Two years after the failure of his hopes, Dr. Langley died. It was said that his disappointment had helped to bring on the illness which caused his death. He never for a moment, however, lost faith in the future of his airship.
“I have done the best I could in a difficult task,” he said, “with results which, it may be hoped, will be useful to others. The world must realize that a new possibility has come to it, and that the great universal highway overhead is soon to be opened.”
While the crowd was still laughing at the absurdity of man’s attempting to fly, there were those who were seriously at work on the problem. After success had crowned their efforts and their aëroplane was the marvel of the hour, the Wright brothers declared that it was the knowledge that the head of the most prominent scientific institution in America believed in the possibility of human flight which had led them to undertake their work. “He recommended to us, moreover, the books which enabled us to form sane ideas at the outset,” they said. “It was a helping hand at a critical time, and we shall always be grateful.”
So it was that the work of our hero of flight was carried on, as he had faith that it would be. Is it not strange to reflect to-day, when aëroplanes are used so generally in the Great War, that it is only a little more than a decade since people were laughing at “Langley’s folly”?
For ten years the ill-fated aërodrome hung suspended among the curiosities in the National Museum. Then in May, 1914, Mr. Glenn H. Curtiss obtained permission from the Government to make some trial flights in the first of the heavier-than-air flying craft. After making a brief skimming flight above the water of Lake Keuka, New York, he declared that with a more powerful engine the pioneer aëroplane could sustain itself perfectly in the air.
Returned in triumph to the museum, it now shares honors with the models of Watt’s steam-engine, the first steam-boat, and other epoch-making inventions. “Langley’s folly” is completely vindicated, and Samuel Pierpont Langley is to-day numbered as chief among the many heroes of flight.
A POET-SOLDIER: RUPERT BROOKE
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there ’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Rupert Brooke.