Heroes of To-Day

by Mary Rosetta Parkman

But while he was working over the problems of sun-spots, and making drawings of the surface of the sun that bear witness to his patience no less than to his skill, he became vitally interested in the subject of mechanical flight. For at last he had made an opportunity to work on the problem that had fascinated him ever since he was a boy. “Nature has solved the problem of flight, why not, man?” he said.

He soon became convinced that the mathematical formulas given in the books concerning the increase of power with increase of velocity were all wrong. “At that rate, a swallow would have to have the strength of a man!” he exclaimed. He devised a sort of whirling table with surfaces like wings to test with exactness just how much horse-power was required to hold up a surface of a certain weight while moving rapidly through the air, and by this means discovered and demonstrated the fundamental law of flight, known as Langley’s Law, which tells us that the faster a body travels through the air the less is the energy required to keep it afloat.

After proving that birds are held up like kites by pressure of the air against the under surface of their wings, he made experiments to show that their soaring flight is aided by “the internal work of the wind,” that is, by shifts in the currents of air, particularly by rising trends, which the winged creatures utilize by instinct. Watch a hawk as it circles through the air, dipping its wings now at this angle, now at that, and you will realize that the wind is his true and tried ally. He trusts himself to the sweep and swirl of the air, just as a swimmer relies on the buoyancy of the water.

Having demonstrated so much through experiments with his whirling table, Dr. Langley determined to construct a real flying-machine, with wide-spreading planes to sustain it in the air while it was driven along by a steam-engine which furnished power to the propellers. This machine, which he called an “aërodrome” (air run), was put to the test on the sixth of May, 1896. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who was present at the trial and who took pictures of the machine in mid-air, declared, “No one who witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a steam-engine flying with wings in the air, like a great soaring bird, could doubt for one moment the practicability of mechanical flight.”

Now that he had succeeded in solving the problem from the scientific standpoint, Professor Langley wished to leave the task of developing the idea in a practical, commercial way to others. There was, however, a popular demand for him to carry on his experiments with a model large enough to carry a man, and $50,000 was appropriated for the purpose by the Government on the recommendation of President McKinley and the Board of Ordnance and Fortification of the War Department.

Professor Langley constructed the giant bird-machine and selected a secluded spot near Quantico on the Potomac below Washington for the trial. The place was not remote enough, however, to escape the watchful enterprise of the newspaper reporters. A number of them flocked to the spot and actually camped out near the scene. When any one approached the great house-boat on which the aërodrome was perched ready for launching, they got into boats and gathered about to see everything that should take place.

And now there happened one of the most tragic things in all the history of scientific endeavor. After vainly waiting for a moment of comparative privacy for his tests, Dr. Langley decided that delay was no longer possible, and in the presence of a cloud of unfriendly witnesses—who had been irritated by the failure of the perverse scientists to furnish “scoops” for their papers—essayed the first flight.

A rocket shot up in the air as a signal to the inventor’s assistants to stand by to give aid in case of mishap. There was a sound as of the whirring of many mighty wings when the huge launching-spring shot the aërodrome off from its resting-place on the house-boat. For a moment the enormous bird-thing was in the air; then, instead of rising and soaring, it floundered helplessly and fell into the water. There had been a defect in the launching, and the machine did not have a chance to show what it could do. This so-called trial was really no test at all.

The reporters, however, had an opportunity to show what they could do. The next day all the newspapers of the country printed long articles describing the spectacular failure of the man of learning who had left the safe and sane ways of scientific investigation to attempt the impossible. “Langley’s folly,” they called the poor aërodrome. Men read the story at their breakfast tables and said with a laugh, “ ‘Langley’s folly’ indeed! For the choicest sort of foolishness you have to go to these fellows with the three-decker brains!”

There was such a popular hue and cry that Congress refused to allow any more money to be used on the flying-machine venture. In vain did the men who were really in a position to know and judge, like Professor Bell and other scientists, say that the seeming failure had meant nothing at all but an unfortunate accident at the moment of launching. The ridicule of the crowd outweighed the words of the wise. Most people felt just as Dr. Langley’s father had when his boy talked of making a machine that should sail through the air as a bird does.