The most distinguished member of this Washington group of scientists after Mr. Bell was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, at that time agonizing over the problem of flying.
When I first met Dr. Langley in 1894 he was working on his air runner or aerodrome, a machine which, as I gathered from the talk I heard and did not too well understand, was to run on the air as an engine does on rails. He finally came out with a machine weighing about twenty-five pounds made up of a pair of rigid wings, twelve to fifteen feet across, and an engine which weighed not over seven pounds. It had cost him four years’ work to develop the engine to that lightness. But would it fly? Could it be launched? Attempts were made from a houseboat down the river. These experiments were carried on with the utmost secrecy, for Dr. Langley was a taciturn man, proud, dignified, always awesome to me. He knew that there was a public that thought him a little touched in the head and wondered that the Government kept, as director of a great national institution, a man who held the crazy notion that one day people would fly, and who was willing to give his days and nights to proving it.
Dr. Bell took the most genuine and enthusiastic interest in Dr. Langley’s experiments, was always present, I think, when an attempt to launch the air runner was made. I recall his disappointment when it fell, his rejoicing when it did finally fly. This was one day in May of 1896. I have heard him tell how suddenly the air runner rose to one hundred feet and flew in a big circle. It did not fall but made a perfect landing. Again it was launched and again it flew; and this time it went over the land and over the treetops, came back to the river and when its power was exhausted settled quietly on the water.
Inside that little circle at Dr. Bell’s there was the consciousness of a great discovery, a certain solemnity that again it had been proved that labor, training, thought, patience, faith are not in vain.
Mr. McClure was as excited as any one of the Washington group over the news. He must immediately have an article from Dr. Langley himself, and I was commissioned to get it. I think perhaps it was a little strain on Dr. Langley’s good will to have a young woman come to him and say: “Now we want the whole story of how you have done this thing, what it means; but no scientific jargon, please. We want it told in language so simple that I can understand it, for if I can understand it all the world can.” Which, knowing me, he probably knew was true. He consented, and I had the privilege of talking with him occasionally about the article, of reading what he did and saying when necessary, “I don’t see quite what this or that means,” of seeing him docilely make it clear enough for me to understand. A year after the Langley contraption first flew we had in McClure’s Magazine the whole story.
As a reward for my persistent effort to see that article come out to his satisfaction, he gave me what I think he considered the greatest treat he could give his friends. He took me to the Rock Creek Zoo after the crowds had gone and, with the help of the director, Dr. Baker, made the kangaroo jump and the hyena laugh.
But the public interest in his air runner, the fresh honors that now came to him did but little to wipe out the bitterness that ridicule had stirred in Dr. Langley. “There was a time,” he said as he was going to England to take a degree which Oxford University (I believe it was) was giving him, “there was a time when I should have been glad of this. It means little now.” Yet he had his moments of strong emotion. Rarely have I been more moved than at a dinner at Mr. Hubbard’s soon after the Greco-Turkish War began in 1897. A half-dozen men of seventy or thereabouts were at the table, among them Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, Major Powell, Edward Everett Hale, and Dr. Langley. They talked only of Greece and her helplessness before the Turk. They recalled the wave of sympathy which in their boyhood had swept over the country when the Turk attacked Greece. It was to Greece, said Senator Hoar, that he first gave money of his own, a long treasured twenty-five-cent piece. Dr. Hale and Dr. Langley fell to quoting Byron. Their voices shook as they declaimed,
“The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!
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Earth! render back from out thy breast