![A years-long string of setbacks had deprived Samuel Langley of all but a shred of hope when, in May 1896, his pertinacity was finally rewarded. [Credit: Library of Congress]](https://flyingmag1.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/FLY0925_3.8-Technicalities.jpeg?width=790&height=620)
Fall 1903 was a fateful season. Its closing days would anoint a pair of obscure bicycle shop owners named Wright kings of flight, and would reduce Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution and an esteemed physicist and astronomer, to a status somewhat below that of court jester.
Today, no account of comically misguided attempts at manned flight omits the ignominious plunge of Langley’s Great Aerodrome into the Potomac. Unfortunately immortalized on film, it is invariably sandwiched among short clips of inept ornithopters, venetian-blind wings, and people setting their pants on fire while attempting to fly on rocket-propelled bicycles.
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By his own account, Langley had already been thinking about flight for a long time before 1889, when he began performing practical experiments to determine how much power was required to “sustain a given weight in the air and make it advance at a given speed.” His first experimental apparatus was a large turntable, powered by a steam engine, on which he attempted to measure the lift and drag of stuffed birds.
In 1891 Langley published his first paper on his findings. Entitled “Experiments in Aerodynamics,” it included a statement, now derisively called “Langley’s Law,” that the power required to propel a load-bearing inclined plane forward diminishes as the speed increases. The apparent absurdity of this finding—which seemed to suggest that a wing, suitably propelled, ought to accelerate indefinitely— did not escape Langley. But to his credit as a scientist, he did not shrink from reporting it.
Today, we understand the reason: Langley’s wings were “behind the power curve,” that is, in the regime of low speed and high lift coefficient in which the drag, which is mainly of the induced or lift-dependent type, actually does diminish as speed increases.
Langley knew of French experimenter Alphonse Pénaud, who in 1871 had developed a stable glider of 18-inch wingspan that was powered by a tail-mounted propeller and a twisted rubber band, and accurately prefigured today’s airplanes in almost all respects. Langley experimented with variations on Pénaud’s “toy,” persevering despite repeated, though at least instructive, failures.
He determined that quite a bit more power would be needed for a larger flying machine than could be supplied by rubber, and so he turned to steam engines, which could be made very light provided they were small and did not have to run for very long. For some time his investigations were complicated by the need to find the lightest, most efficient way to build a small steam engine.
Langley called his machines “aerodromes,” from Greek roots meaning “air runner.” Because they had to be launched into the wind, and the wind could blow from any direction, he obtained a houseboat and moored it in the Potomac River 30 miles outside Washington, D.C.. By 1895 his models were achieving short flights, but their behavior was unpredictable. One might promptly dive into the water, then on its next flight shoot upward before sliding back.
A years-long string of setbacks had deprived Langley of all but a shred of hope when, in May 1896, his pertinacity was finally rewarded. At this point he was working with a tandem-wing model of 13-foot span, 16 feet long, and weighing around 30 pounds. Its small steam engine drove two propellers mounted amidships, between the wings.
“I watched it from the shore,” Langley wrote, “with hardly a hope that the long series of accidents had come to a close. And yet it had, and for the first time the aerodrome swept continuously through the air like a living thing, and as second after second passed on the face of the stop-watch, until a minute had gone by, and it still flew on, and as I heard the cheering of the few spectators, I felt that something had been accomplished at last, for never in any part of the world, or in any period, had any machine of man’s construction sustained itself in the air before for even half this brief time.”
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone and a friend of Langley’s, was one of the spectators, and marveled that after the aerodrome’s engine ran out of steam the “machine, deprived of the aid of its propellers, to my surprise did not fall, but settled down so softly and gently that it touched the water without the least shock, and was in fact immediately ready for another trial.” Bell calculated that the machine had traveled more than half a mile.
This flight, which was followed by others equally graceful and still longer, preceded the success of the Wright brothers by seven and a half years. True, Langley’s aerodrome was only an unmanned model. But it flew, it was stable, and it was propelled by an engine. The elements of flight were there. Only the pilot was missing.
Buoyed by his success in creating, if not an airplane, then certainly an artificial bird, Langley, now assisted by a $50,000 government grant, began designing a much larger, man-carrying version of his design. For it, he needed a gasoline engine with a certain power-to-weight ratio.
At the time, no such engine existed. Langley engaged the services of two mechanical engineers, Stephen Balzer and Charles Manly. Balzer, pursuing a rotary design in which the cylinders spun around a fixed crankshaft, did not succeed in developing a satisfactory engine. Manly, however, setting out on his own, created a 5-cylinder, water-cooled radial engine that weighed 120 pounds and delivered an astonishing 52 hp.
In fall 1903, Langley was ready to test his full-scale Great Aerodrome, with Manly at the controls. At the same time, unbeknownst to him, the Wrights were readying the latest version of their Flyer.
On October 7, the Great Aerodrome made its first attempt to launch from atop the houseboat. It plunged into the Potomac, probably because the launching catapult failed to get it up to flying speed. Manly was unhurt. The machine was repaired and a fresh attempt made on December 8. This time, some structural member broke and the wings crumpled, making the second failure appear more feckless than tragic.
The Wrights flew a week later.
Langley would die, disappointed and eclipsed, in 1906, bequeathing his name to the NACA’s Hampton, Virginia, research center.
The humiliation of the officially supported bigwig professor and the triumph of the two unknown country boys from Ohio was too good a story to die, however, and thus the myth of Langley as an ineffectual and blundering mediocrity has persisted despite its lack of factual foundation.
After that first success, in 1896 Langley wrote: “Habit has not dulled the edge of wonder, and I wish that [you] could have witnessed the actual spectacle. ‘It looked like a miracle,’ said one who saw it.”
It was a miracle, and Langley was the one who performed it.
This column first appeared in the September Issue 962 of the FLYING print edition.
