by James Tobin
Wilbur Wright’s letter was filed and forgotten.
Chapter One
“The Edge of Wonder”
“LIKE A LIVING THING”
The first flight of Langley’s unmanned Aerodrome No. 5, May 6, 1896
RALPH WALDO EMERSON once remarked that in all nature, birds were the “reality most like to dreams.” They were not only graceful and free. They also seemed to pierce the veil between this difficult world and whatever ethereal regions might lie beyond it. So every culture has cherished a collective dream—a myth—about humans finding a path into the sky.
One event more than any other promised to bring the magic within man’s grasp. It had happened only three years before Wilbur Wright wrote his letter, on the afternoon of May 6, 1896, when Secretary Langley’s unmanned model Aerodrome No. 5 first flew over a remote reach of the Potomac River, thirty-five miles south of Washington, D.C.
Langley had watched from the bank. Alexander Graham Bell sat in a rowboat out on the river, near the houseboat with No. 5 mounted on its catapult on the roof. The unmanned machine looked like a giant white dragonfly, sixteen feet from nose to tip, with one pair of wings forward and another behind. Earlier versions had failed to fly. But this time, when Langley’s men started the steam engine and launched the craft over the water, it remained aloft and sailed into a graceful circle. “Like a living thing,” Langley remembered, it “swept continuously through the air . . . 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 of this brief period.”
“We may live to see airships a common sight,” he wrote later, “but habit has not dulled the edge of wonder, and I wish that the reader could have witnessed the actual spectacle.”
No. 5 had vindicated the labor and hope of ten years. Langley believed it was the herald of a new age, proclaiming that the myth was about to come to life.
HE NEVER INTENDED to be an inventor. He was a scientist, a student of nature, and deeply proud of it. Indeed, he had made himself a scientist against rather long odds, after a false start.
He had been a boy in Boston in the 1840s, the descendant of New England Puritans and the son of a prosperous wholesale merchant who belonged to the city’s “aristocracy of trade.” At the end of his life, when Langley tried to record everything he could recall from his earliest years, he remembered a day when he was punished for refusing to recite, “an early breaking down of my will.” He remembered his first doubt in the existence of God—“a doubt which has never entirely left me”—when a mosquito stung him just as he prayed it would not. He recalled a night trip on the horse ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, and the view through his father’s telescope as workers put the capstone on the monument to the veterans of Bunker Hill. These were fragments without a pattern. In better times, when he spoke of his childhood, the events he recalled had to do with his life’s work—with becoming acquainted with nature, especially the birds and the stars. Langley developed a multifaceted curiosity that would take him deep into literature, history, and art. But his calling was to look skyward.
“I cannot remember when I was not interested in astronomy,” he later told a friend. “I remember reading books upon the subject as early as at nine, and when I was a boy I learned how to make little telescopes, and studied the stars through them. Later I made some larger ones, and . . . I think myself they were very good for a boy.”
One of the most wonderful things to me was the sun, and . . . how it heated the earth. I used to hold my hands up to it and wonder how the rays made them warm, and where the heat came from and how. I asked many questions, but I could get no satisfactory replies . . . I remember, for instance, one of the wonders to me was a common hotbed. I could not see how the glass kept it warm while all around was cold, and when I asked, I was told that “of course” the glass kept in the heat; but though my elders saw no difficulty about it, I could not see why, if the heat went in through the glass, it could not come out again.
After Boston High School, where he excelled in mathematics and mechanics, he apprenticed himself to a civil engineer in Boston, then to an architect. He loved the study of the stars. But he had been born a few years too early. Stargazing was common in the seafaring towns of New England, but scientific astronomy was chiefly a gentleman’s hobby when Langley was a boy. Observatories were few, and their potential for useful knowledge was little appreciated. When he was nine years old, people stared in awe and fear at the Great Comet of 1843, with its brilliant tail spreading fifty degrees across the sky. The comet spurred support for astronomical studies, and an observatory was established at Harvard. But when Langley was finishing school, astronomy could support only a tiny handful of professional practitioners.
Langley’s younger brother John went to Harvard and became a professor of chemistry. But Samuel became stuck at a series of drafting tables—first in Boston, then in St. Louis and Chicago. In 1861, his brother joined the Union Navy as a surgeon. But Samuel stayed put in a civilian job ill-suited to his intellectual gifts and passionate interests. No explanation survives of why one Langley brother from Boston, the home of abolitionism, served the Union cause but not the other.
As a job, architectural drafting was not a bad match for Langley’s skills in drawing and mechanics. Yet the work apparently left him empty. He did not marry, so his time off was completely his own, and it is clear that he devoted much of it to reading deeply in astronomy. He observed the skies whenever he could, with whatever instruments he could borrow. Finally, in 1864, at the age of thirty-one, he quit his job and went home to Boston.
If his family considered his decision rash, they must have seen his fixity of purpose in what he did that fall. As the Army of the Potomac beseiged Confederate forces at Petersburg, Langley built a device for observing distant heavenly bodies. He had a Smithsonian monograph on how to make a telescope, and advice from an expert in fine optical equipment, and he enlisted his brother, home from the Navy, as his assistant. Using tools they scrounged from an old barn, the brothers worked for three months on the construction. Samuel ground or reground some twenty mirrors until he had one that he considered acceptable. “My brother’s . . . perseverance would not allow us to be satisfied with anything short of a practical degree of perfection,” John recalled.
Still “without fixed duties,” the brothers then left Boston for a year-long tour of European museums, astronomical observatories, and galleries of art. It may have been on this trip, the first of many that Samuel Langley made to Europe, that he became friendly with the British historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, who attributed the movements of history to the heroes, the “great men,” of each generation, and who advised the young not to “know thyself,” as Socrates had taught, but “to know thy work and do it.” Langley revisited the philosopher’s home time after time over the years, and listened for many hours.
BY THE FALL OF 1865, when Langley returned from Europe, there were fifty observatories in the United States and good positions even for self-taught astronomers. He quickly found a post as assistant to Joseph Winlock, a leading figure in the field, at the Harvard Observatory. After a year he moved to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, where he was named assistant professor of mathematics. In 1867, he became director of the new Allegheny Observatory and chairman of astronomy and physics at the Western University of Pennsylvania, later to become the University of Pittsburgh. “He had not as yet published anything of note; had not made himself known in the universities; had made no popular addresses; had not pushed himself into notice in any way,” said his friend, the historian Andrew Dickson White, founding president of Cornell University. “Yet there was in him something which attracted strong leaders in science, inspired respect, won confidence, and secured him speedy advancement.”
Still, the Allegheny post was no prize. Pittsburgh in 1867 was a rough, raw town, just beginnin
g its rise to industrial power, and a long way from Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore, the seats of American science and culture. The university boasted a faculty of just twelve, three of whom, like Langley, had no college degree. The observatory was an orphan. The college had taken it off the hands of a bankrupt association of local amateurs. Its telescope was a good one. Otherwise Langley had no scientific apparatus, no library, and no assistant. Besides the telescope, the observatory’s furnishings consisted of a table and three chairs.
And the Western University of Pennsylvania was no Harvard or Yale, where a scientist could devote most of his time to pure study. The typical astronomer in such a school, as one said, found “his strength burdened to the limit of endurance, by the routine of daily class instruction.”
Langley did not mean to spend his new career at a blackboard. He lost no time in securing two steady sources of outside funding. First, he cultivated a rich railroad man and amateur stargazer, William Thaw, who agreed to supplement Langley’s salary and subsidize his projects. Next, Langley arranged to sell the astronomer’s one commodity of practical value—accurate time.
In the late 1860s, every city and town in the United States operated according to its own reading of the correct time. For a nation that increasingly depended on efficient railroads, this was intolerable. Observatories, already tracking the movements of the earth with extreme precision, could also track the exact time, and transmit it by telegraph. Langley informed himself on timekeeping at other observatories. Then, with Thaw pulling strings among railroad friends, he beat out competitors for the right to sell astronomical time to the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad and all its subsidiary lines. The fees were enough to equip Langley’s observatory handsomely and pay for an assistant. Other customers, including the city of Pittsburgh, were soon added. The time service boosted Langley’s standing with practicality-minded administrators and patrons. He could point to it as a substantial down-to-earth benefit of their investment and support.
His faculty colleagues were not so impressed. They complained that Langley was neglecting faculty meetings as well as the classroom, though students’ fees paid most of his salary—which, with William Thaw’s supplement, was now the highest on campus. Langley retorted that if he neglected the usual faculty duties, it was only to make the observatory “useful not only to science in the abstract but to the University as a seat of learning.” In other words, his bid for eminence would pull the lowly university upward with him. He went on to propose that the faculty of the observatory—that is, himself—should become an entity separate from the regular faculty, with the power to run its own affairs. Administrators turned down that proposal, but they did formally declare that Langley would be expected to teach no classes, grade no papers, and play no role in administration. He would operate as a department unto himself, probing the universe full time.
LANGLEY HAD INTENDED to study stars. But in expeditions to witness the total solar eclipses of 1869 and 1870—the first to Kentucky, the second to Spain—he fell captive to the sun. To Langley, an eclipse allowed a full apprehension of humanity’s place in a universe of spheres suspended in nothingness. His description revealed his hunger to experience the sublime in nature. As one watched, he said:
. . . the sun’s disk is seen to be slowly invaded by the advancing moon, and as the solar brightness is gradually reduced to a thin crescent, daylight fades with increasing rapidity, and a quite peculiar and unnatural light, hard to describe but which no one forgets who has once seen it, spreads over the landscape. Then, and suddenly, we come to a new sense of the reality . . . of the heavenly bodies, for the moon, which we have been accustomed to see as a disk of distant light on the far background of the starry skies, takes on the appearance of the enormous solid sphere which it is, and a faint glow within its circumference . . . makes its rotundity so perceptible that we feel, perhaps for the first time, the perpetual miracle which holds this great cannonball-like thing from falling.
He had stumbled into solar studies at a promising moment. The recent discovery of a predictable cycle in the appearance of sunspots had spurred intense interest in the possible relationship between sunspot activity and events on Earth, from gravitation to weather to crop cycles. Studies of the sun promised practical knowledge for solving “some of the mightiest problems in our study of the human race itself.” And the sun had practical advantages. Langley could do his observing during the day, no small thing in a profession that doomed most of its practitioners to nocturnal lives. Furthermore, as he liked to tell eastern friends, the sun was “perhaps the only celestial object that I can hope to see and observe in any detail and with any regularity in the Pittsburgh area with its coal-burning steel mills and its soot-and-smoke-filled atmosphere.”
Astronomers since ancient times had been concerned with the location of heavenly bodies. In Langley’s time, they were turning to probes of the composition and behavior of stars—not the where but the what, and why. The key tool in the “new astronomy” was the spectroscope, which, with prisms, broke starlight into its component colors and patterns, each of which might reveal secrets about the stars’ chemical composition. Langley was all for the new astronomy. But early in his career, he left his spectroscope mostly in storage. Spectroscopy was a business of analysis, not direct observation. It could not satisfy Langley’s desire for a primal experience of the heavens. Instead, he chose a program of study that allowed him to look at the sun with his own eyes. He focused on sunspots, those misleadingly named regions “whose actual vastness,” Langley said, “surpasses the vague immensity of a dream.”
Theories about sunspots diverged wildly. Were they eruptions? Cyclones? Currents? In the era before astronomical photography, painstaking observations and drawings were essential. This required extreme patience even on a clear day, for the earth’s atmosphere made the sun’s image blur and waver. “One who has sat at a powerful telescope all day is exceptionally lucky if he has secured enough glimpses of the true structure [of the sun] to aggregate five minutes of clear seeing.”
Langley’s sunspot drawings reveal his fierce self-discipline. His purpose was not to be an artist, not to render a beautiful image or convey his own impression of the thing he observed. It was to be a camera—to record the strange physical features that appeared in the lens exactly as he saw them, without letting his beliefs about their physical nature influence the drawing. Even though Langley might suspect that a sunspot was in fact a solar cyclone, he could not allow himself to depict a sunspot as though it were a cyclone. He must draw what he saw. Only if the drawing then resembled a cyclone would it tend to confirm the theory.
“THE ONLY CELESTIAL OBJECT I CAN HOPE TO SEE IN PITTSBURGH”
Langley’s freehand drawing of a sunspot
The drawings were not meant to be beautiful, but in fact they were, besides being enormously detailed and accurate. Of his hundreds of sunspot renderings, several became classics of solar studies, remaining in textbooks well into the twentieth century. George Everett Hale, a great astronomer of the next generation, once remarked that the more powerful telescopes became, the more their images of sunspots resembled Langley’s freehand drawings.
He took pride in his attention to detail and proper method. He recorded every detail of his work in notebooks and insisted his aides do the same. “The user of this book,” he wrote in one, “is expected never to commence the entry of a day’s observations without writing under ‘object’ what the general aim of the observations is to be, nor to end the day, under whatsoever pressure of occupation or fatigue, without writing under the heading ‘result’ a few words (if only a line) to indicate what seems to him then the general tenor and result of the day’s work, without waiting for final reduction and analysis.” “I can, I hope, honestly say that I spare no personal pains in observation and experiment,” he told a friend.
In time, Langley’s studies led him to develop an extremely sensitive and delicate thermometer for measuring radiant heat in spectra. He cal
led the device a bolometer. It showed his skill in technology and led to his most important contributions in astronomy. Using it—and only he and a handful of others ever possessed the patience to do so—Langley discovered heretofore unknown regions of the solar spectrum, estimated the heat of various regions of the sun’s surface, and calculated the solar constant (the energy of the sun before it strikes Earth’s atmosphere). The bolometer bolstered the dawning belief “that heat and light were not two different things, but different effects of the same thing.” And Langley’s presentations were lucid and winning. “The thoroughness, ingenuity, and beauty of his methods and the clearness of his style in presenting them attracted attention far and wide,” said an admirer.
He also mastered less noble means of advancement. He ingratiated himself with prominent men and women. He beefed up his list of publications—which eventually totaled more than two hundred—by composing different versions of the same set of experiments for several journals. He pushed aides to do work for which he received the credit. A good deal of the research at Allegheny was actually performed by Langley’s assistant, Frank Very, but it was always Langley’s name alone that went on the articles. “He was a man of strong personality,” an aide said, “likely to dominate almost any association into which he came: a hard taskmaster, as the real investigator is likely to be, sparing neither means, his assistants, nor himself in the pursuit of his object in research.”
He tended to exaggerate, to push his claims too far. He said the moon was colder than it turned out to be. He said the solar constant was higher than it turned out to be. He exaggerated the temperature to which the surface of the Earth would sink without its atmosphere. No one ever charged Langley with intellectual dishonesty. But the pattern of pressing too hard for findings and claims that might attract plaudits is too clear to ignore. “A certain part of Langley,” said a careful student of his career in astronomy, “was attracted to the spectacular.”