by James Tobin
“What’s maddening?” Bell asked.
“The gulls!”
Bell replied, “I was thinking they were very beautiful.”
LANGLEY’S METHOD WAS TO try something, test it, fix whatever problems appeared, and try again. Every failure, however frustrating, was welcome, for it identified another problem he might solve if he tried hard enough and often enough. His aide, the astronomer Charles Abbot, once said of Langley: “Whether from natural disposition or from deliberate conviction that time could be saved thereby, or both, his method of attack upon a new experimental problem was to make rough trials at once, to improve the method as experience dictated, and at length reach the final dispositions as the result of correcting this and that detail, rather than by first spending long and careful study over every detail before reducing any part of the work to practice.” In engineering, the approach is known simply as “cut and try.”
He faced a void. “In designing this first aerodrome,” he wrote later, “there was no precedent or example. . . . Everything was unknown.” He groped for something to try, searching the catalogues of nature and civilization for some combination of things that move well through fluids. The bird, of course, offered the essential example of the wing and the tail. From the ship he seized the notions of hull and rudder. Wondering what shape the hull of a flying machine might take, he thought of “the lines which Nature has used in the mackerel,” and deemed this the best for movement through the air. With these images in mind, he drew a plan.
In a converted shop at the Smithsonian, Langley assembled a team. In one corner, machinists labored on engines and boilers. Other machinists worked on frames, often for more than one model at a time. Carpenters made spars and ribs for wings and tails, and covered them with fine and expensive fabrics, the lightest and strongest to be found—black silk, white silk, even the exceptionally light membrane of cattle intestines called goldbeater’s skin. Langley ordered up a smaller version of the whirling table and put it to work testing new shapes.
Slowly, with infinite care and pain, a basic shape emerged, one version supplanting another as Langley and his men struggled to find the right combination of strength and lightness. They would try a new design, test it, then alter “the form of construction so as to strengthen the weakest parts. . . . When the breakdown comes all we can do is to find what is the weakest part and make that part stronger; and in this way work went on, week by week and month by month, constantly altering the form of construction so as to strengthen the weakest parts.”
With his keen awareness of history, Langley consulted a philologist about a proper, Greek-derived name for his evolving creation. The term “aerodrome” emerged from these conversations; Langley took it to mean “air runner.” He thought of adding the prefix “tachy,” to connote the all-important concept of speed. But the philologist, one Basil L. Gildersleeve, suggested that “tachy-aerodrome” would have too many syllables, and Americans would reduce it to “drome” within ten years anyway. So Langley stuck with “aerodrome.”
The frames were in the shape of a cross, with a thick hull to hold the engine and arms to either side to hold propellers and wings. Difficult as it was to find a workable frame, it was far harder to design and build a workable engine light enough for Langley’s purposes. He believed internal combustion ultimately would provide the best power source for a flying machine, but in 1891, the new technology had not advanced far enough. He tried other sources of power—carbonic acid and compressed air—but soon was forced back to the old standby, steam, heavy but dependable. He set his machinists to work. With each model he would run tests to see if it was powerful enough to sustain the aerodrome in the air. He calculated that he must have an engine with enough power to lift a weight equal to at least 40 percent of the deadweight of the aerodrome in the shop; the wings would provide the additional lifting power in flight. The first design, which Langley labeled No. 0, was never tested. The engine of the second model, called No. 1, could lift scarcely more than 10 percent of the machine’s weight. No. 2 made it to 20 percent—encouraging, but the frame and wings were judged too flimsy to withstand a trial.
Langley knew science demanded repeated “backward steps—that is, the errors and mistakes, which count in reality for nearly half, and sometimes for more than half, the whole.” But in the aerodrome, the backward steps seemed endless. His memoir of the experiments is larded with countless attempts and tests that ended in disappointment:
“It appeared to be inexpedient to do anything more with it . . .”
“. . . these engines did not give results that were satisfactory . . .”
“. . . a long and tedious series of experiments . . .”
“. . . many unexpected difficulties . . .”
“. . . numerous features of construction . . . which proved useless when rigorously tested . . .”
“. . . difficulties which seem so slight that one who has not experienced them may wonder at the trouble they caused . . .”
“The delays . . . were always greater than anticipated . . .”
Finally tests showed the engine was ready. He knew perfectly well the problems of balance and steering remained unsolved. But he could begin to attack them only if he could watch his craft in actual flight. So “the point was reached where an attempt at actual free flight should be made.”
The models had no way to land, so he decided he had to conduct his test flights over water, to minimize the inevitable damage. This led to a long search for a suitable test site. Langley eventually decided on a wide and secluded stretch of the Potomac River near the village of Quantico, Virginia. He decided, too, that the models should be launched from a houseboat, which could be turned to face the wind no matter what the wind’s direction.
Attempts began with the coming of warm weather in 1894. Most were smash-ups. The best lasted only a few seconds. The machines, Langley told Bell, would typically “pitch up or down, but ordinarily up, showing an excess of power, not a lack of it, like a horse which is always trying to walk on his hind legs and falling backward.”
On May 6, 1896, two aerodromes were prepared for testing—No. 5 and No. 6. Shortly after lunchtime, No. 6 met the usual fate. The guy wire between the fore and aft wings caught on a strip that held the wings in place. A wing snapped and the craft flopped into the water, crushing the propellers. The mechanics fished it out, stowed the sodden pieces, then hoisted No. 5 onto the launcher, which they pointed to the northeast, into a “gentle breeze.”
Langley stood on shore holding a stopwatch, but “with hardly a hope that the long series of accidents had come to a close.” Bell was seated in a small boat near the houseboat, holding a camera. As the mechanics worked, a few locals looked on from shore. The launcher was tripped, and No. 5 slid along the track, then out over the water at a height of about twenty feet. The machine seemed to swoon, sagging three or four feet toward the water. But as it gathered speed it began to rise, and the spectators froze, then cheered. Rising slowly and gracefully at an angle of about ten degrees, the machine tilted slightly to the right and began to describe a great spiral roughly one hundred yards in diameter. It completed one circle and began another. Bell, thunderstruck, remembered to snap the shutter of his camera. Langley glanced at his stopwatch. A minute had passed, “and it still flew on.”
By the end of the second circle, when the aerodrome had reached a height of eighty or a hundred feet, the fuel ran out and the propellers slowed. Bell, expecting the craft to capsize and plunge headlong into the water, watched in awe as instead it glided onward in silence, nosing down slightly and finally settling “so softly and gently that it touched the water without the least shock.” In ninety seconds No. 5 had flown more than half a mile at a speed of roughly twenty-five miles per hour. That November, No. 6 made a flight over the river of more than five thousand feet, nearly a mile.
“AS IT GATHERED SPEED IT BEGAN TO RISE.”
An artist’s rendering of the steam-driven Aerodrome No. 5
THIS
SEASON OF TRIUMPH brought loss as well. Shortly after the test of No. 5, William Crawford Winlock, the son of Langley’s old patron at Harvard, whom Langley had appointed as a key assistant, died suddenly. A greater blow fell in September 1896, when George Brown Goode, assistant secretary in charge of the National Museum, died after working himself to exhaustion. Goode, a first-rate naturalist much loved inside the Institution and out, was widely regarded as the best museum man in the nation. He and Langley had become assistant secretaries together, and many believed Goode, not Langley, should have succeeded Spencer Baird as secretary. But Goode had become Langley’s close friend—“like a brother,” Langley said—and Goode’s strong hand in the Institution’s day-to-day affairs had freed Langley to devote most of his time to his own research. He was “a man who cannot be replaced,” the secretary told the regents, “a man who . . . possessed a combination of administrative ability and general scientific knowledge with every element of moral trustworthiness for which I do not know where to look again.”
With no wife or children of his own, Langley depended inordinately on a few close friends and their families. So for many months, a friend observed, “the severe strain of his scientific labors and his personal losses tended to a depression of spirits which caused him to shrink from new work.” At the request of McClure’s Magazine, he prepared a detailed account of his experiments. “Nature has made her flying-machine in the bird . . . and only those who have tried to rival it know how inimitable her work is, for the ‘way of a bird in the air’ remains as wonderful to us as it was to Solomon, and the sight of the bird has constantly held this wonder . . . in some men’s minds, and kept the flame of hope from utter extinction, in spite of long disappointment.” In closing he turned wistful, saying—or almost saying—that he was through with his part in the pursuit of flight. “Perhaps if it could have been foreseen at the outset how much labor there was to be, how much of life would be given to it, and how much care, I might have hesitated to enter upon it at all . . . I have brought to a close the portion of the work which seemed to be specially mine—the demonstration of the practicability of mechanical flight—and for the next stage, which is the commercial and practical development of the idea, it is probable that the world may look to others.”
In fact he was deeply torn about what to do. His apparent farewell to flight had no sooner appeared in McClure’s than Langley made it known—privately—that he wanted very badly to carry on the work himself. The difficulty was how to pay for it. To build a man-carrying aerodrome, he believed he would need at least fifty thousand dollars. He asked the regents and received permission to use a reserve research fund for his aeronautical work, but that was only enough to keep the work in low gear. If he pursued manned flight as a moneymaking proposition, he risked a tangle over ethics and propriety. More important, Langley had heard enough about his friend Bell’s long struggle to defend his telephone patent to know that he lacked the stomach—and the years—for such a battle.
In the spring of 1897, Bell’s aged father-in-law, the Cambridge businessman and philanthropist Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a Smithsonian regent, beseeched Langley to protect his creation. “You have done what no one has ever done before,” Hubbard said. “There is in that fact something novel, something new and therefore patentable.” Without a patent Langley would lose the credit due him and mankind might lose the benefit, while with one, he would stand a better chance of expanding his experiments. Hubbard even offered to cover the expense of applying for a patent. But the secretary hesitated. “I have passed sixty years, chiefly in quiet pursuits.” He could imagine himself making one more large scientific effort. But he could not imagine himself plunging into “years of labor and commercial strife, of a kind for which every habit of my life unfits me . . . I am not of an age to become another man than what I am.”
A rich benefactor might fill the need, one who wished only to help the cause of science. But there was none to be found. Twice that year Langley asked the Chicago engineer Octave Chanute, a flight enthusiast and promoter, to be on the lookout for such a patron. “If anyone were to put at my disposal the considerable amount—fifty thousand dollars or more—for . . . an aerodrome carrying a man or men, with a capacity for some hours of flight, I feel that I could build it and should enjoy the task.” Chanute offered encouragement but no concrete aid.
Langley’s itch to resume the work only grew. His aerodromes weren’t little hand-held toys, like Pénaud’s, but substantial and weighty. And they had flown for as long as they had fuel! Why not simply increase their dimensions to a size large enough to hold a man? The central problem would not be the form of such an aircraft—that problem he had solved already—but whether an engine could be built to propel it.
Isolated as a medieval scholar, Langley brooded in the nine-towered Smithsonian Building, universally known as the Castle, which appeared to one observer as if “a collection of church steeples had gotten lost, and were consulting together as to the best means of getting home.” In the fall of 1897, he drew out his notebook to record “certain private thoughts about a possible extension of my official aerodromic work to a scale which would enable the machine to carry a man.”
I believe that the results already accomplished on May 6/96, and Nov 18/96, make it as nearly certain as any untried thing can be, that with a larger machine of the same model, to carry a man, or men—if the steam engines could be . . . replaced by such gas engines as can probably now be built—flight could be maintained for at least some hours. . . . My idea would be not to experiment further in the quest of an ideal flying-machine, but to take the results already obtained—which it is almost certain will work on a considerably larger scale—and to repeat them in that form with such modifications only as the changed scale and the presence of a man in the machine may demand.
The same machine as No. 5, only bigger, launched from the same sort of houseboat, “but more elaborate,” with a more powerful engine, though very light. That would be the key, he was sure—an engine of unprecedented ingenuity, the most powerful lightweight engine in the world. The flat stone skips along the surface of a pond only so long as it moves fast. “Speed, then, is indispensable here.” An image from the poetry of Alexander Pope came to his mind:
Swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
“Now, is this really so in the sense that a Camilla, by running fast enough, could run over the tops of the corn? If she ran fast enough, yes.”
Just before Christmas, Langley wrote again to Octave Chanute, asking for the name of “anyone who is disposed to give the means to such an unselfish end.” But the Chicagoan replied: “I know of nobody disposed to give the means for a purely scientific experiment nor do I see what promises of financial profit, or of fame, could be made to a rich man furnishing the funds.”
Then events outside the realm of science offered Langley his opportunity.
ON FEBRUARY 15, 1898, in the midst of tense negotiations between the United States and Spain over Spanish misrule in Cuba, an explosion sank the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor, killing 260 officers and sailors. Spanish agents were widely blamed, and the ensuing inquiry went forward amid rising cries for a war against Spanish imperialism. Congress approved $50 million to prepare for it. On Saturday, March 19, Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont, a calm and respected figure just back from an inspection tour of Cuba, confirmed newspaper reports of Spanish brutality. Few doubted that a declaration of war was near.
The following Monday morning, Secretary Langley met with Charles Doolittle Walcott for a long, private talk. Walcott had succeeded the legendary John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Grand Canyon, as director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Langley regarded Walcott as one of the most capable men of his acquaintance. Upon the death of George Brown Goode in 1896, Langley had invited Walcott to run the National Museum during the search for Goode’s successor. Walcott himself was everyone’s choice for the permanent post. He
was not only a paleontologist of the first rank—he later would discover and catalogue the fossils of the Burgess Shale, the greatest fossil trove ever found—but also a shrewd and resourceful politician, well-connected and well-liked throughout Washington. “He was an athletic, breezy type of man,” a close associate said, “who would go for a brisk early morning walk in Rock Creek Park and turn up for breakfast with some influential Representative or Senator, or perhaps with the President. Without apparent guile, and with a cheerful humorous talk, he would put in just the right words to lead his host in the way of promoting some good thing he had at heart.” Langley, always anxious about his relations with the capital’s power-brokers, needed the help of such a man in the plan he was about to assay.
Some months earlier, Langley had gathered that Walcott would like to become the permanent assistant secretary. But either Langley had misunderstood his friend or Walcott had changed his mind. For in December 1897 he told Langley he must remain at the Survey, even if it meant—as it would—that he could no longer serve the museum part-time. So Langley, disappointed, would have to search for someone else. Their relationship remained warm. But Walcott may have felt a special obligation to do the secretary a favor. And he knew how.