Bluff and thick-bodied, Langley was intimidating and imperious. He rarely performed the menial tasks of experimentation himself but instead employed a team of talented young assistants who were charged with adhering to minutely detailed instructions, some of which were contradictory or ludicrous. Langley demanded, for example, that the nuts and bolts of his models be polished as if they were museum pieces. He changed his mind repeatedly, causing much of his assistants’ work to be scrapped before it was completed. Langley’s overbearing manner created constant friction and would eventually cause a key defection from his team.
As expected, within months of his appointment as assistant secretary, Langley was named to the top post at the Smithsonian Institution. Although he didn’t resign his post at the Allegheny Observatory until 1891, he moved to Washington, D.C., where, as an eminent newcomer, he found himself pleasantly in the center of the capital’s social swirl. Among the many luminaries eager to talk science with the secretary of the Smithsonian was Alexander Graham Bell, who would become one of Langley’s most ardent supporters and closest friends. Even with his notoriety, however, in a position so public, Langley needed to be circumspect about proclaiming his intentions to pursue an end that many still considered the province of the fanciful or the insane.
Proceeding cautiously, Langley set to work to build a powered, stable aircraft that could drive through the skies. He published his early findings in 1891 as Experiments in Aerodynamics, which at once illustrated his greatest strengths and most glaring weaknesses. While the data itself did seem to demonstrate that powered, heavier-than-air flight was feasible, his extrapolation of the data to a principle that asserted it took less power to fly fast than slow—which he called “Langley’s Law”—proved to be embarrassingly incorrect.
Langley’s objective was typically grandiose. He would leap past the aerodynamics—skip the unpowered glider phase—and proceed directly to powered flight. His prototype would be unmanned but if that could be made to work, a manned version seemed simply a matter of increasing the scale and power output of the motor.
Langley’s assistants built a series of rubber models, none of which would successfully fly. Rather than analyze the principles under which the models were built, Langley decided that the problem was insufficient power and set to increasing the size of his models to accommodate a larger motor. Beginning in 1891, Langley’s team built a series of what he called “aerodromes”; Langley, with no knowledge of Greek, was unaware that an aerodrome is a place rather than a thing. Langley’s assistants tried different configurations, considered varying power sources, and attempted to utilize materials that would be both light and strong. Langley employed cambered wings but otherwise considered the aerodynamics of the craft subordinate to weight and power.
The first three aerodromes, numbers 0 through 2, were so obviously overweight and underpowered that Langley did not even attempt to test-fly them. The next two models were improved but still not capable of flight. But Langley’s assistants, beleaguered constantly by their punctilious boss, were getting closer. Tandem sets of wings fore and aft of the motor set in a dihedral—in an upward slant from the body, forming a V—did well in simulations and, with a cruciform tail, provided the proper stability.*1 A light steam engine could generate sufficient power per pound, and the spruce, pine, and silk construction reduced the weight of the craft to thirty pounds. To launch the aerodrome, the team settled on a catapult, which eventually evolved into a complicated overhead arrangement with tackle and pulleys. Langley purchased a flat-bottomed houseboat on which to mount the apparatus and eventually send an aerodrome ranging down the Potomac. All that was left was to get the most advanced aerodrome, number 6, to actually fly. To help find the solution to that final problem, Langley took on two new assistants.
The first, Edward Chalmers Huffaker, a Tennessean who went by E.C., was a forty-year-old slovenly, tobacco-chewing engineer who had submitted a paper in 1893, “The Value of Curved Surfaces in Flight,” to the Congress on Aerial Navigation, an event sponsored by Octave Chanute, who then recommended him to Langley. The always fastidious Langley tried to overlook Huffaker’s personal habits, and put him to work on devising the optimal airfoil configuration. The second new assistant came with a reputation for brilliance and would become the most controversial figure in the annals of early flight.
Augustus Moore Herring was also a southerner, born in Georgia in either 1865 or 1867, son of a cotton broker. The family relocated to New York when Herring was a boy. He attended Stevens Institute of Technology, where he later claimed either to have graduated or to have been denied graduation because his senior thesis on aeronautics was too sophisticated for the faculty to grasp. Both claims were false. He was dismissed from school for failing a number of courses and he never attempted to write on aeronautics. Unsubstantiated assertions or outright lies would follow Herring throughout his life.1
Audacious and deceitful as he might have been, Herring did not lack either intelligence or talent. Shortly after he left Stevens, he built two Lilienthal-type gliders and showed a remarkable grasp of the German’s design principles. He began a consulting engineering practice that failed, so he took a job, as had Chanute, as a chainman on the railroad. Herring wrote to Chanute in 1894 and asked for his help. When Chanute was unable to find Herring work, he hired the young man to develop a more sophisticated manned glider model based on the Lilienthal principles. Chanute by that time had decided that the path to controlled, motorized flight must proceed through the aerodynamics of gliders, opposite the approach that Langley had taken but in accordance with the one that the Wrights would employ six years hence.*2
Herring showed great promise, but before the manned glider project could really get started he came to Langley’s attention through James Means. Langley offered the young man a position on the aerodrome team at a good deal higher salary than Chanute was paying him. Although Chanute later wrote to Means, “You did me a rather ill turn,” he gave his grudging blessing to the move and Herring accepted Langley’s offer. He was given a senior assistantship, assigned to improve the aerodrome’s overall design.
Two men more likely to clash than Langley and Herring are hard to imagine. It took only five days before Herring wrote to Chanute complaining about the meticulous, rigid perfectionist from whom he had accepted a position. (He also took pains to mention that he was not alone in his dissatisfaction. Huffaker was described as “on the verge of nervous prostration.”2) One month later, Herring renewed his lament in another letter to Chanute. What irked Herring the most, it seemed, was that while the assistants did all the work, Langley took the credit—as long as things went well. When they did not, the assistants were assumed to be at fault.*3 Herring endured for eighteen months, until November 1895, and then resigned. The only surprise was that he lasted so long. But during his tenure, Herring had made invaluable contributions to the design of Aerodrome 6, particularly in the wing configuration and tail assembly. Without his participation, Langley would have had no chance.
On May 12, 1896, Langley was finally ready. With Alexander Graham Bell standing on the banks of the Potomac with a camera, Aerodrome 6 was launched. Bell later gave an account of the “remarkable experiment” to the newspapers. “The aerodrome or ‘flying machine’ … resembled an enormous bird soaring in the air with extreme regularity in large curves, sweeping steadily upward in a spiral path, the spirals with a diameter of perhaps 100 yards, until it reached a height of 100 feet in the air at the end of a course of about half a mile.”*4 After the “steam gave out,” Bell added, “to my further surprise, the whole, instead of tumbling down, settled as slowly and gracefully as it is possible for a bird to do, touched the water without any damage, and was picked out immediately and ready to be tried again.”3
Samuel Pierpont Langley had succeeded in developing the first powered heavier-than-air flying machine. In doing so, he achieved all his goals: He had overthrown centuries of theory and skepticism; flung aviation into the forefront; and establ
ished himself among the general public as the nation’s foremost scientific mind. The next step was to build an aerodrome sufficiently large and powerful to carry a man. To aid in the endeavor, the War Department, with President McKinley’s approval, bestowed on Langley a $50,000 grant, the first ever expenditure of public funds in the pursuit of human flight.
* * *
*1 With dihedral wings, if the craft dipped to one side, the lower side would move more parallel to the air rushing at it, which would increase the lift to that side and right the craft. But lateral stability in a dihedral wing arrangement comes at the expense of maneuverability, restricting the craft to flat turns.
*2 Chanute and Langley, if not personal friends, enjoyed a cordial relationship. Chanute was pleased that Langley was pursuing flight so seriously and Langley was happy to incorporate any of Chanute’s findings into his own work.
*3 Herring was given to hyperbole and distortion but others made the same charges, although not publicly.
*4 Bell’s Greek was no better than Langley’s.
Men in the Dunes
Despite Langley’s success, Octave Chanute continued to maintain that development of a successful glider was the real key to flight. He had also decided to become an active participant in the research. One month after Langley’s aerodrome corkscrewed down the Potomac, Chanute set up a camp in the sand dunes on remote, windswept Miller Beach, on the shores of Lake Michigan, just east of Gary, Indiana. Unlike Langley, for whom a breeze of five miles per hour was sufficient to deter a launch, Chanute, as would the Wrights four years hence, wanted wind. “No bird soars in a calm,” Wilbur would observe. As Chanute later recounted, Miller Beach was specifically chosen because the gliders would need “a soft place on which to alight … a dry and loose sand-hill, and there ought to be no bushes or trees to run into. Our party found such sand-hills, almost a desert, in which we pitched our tent … about thirty miles east of Chicago.”1
As had Langley, he had recruited a team of talented younger men. But Chanute’s four assistants would have the freedom to pursue their own ideas.*1 They would also, in theory, receive credit when the ideas worked, but that was to become a matter of contention as events progressed. The most important of those assistants was Augustus Herring, returned from his misadventure at the Smithsonian. If Chanute bore Herring any ill will, he never showed it.
Herring brought with him his Lilienthal glider but neither he nor Chanute intended to spend a great deal of time on what both considered by then only a formative technology. When the glider was damaged in a crash, they decided not to repair it. “This decision,” Chanute wrote, “was most unfortunately justified on the 10th of the succeeding August, when Herr Lilienthal met his death while experimenting with a machine based on the same principle.”2
Instead, Chanute set Herring to work on his own concept of a “ladder glider,” a stack of up to seven airfoils. For this and any other arrangement, Chanute adapted Lilienthal’s launching technique.
The operator stands on the hill-side. He raises up the apparatus, which is steadied by a companion, and quickly slips under and within the machine. He faces the wind. This wind buffets the wings from side to side, and up or down, so that he has much difficulty in obtaining a poise. This is finally accomplished by bracing the cross-piece of the machine’s frame against his back, and depressing the front edge of the wings so that they will be struck from above by the wind. His arm-pits rest on a pair of horizontal bars, and he grasps a pair of vertical bars with his hands. He is in no way attached to the machine, so that he may disengage himself instantly should anything go wrong. Then, still facing dead into the wind, he takes one or two but never more than four running steps forward, raising up the front edge of the apparatus at the last moment, and the air claims him. Then he sails forward into the wind on a generally descending course.3
The Miller Beach expedition had its share of failed experiments—Chanute’s ladder glider was an early casualty—but its one success would change aviation. A collaboration by Herring and Chanute resulted in what was later referred to as the “two-surface glider,” described as “the most significant and influential aircraft of the pre-Wright era.”4 The apparatus was bifoil, essentially a Hargrave box kite with two sides removed, the two parallel surfaces held in place by Pratt trussing, a method Chanute had used often in bridge building.*2 (It had started as a trifoil, but the bottom wing was removed to facilitate control.) The wings were sixteen feet long with a chord of four feet (thus an aspect ratio of four) and covered with varnished silk. The operator, as in Chanute’s description, hung supported by bars under his armpits. In the dunes, as well as on the Potomac, dihedral wing placement was employed to create “automatic stability.” But rather than the fixed cruciform tail he had installed on Langley’s aerodromes, Herring added a tail on a universal joint that could “give” in the wind to help maintain the glider’s attitude and avoid the corkscrewing of the Potomac flights.
The design was an immense success. Hundreds of straight glides were made under full control. Difficult to reach as the location was, newspapermen began pioneering their way through the underbrush to report on the great advance. As word of the activities on Miller Beach seeped out, Chanute and his team, especially Herring, became nationally known; not to the extent of Samuel Langley, perhaps, but sufficient to inform the public that the attack on the flying problem was on at least two fronts. While both Langley and Chanute believed the other’s approach to be a dead end, for the moment each was content to bask in his own success.
Success, however, has a way of destroying both cooperation and friendship and so it was in Indiana. A dispute arose between Herring and Chanute as to which of them was responsible for the two-surface design. Chanute conceded that Herring deserved full credit for the tail but insisted the remainder of the glider was at his initiative. Herring said the glider was merely a more sophisticated version of a mechanism he had built earlier. When speaking to reporters, he had always referred to the device as his own. Under the headline, “Flying Machine Flies,” for example, The Boston Daily Globe, while identifying him as “Mr. Chanute’s assistant,” described the glider as “Mr. Herring’s machine.”5
Augustus Herring testing a Herring–Chanute glider, 1896.
One prominent historian claims Herring had the stronger case, and agrees that the glider “represented a design that Herring had been evolving over a four- or five-year period.” Still, on only one other occasion would Chanute’s integrity be questioned—by Wilbur Wright—while Herring’s veracity would remain elusive at best for the remainder of his life.
Herring and Chanute differed on another key issue. Herring thought the transition from glider to powered flight was by then a straightforward affair, requiring only extrapolation from previously attained data. He proposed immediately building and testing a machine with either a compressed-air or gasoline motor and propellers.
Chanute was far more circumspect. “I do not know how much further I shall carry on these experiments,” he wrote.
They were made wholly at my own expense, in the hope of gaining scientific knowledge and without the expectation of pecuniary profit. I believe the latter to be still afar off, for it seems unlikely that a commercial machine will be perfected very soon. It will, in my judgment, be worked out by a process of evolution: one experimenter finding his way a certain distance into the labyrinth, the next penetrating further, and so on, until the very centre is reached and success is won. In the hope, therefore, of making the way easier to others, I have set down the relation of these experiments, perhaps at tedious length, so that other searchers may carry the work of exploration further.6
Wherever the truth lies, Herring, described as “a bitter and frustrated man,” left Chanute shortly thereafter. “For years he had worked in a subordinate role, overshadowed by employers he regarded as less talented than himself. His disappointment festered as Chanute and Langley failed to allow him complete control over their aeronautical research.”7 Herring, the only m
an to be part of aeronautics’ two great triumphs, experimented on his own and sought a new benefactor. He soon found one in the person of Matthias Arnot, a banker and aviation devotee from Elmira, New York. Arnot was fascinated by the glides of almost one thousand feet made by Herring in a triplane glider of his own design that he had tested after leaving Chanute. Even more intoxicating, Herring told Arnot he had designed a compressed-air motor to power the glider and so, for only a modest outlay of funds, Arnot could participate in one of history’s seminal events.
As always, Herring started well. He built another model of the two-surface glider, this time called the “Herring–Arnot glider,” and tested it at Dune Park in autumn 1897. To show no hard feelings, he invited Chanute to attend. The old man arrived to a much more frenzied scene than when he ran the camp. Where Chanute saw excessive publicity as ultimately harmful to the overall goal, Herring seduced the press. He even allowed a reporter from the Chicago Times-Herald to experience soaring firsthand and write of his experiences for the paper:
Any man endowed with an average amount of nerve, a cool head and a quick eye and a fair muscular development can soar through the air nowadays, provided he is equipped with a machine like the one being used by A. M. Herring among the sand dunes near Dune Park, Ind. All that is necessary for him to do is to seize the machine with a firm grasp, say a prayer, take a running jump into space, and trust to luck for finding a soft place when he alights. His chances of getting hurt are about one in a thousand in his favor, while having more sport to the second than he ever dreamed possible.
The unnamed reporter’s account—the article is without byline—reflects the childlike joy of those early glider days:
The wind grows stronger … one takes four or five running steps down the plank and jumps off, expecting to drop like a stone to the sand. To his surprise and pleasure he experiences about the same sensations felt by a man when taking his first ascension in an elevator.… As the machine mounts in the air one sees the ground sinking beneath. He imagines he is a hundred feet in the air, and begins to wonder if he will ever come down and be able to see his folks again in this world. The thought no sooner comes when the machine suddenly begins to descend with lightning speed. The machine settles down slowly and steadily, and to the disappointment of the operator his feet strike the sand. His experience in the air is over. He turns around and looks up the side of the hill, feeling that he has traveled at least a thousand yards. When the tape-line is brought out, however, he is somewhat disgusted to find that he is only 110 feet away from his starting point. He wonders how this can be, when he was up in the air at least ten minutes. Then he receives another shock, when he is told that his flight lasted just five seconds.8
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