tested on Aerodrome No. 3 and was a decided improvement and was incorporated into Aerodrome No. 4. By the end of 1893 Aerodrome No. 4 was ready for testing and a launching device atop a house boat was built.

Many months were consumed with preparations, but once the tests commenced failure mounted atop failure, through November and December of 1893 and into June of 1894. A seemingly prophetic recurrent difficulty with excessive flexing of the wings resulted in a number of failures and inconsistent results. In October of 1894, Aerodrome No. 4 made a short hop of 130 feet over the Potomac River. Toward the end of 1894 two Aerodromes (the framework of which were built largely of steel) with more adequately wired and braced wings were constructed. Aerodrome No. 5 flew 100 feet during December of 1894. In May of 1895 Langley hired Augustus M. Herring as an assistant. At the end of 1895, Langley was not enthusiastic over the results he had thus far secured, considering the amount of time, effort and money which had been expended.

 

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Langley Aerodrome Flights May & November 1896

The map shows the tracks of the Langley Aerodromes No. 5 and No. 6. flights made during May and November of 1896. These remarkable and extraordinary achievements led President McKinley to request that Samuel Langley pursue the development of the Langley Aerodrome, to enable it to carry an operator.

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Cover of McClure's Magazine - June 1897

Considering the difficulties which had been visited on his efforts, it isn't surprising that Langley decided in 1896 to not attempt to build a human-carrying Aerodrome. By May of 1896, however, the circumstances had begun to change. Aerodrome No. 5 had managed two spectacular feats, making circular flights of 3,300 and 2,300 feet, at a maximum altitude of some 80 to 100 feet and at a speed of some 20 to 25 miles an hour. During November of 1896 Aerodrome No. 6 flew 4,200 feet, staying aloft over 1 minute.

By 1897 Langley had, in his mind, concluded his aerial experiments. In June of that year he penned an article for popular and widely-read McClure's Magazine in which he stated "I have thus far had only a purely scientific interest in the results of these labors. Perhaps if it could have been foreseen at the outset how much labor there was to be, how much of life would be given to it, and how much care, I might have hesitated to enter upon it at all. And now reward must be looked for, if reward there be, in the knowledge that I have done the best I could in a difficult task, with results which it may be hoped will be useful to others. I have brought to a close the portion of the work which seemed to be specially mine - the demonstration of the practicability of mechanical flight - and for the next stage, which is the commercial and practical development of the idea, it is probable that the world may look to others. The world, indeed, will be supine if it do (sic) not realize that a new possibility has come to it, and that the great universal highway overhead is now soon to be opened." It's interesting to note that Langley did not encourage those who would follow to develop the techniques and modalities which he had used, he simply encouraged them to pursue "the commercial and practical development of the idea."

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On May 6, 1896, Langley launched his prototype—an unmanned, steam driven, quarter-size aerodrome—into the sky from a secluded spot along the Potomac River in Washington D.C. Aerodrome Number 5 rose into the sky and flew at 25 mph for over a minute. On November 28, 1896, Number 6 flew 4,200 feet at about 30 mph.

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Langley Large Aerodrome "A" Mounted On The Launching Apparatus Atop A House-Boat, Potomac River - 1903

Langley continued his work as an astronomer, specializing in solar astronomy, and remained a very active and involved Secretary of the Smithsonian, reinforcing his comments that he had ended his research on flying machines. However, President McKinley prevailed upon Langley to solicit funds from the U.S. Army to construct an Aerodrome capable of carrying a human operator. In December of 1898 Langley agreed, writing a letter to the U.S. Army Board of Ordnance and Fortification in which he stated that he would pursue the matter on his own time and without charge to the Smithsonian or to the U.S. Federal Government. He requested and ultimately received $50,000 from the U.S. Army to cover the costs of the coming two years of construction and experimentation.

The next series of tests proved fruitful. In June of 1899 Aerodrome No. 6 made a circling flight of 1,800 feet, and in July Aerodrome No. 5 flew 2,500 feet. The next machine tested was the Quarter-Size Aerodrome, scaled to one-quarter the size of the planned human-carrying machine. That flying machine made flights of only 150 and 300 feet in June of 1900, but by August of 1903 it had made a flight of 1,000 feet. The next machine to be tested, the Langley Large Aerodrome "A," would carry a human operator.

 

Langley's Large Aerodrome "A" 1903

 

The Langley Large Aerodrome "A" was designed in 1898 in response to a request by President McKinley. It is almost certain that Langley had not originally intended to build an Aerodrome capable of carrying an operator, but had planned to refine the larger model Aerodromes. These would have evolved from the quite successful Aerodromes No. 5 and No. 6. The first step in building an Aerodrome capable of carrying an operator was to construct a smaller version of what would be a larger craft. This was the Langley Quarter-Size Aerodrome, which confirmed the apparent soundness of the design for the Aerodrome "A."

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Side View Of The Langley Aerodrome No. 6

It must be noted that the National Air and Space Museum Langley Aerodrome "A" web page contains a different explanation for Samuel Langley's progression to a human-carrying Aerodrome:

"Langley's aeronautical experiments appeared to have concluded with the successful flights of Aerodromes No. 5 and 6, but privately he intended to raise funds to begin work on a full-scale, human-carrying aircraft. He believed his only real hope of securing the kind of funding necessary was from the federal government. The breakthrough came when Langley's friend and colleague, Charles D. Walcott, of the U.S. Geological Survey, offered to present the proposal to President McKinley. A panel was created to review Langley's work up to that time. The panel, which included Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, met at the Smithsonian in April 1898. After a week of deliberations, they approved a grant of $50,000 from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification for Langley to construct a full-sized aircraft. The outbreak of the Spanish-American War only five days earlier contributed to the panel's favorable and speedy decision."

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A concerted effort by Pioneer Aviation Group to locate the clear bright link between Charles D. Walcott's presentation of a proposal to President McKinley and a request from Langley to Walcott that he do so has thus far been unsuccessful. Perhaps there is documented evidence that Langley pursued the matter through Walcott, but until such documentation is found we will hold to the point that Langley acted in response to a proposal from President McKinley.

One of the most remarkable and successful aspects of the Aerodrome "A" was its engine. Originally found to be inadequate for the task, Charles M. Manly redesigned the Balzer engine to produce, in December of 1901, a reliable 5-cylinder radial engine which generated 52 h.p. at 950 r.p.m., a wonder of its time.

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Photograph of the Large Aerodrome "A" as it began its plunge into the Potomac River - October 7, 1903

Charles Manly was chosen to operate the Langley Large Aerodrome "A" and plans for the first flight, in October of 1903, were made. This attempt was a dismal failure, caused by an improper balancing of the Aerodrome "A"; it was nose-heavy and after leaving the launcher plunged into the Potomac River. Manly attempted to correct the problem by moving the tail, but the machine did not respond in time. As Manly stated to the press, "The balancing, upon which depends the success of a flight, was based upon the tests of the models and proved to be incorrect, but only an actual test of the full-sized machine could determine this."

After rebuilding the damaged Aerodrome "A" (a considerable amount of the damage was caused by a tugboat towing the wrecked flying machine through the water), another test was planned for December of 1903. On the 8th, the Aerodrome "A" was again sent down the launching apparatus track, with Charles Manly again at the controls.

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Charles M. Manly (note the goggles in his hands and the compass attached to his pants over his left knee) & Samuel Langley Aboard The House Boat, Below The Aerodrome "A" - 1903

Another, even more spectacular disaster resulted, as the Aerodrome "A" reared-up into a vertical position, its propellers spinning and holding the craft momentarily in its vertical position, before it fell, yet again, into the Potomac River. This failure was caused, it was believed, by the tail snagging on the launching apparatus and then breaking. The newspapers were unforgiving of the failure, dubbing it "Langley's Folly," ridiculing the effort and railing about the expenditure of U.S. Army funds on the project. Manly believed that additional funds could have been secured to continue the experiments save for the negative press reports and blasting editorials. As for Langley, he was deeply disheartened by the failure (coming as it did as the last of the funds had been spent) and was also deeply hurt by the negative press. Hence, he decided it would not serve to request additional funding. Thus ended Langley's 16 years of aerial experiments.

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The Langley Large Aerodrome "A" Fails To Fly - December 8, 1903

The Aerodrome "A," much rebuilt and modified by Glenn H. Curtiss, would fly... in 1914, into yet another cyclone of controversy, as an element in the bitterly fought patent suit between the Wright Company and Glenn H. Curtiss. That part of Aerodrome "A"'s story, however, is beyond the scope of this article.

Seen on its own terms, the lengthy series of Langley's experiments with flying machines is an amazing story of perseverance and failure, highlighted by some stunning successes, only to end in even greater failure. Hopefully the acidic atmosphere around the Aerodrome "A" 's later history (in which Samuel Langley played no role, for he died in 1906) and its role in the Wright-Curtiss patent war will some day be seen as distinctly separate from the honorable and quite wonderful series of aerial experiments of which it had been a part.

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The Rebuilt And Modified Langley Large Aerodrome "A" Aloft, Powered By Curtiss OX Engine - September 1914

In 1897, when he had, or so he thought, finished his work with flying machines, Langley wrote of his model Aerodromes "And now, it may be asked, what has been done? This has been done: a 'flying machine,' so long a type for ridicule, has really flown; it has demonstrated its practicability in the only satisfactory way - by actually flying, and by doing this again and again, under circumstances which leave no doubt."

On the wind-swept sand dunes of North Carolina's Outer Banks, nine days after Aerodrome "A"'s last, public and profound failure, Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright would achieve the first dash through the air which could properly be termed a powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight with an operator aboard. Even if funds had become available for Langley to continue research with the Aerodrome "A" in 1904, the events at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina (little noted at the time in stark contrast to Langley's very public, embarrassing and well known failure), would have made the matter moot. Unless, of course, Charles Manly had managed in early 1904 to control the Aerodrome "A" through a flight of a number of miles, perhaps turning left and right and circling back to land alongside the house boat. Then, perhaps, the matter of The First Flight would have still remained a topic of heated debate. But that was not to be.

 

Samuel Pierpoint Langley

Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834 - 1906) is often used as a contrast to the Wrights. Unlike the two brothers, Langley was highly-educated and had more than ample funding in support of his efforts to develop an airplane. His stature at Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution lent great credibility to his efforts to build an airplane, as did his success with the unmanned aerodromes. In particular, his Aerodrome No. 6 flew 4,200 feet at about 30 mph on November 28, 1896. This unmanned tandem-wing craft employed a lightweight steam engine for propulsion. The wings were set at a distinct dihedral angle so that the craft was dynamically stable, capable of righting itself when disturbed by a sideways breeze. There was no method of steering this craft, nor would it have been easy to add any means to control the direction the craft flew.

From the success of No. 6, Langley was able to convince the War Department (a.k.a. Department of Defense) to contribute $50,000 toward the development of a person-carrying machine. The Smithsonian contributed a like sum towards Langley's efforts. Charles Manley developed an extraordinary radial-cylinder internal combustion engine that developed 52 horsepower for the man-carrying Great Aerodrome. Langley felt it would be safest to fly over water, so he spent almost half of his funds constructing a houseboat with a catapult that would be capable of launching his new craft.

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The front wing was badly damaged in the first launch of October 7, 1903.

The Great Aerodrome might have flown if Langley had chosen a more traditional means of launching the craft from the ground. The pilot still would have lacked any means of steering the plane, and so faced dangers aplenty. But it might have at least gotten into the air. Unfortunately, Langley chose to stick with his 'tried-and-true' approach of catapult launches. The plane had to go from a dead stop to the 60 m.p.h. flying speed in only 70 feet. The stress of the catapult launch was far greater than the flimsy wood-and-fabric airplane could stand. The front wing was badly damaged in the first launch of October 7, 1903. A reporter who witnessed the event claimed it flew "like a handful of mortar." Things went even worse during the second launch of December 9, 1903, where the rear wing and tail completely collapsed during launch. Charles Manley nearly drowned before he could be rescued from the wreckage and the ice-covered Potomac river.

Needless to say, the Washington critics had a field day. The Brooklyn Eagle quoted Representative Hitchcock as saying, "You tell Langley for me ... that the only thing he ever made fly was Government money." Representative Robinson characterized Langley as "a professor ... wandering in his dreams of flight ... who was given to building ... castles in the air."

The War Department, in its final report on the Langley project, concluded "we are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would seem as if years of constant work and study by experts, together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars, would still be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus of practical utility on these lines." Eight days after Langley's spectacular failure, a sturdy, well-designed craft, costing about $1000, struggled into the air in Kitty Hawk, defining for all time the moment when humankind mastered the skies.

In spite of 18 years of well-funded and concerted effort by Langley to achieve immortality, his singular contribution to the invention of the airplane was the pair of 30-lb aerodromes that flew in 1986. He died in 1906 after a series of strokes, a broken and disappointed man.

 

 

Langley And The Aerodrome

 

While Chanute’s group was hard at work on the banks of Lake Michigan, America’s other pre- Wright aviation researcher was also closing in on the prize of being the first to fly. Samuel Pierpont Langley was appointed Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1887 after a distinguished career as an astronomer and professor of physics at the Western University of Pennsylvania (later called the University of Pittsburgh) and director of the Allegheny Observatory at Pittsburgh—all without any formal education beyond high school.

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RIGHT TOP: Langley conferred with his assistant, Mathews Manly, days before the test, but was not present for the launch. Assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Cyrus Adler (right) looks on.

BOTTOM: Langley s Aerodrome is poised atop a houseboat, ready for Launching, on October 7, 1903.

Langley was a self-taught scientist whose work displayed the highest standards of scientific rigor yet he was capable of making elementary mistakes and relied heavily on the work of his assistants. At the Allegheny Observatory, Langley built a whirling arm to test airfoils as George Cayley had done, but his machine was driven by a steam engine that whirled an arm seventy feet (21m) long and attained speeds the tip of seventy miles per hour. Once at the Smithsonian, he began building models powered by rubber bands. Realizing the limitation of this kind of power source, he adapted steam engines to the models and tested them carefully on many configurations, leaving behind careful records in his Memoir.

In the period between 1894 and 1896, several large model aircraft that Langley called “Aerodromes” were launched by a catapult device from atop a houseboat on the Potomac River near Washington, D.C. Several test flights were observed by Alexander Graham Bell, himself a flight enthusiast (as we will see later), and by 1896 Langley’s Aerodrome No. 6 made a stable flight of forty two hundred feet in one minute, forty-five seconds, landing gently on the waters of the Potomac.

Langley was inclined to let the matter rest there, but two events made him press on: America’s involvement in the Spanish-American War, and the rise of Charles Matthews Manly, a recent graduate of Cornell, to the position of Langley’s principal assistant. Hoping to create a military device that would assist the United States in the war President McKinley and the War Department had enticed Langley to Washington with a generous fifty- thousand-dollar grant to develop the airplane. Manly’s contribution of a gasoline engine that weighed 187 pounds (85kg) and produced more than 50 horse-power solved the power plant problem.

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Glenn Curtiss in a significantly modified version of Langley’s Aerodrome. Curtiss flew the craft on May 28, 1914, in Hammondsport, New York, in an effort to invalidate the Wright patent. Although it seems that several other machines could have flown as much as fifty years earlier, the Wright Flyer was the one that did fly.

Tests on a quarter- scale model in August 1903 were successful. Aware that they were in a race against other experimenters (and pressed by the War Department), Langley and Manly went directly to a full- sized craft, abandoning Langley’s long-established practice of careful, piecemeal experimentation. They constructed a full-scale model, making modifications they could not test, and adapting the catapult mechanism in ways that were, they knew, unpredictable.

Langley was justifiably apprehensive. Manly piloted the Aerodrome on its first test flight on October 7, 1903; the test ended in seconds with the craft falling into the water (“like a handful of mortar,” the Washington Post reported the next day) and Manly having to be fished out. Langley and Manly were not certain what had gone wrong. They reviewed the catapult atop the houseboat and examined the Aerodrome itself, but they could not ascertain what had caused the crash. Ordinarily, Langley would have investigated the matter at length, but he knew that if he did not make a test flight soon he would have to wait until spring, and the War Department was getting impatient. On December 8, another test was run with the same result; this time Manly was just barely rescued.

The reports in the press created a public outcry, and speeches lampooning Langley were delivered on the floor of Congress. (A secretary position at the Smithsonian Institution was looked upon as nearly a cabinet-level post—a kind of Secretary of Education—so that his failure presented a political opportunity to the opposition party.) Langley was deeply hurt by these attacks and withdrew from active research entirely. He died a broken man in February 1906. Throughout his life, Langley blamed the catapult mechanism for the failure of the Aerodrome, but later analysis revealed that many elements of the craft were deeply flawed.

First, the stress on a machine cannot be accurately measured by a smaller model, and simply multiplying the proportions of the model’s dimensions does not result in a structurally sound machine. Langley made no attempt to have a pilot learn the feel of the aircraft in gliding experiments; Manly was not so much a pilot as cargo unable to control the performance of the machine. Also, the idea of bringing a full-sized aircraft to flight speed in just seventy feet (21m) by catapulting it into the air was unsound on the face of it. All these flaws became apparent when, in 1914, Glenn Curtiss borrowed the original Aerodrome, modified it significantly, and flew it over Lake Keuka in New York, all in an effort to challenge the Wright brothers’ patents. The modifications Curtiss made only highlighted the fact that, as originally conceived and constructed, the Aerodrome was not an airworthy craft.

The conflict between the Smithsonian and the Wrights (fuelled by Curtiss) lasted for many years and resulted in the original Wright Flyer’s being exhibited in London rather than in the United States. Not until Orville had passed on in 1948 (the then-Secretary of the Smithsonian having already offered a formal apology acknowledging the priority of the Wrights) was the Flyer returned to the United States and exhibited in the Smithsonian.

 

 

The Langley Aerodrome A