by James Tobin
The Smithsonian secretary was trying to invent a flying machine that never would fly in a wind.
IF SAMUEL LANGLEY had ever ridden “a fractious horse,” he had not made a habit of it, and it is doubtful that he had tried, let alone mastered, a bicycle. He had neither flown in a glider nor seen one fly. He had chosen the alternative method of learning to ride a fractious horse—“to sit on a fence and watch the beast a while, and then retire to the house and at leisure figure out the best way of overcoming his jumps and kicks.” The figuring had now consumed ten years and filled many bound volumes of memoranda, letters, calculations, tables, diary entries, sketches, and plans.
On the basis of those ideas and findings—especially the performance of the 1896 models—Langley had designed the great aerodrome. He had delegated the work of actually building the machine to a highly competent and dedicated young engineer, educated at a fine university, who in turn had delegated most of the hands-on jobs of machining and carpentry to skilled tradesmen, working for wages. These men came and went. While they stayed, they did not participate in the secretary’s meetings and correspondence with Charles Manly. Nor did any leave a record of his private opinion of the enterprise, so one can only imagine what these men and their families thought of Secretary Langley and his flying machine. The records do show that not a few of Manly’s setbacks were the result of workmen’s errors. Perhaps they slipped up occasionally because they worked without much understanding of the overall plan, or because they felt little personal stake in the result. Perhaps, as Manly believed, they simply needed very close supervision.
The work went on six full days a week, with Sundays off. Like any good student of the nascent science of industrial engineering, Manly broke the process into parts, arranged the parts in their proper sequence, and assigned a man to each. His detailed plan of work for early December 1902 is a good example. R. L. Reed, the long-serving carpenter and shop foreman, was to concentrate on the top priority of new flywheels for the engine. C. H. Darcey would assist Reed, except when Reed didn’t need him; then Darcey would complete a new propeller for the quarter-scale aerodrome. G. D. McDonald, after finishing a little side job for the secretary, was to complete new porcelain castings, make new exhaust springs, and “hob the blank for the extra worm gear for the starting mechanism of the large engine.” H. O. Webb was to bore and counterbore blanks for extra flywheel hubs, while Richard Newham was to make forgings needed for the derrick on the houseboat—though when Webb had finished the first flywheel blank, Newham should slot it to fit the engine shaft, and “if a new goose-neck tool is required for this job, he should make the tool first thing.” Mr. Endriss, the new machinist, was to finish a new case for the tachometer, test the instrument to make sure its readings were correct, then complete the combined main piston rod and so on.
And these details were the work of only a few days. There were “innumerable other details,” Langley remarked later, “for the whole question is one of details. . . . It is impossible for anyone who has not had experience with such matters to appreciate the great amount of delay which experience has shown is to be expected in such experiments.”
Yet by the spring of 1903, the delays at last seemed to be over. Manly had brought the engine to a state of perfection. Anyone who looked at it could see that it was the result of superb workmanship. It looked like a five-pronged star inside a wheel. It was built almost entirely of steel, the strongest metal for its weight, with brass bushings, cast-iron pistons, and cast-iron liners for its five cylinders. Every fitting gleamed.
“THE DELAYS AT LAST SEEMED TO BE OVER.”
Two diagrams of Langley’s great aerodrome: front-view sketch (top); side-view sketch (bottom) with Pénaud tail at far left
In March Manly ran the engine nonstop in the South Shed for three flawless tests of ten hours each. The dynamometers recorded its best performance at 53.5 horsepower—nearly five times the power that Langley had originally demanded of Stephen Balzer. With cooling water, flywheels, batteries, and accessories, it weighed 207.5 pounds, or 3.96 pounds per horsepower. Of all the engines built so far to power a flying machine—Clement Ader’s, Hiram Maxim’s, the Clement Autocyclette engine just completed for Alberto Santos-Dumont’s newest airship, and the Wright brothers’—this was by far the best. It possessed four times the power of the Wrights’ engine, and it was four times lighter in comparison to its horsepower. If pure strength were all that was required to fly, Langley was sure to win the race.
The great aerodrome, likes its ancestors, No. 5 and No. 6, had the shape of a gigantic dragonfly. Its two pairs of bowed wings encompassed more than a thousand square feet of lifting surface. Between the two sets of wings was the engine and its two propellers. In the rear was the large Pénaud tail. In every part of its frame and covering, the aerodrome showed the same supreme care that was obvious in the engine. “The appearance of the machine prepared for flight was exceedingly light and graceful,” said an Army officer, “giving an impression to all observers of being capable of successful flight.”
In early July Manly and his workmen loaded the engine and the two aerodromes—great and quarter-scale—into the enormous houseboat, which had been waiting at a slip on the Potomac since 1901. The boat’s hull was fifty feet long and thirty feet wide, with a fifteen-ton turntable and launching apparatus on its roof. The parts of the great aerodrome were packed inside. The quarter-scale aerodrome was mounted on the launching track and covered in a shroud of canvas. Early on the morning of July 14, two tugboats pulled the houseboat forty miles down the Potomac, past Alexandria and Mount Vernon, around the bend at Indian Head and past the mouth of Occaquam Creek to a spot where moorings had been prepared in the middle of the river near Widewater, Virginia. The river there was about three miles across and seventeen feet deep. A soldier of the U.S. Army was posted as a guard. For room and board, a steam launch would ferry the men upriver to the clubhouse of the exclusive Mount Vernon Ducking Association on little Chopawamsic Island, just off the arsenal at Quantico. (Langley, though not a duck hunter, had joined the club.)
Manly was to keep the secretary constantly informed of events, and to notify him when a trial was impending, so he could make the seventy-minute trip by train from Washington to the Quantico station.
Langley insisted on caution. He instructed Manly to hold the length of the first flight to no more than ten or twelve minutes.
* * *
I. “Aeroplane” was the standard American term during the first decade of powered flight, so I have retained it throughout this narrative.
Chapter Seven
“Our Turn to Throw”
“THE MACHINE GIVES AN IMPRESSION TO ALL OBSERVERS OF BEING CAPABLE OF SUCCESSFUL FLIGHT.”
Langley’s great aerodrome awaiting its first test
THE HOUSEBOAT WAS no sooner moored than Secretary Langley began to complain of the rising humidity. Then he began to feel ill. He was about to turn sixty-nine years old. He was determined to witness the impending test, but he dreaded the malarial vapors of summer on the Potomac. On doctor’s orders, Langley went up to Boston with Cyrus Adler, and Richard Rathbun prayed he would stay there—or, better, that Langley would move farther north for a full-fledged vacation on the New England coast, then go on to Europe. Mosquitoes and reporters were giving the long-suffering assistant secretary all he could handle at the Castle. The only thing worse would be to fight them off with the secretary on the premises.
Rathbun pleaded with Adler to do his best to keep Langley off the Washington scene for as long as possible. “The weather is warm, moisty and heavy,” he warned, “and the Secretary is bound to succumb. There are not less than twenty-five newspaper men lurking in small boats around the houseboat, seeking admission, making constant inquiries for Mr. Langley, and causing a great deal of annoyance, in fact, to the extent of playing practical jokes upon the people on the boat. Here at the office he will be disturbed with newspaper men in the same way. Several come here every day. This flying machine
business has become the most prominent affair in the world, and each paper is bound to come out ahead. You and I could stand such matters, but you know what an irritating effect they have upon the Secretary. I may not be a proper judge in the matter, but I feel that Mr. Manly at this point will do the work better alone than with the Secretary.”
Manly did his best to pretend the press did not exist. No schedule of trials was released or promised. The reporter of the New York Daily Tribune said no one outside Langley’s circle really knew how the aerodromes worked. “Although plausible attempts have been made in public to describe the mechanism, it is said authoritatively that they have been largely poor guess work.” Some of his colleagues might not let secrecy stand in their way, he warned. Thus “the public may regard with suspicion astonishing tales that are likely to be printed within a few days.”
The Tribune reporter undoubtedly was recalling the spectacular narrative lie that had appeared in the rival New York Sun some months earlier. The Sun’s correspondent, overcome by competitive fever or duped by a persuasive hoax, reported that a gale sweeping across Washington had snatched the great aerodrome from the roof of the houseboat and sent it soaring into the air—with the houseboat trailing behind by its ropes. “Rivermen say the flying machine test that followed was remarkable,” the writer attested. “The aeroplane dragged the houseboat around the Potomac for a while, but, hampered as it was, its flight was erratic. Finally after a number of peculiar manoeuvres the flying machine and the boat ran into the steamer Harry Randall, lying at her pier, the boat smashing twenty feet of the steamer’s guard rail and the aeroplane lighting on the flagpole.” Chasing after his bird, Secretary Langley had “arrived in time to view the wreck and receive the congratulations of those who saw his flying machine in successful operation.”
The whole thing was a confabulation. Perhaps it was understandable that Langley, in Boston, was trying not even to look at the newspapers—except, coincidentally, the Sunday edition of the New York Sun, whose book reviews he admired.
OUT ON THE RIVER, Manly was joined by his brother, John, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, who had come to see a Manly make history. Instead, he witnessed the next battle in the Smithsonian’s war with the press.
Even in fine weather, “considerable nervous excitement and tension” would have prevailed. But wind and rain were making things even more tense. No doubt partly to get dry, and perhaps partly to quench their thirst, the reporters were becoming regular visitors to the clubhouse of the Mount Vernon Ducking Association. When Langley heard about this in Boston, he issued orders, through Manly, that the clubhouse was off-limits to the press.
As the reporters pondered this turn, one fact stood out in sharp relief. Their assignment was to report on an official U.S. government project for which the public—their readers—had paid fifty thousand dollars. Mindful of this injustice, or simply fed up with Langley and Manly, one or more of them had a private chat with Mr. Truxton Beale, former U.S. ambassador to Persia and a charter member of the Ducking Association, who had just arrived on the island. Beale must have had disagreements with Langley already. For while Manly and his team worked offshore, Beale summoned the reporters to lunch as his personal guests; invited them to return as often as they wanted; and made critical remarks about “the air of proprietorship exhibited by the Smithsonian employees.” When the aerodrome men returned to the island, Beale informed them that “an indefinite stay of the workmen was beyond membership privileges.” H. C. Yarrow, the sitting president of the Ducking Association, affirmed Beale’s decision in a telegram from his summer home in Quebec, and Manly, steaming, had no choice but to move men and equipment into hastily rented tourist rooms at Clifton Beach, Maryland, five miles downriver.
Reporting this development with suppressed glee, one New York correspondent said the Smithsonian’s “secrecy . . . and the lack of consideration for the press have occasioned severe criticism of the entire undertaking in Washington, where little faith is placed in the utility of the enterprise.”
As a Tribune editorialist noted, with some sympathy for Langley, close public scrutiny of any long-term scientific investigation carried “the danger of misinterpreting a single incident.” In other words, a single flubbed experiment could appear to be a failure of the entire enterprise. This would be true even if reporters were watching the work as disinterested observers. Now, with the controversy over access to the island, Langley and Manly had turned the newsmen into cold-eyed adversaries.
In a rare public statement, Langley tried to clarify matters. His funding was partly public and partly private, he said. His experiments were “believed to be the first in the history of invention where bodies far heavier than the air itself have been sustained in the air for more than a few seconds by purely mechanical means.” All his experimental successes of the past had been built upon instructive failures, he explained, and “I know no reason why prospective trials [of the great aerodrome] should be an exception. . . .
“It is to be regretted that the enforced publicity which has been given to these initial experiments, which are essentially experiments, and nothing else, may lead to quite unfounded expectations. . . . It is the practice of all scientific men, indeed, of all prudent men, not to make public the results of their work till these are certain.”
But the statement came too late to head off yet another misstep in public relations.
On August 8, still seething over the island affair, Manly “caught all the reporters napping” by preparing to launch the quarter-scale aerodrome at 9:30 A.M.—an early hour by newsmen’s standards. The excitement among the crew was palpable. In every detail the model was a scaled-down twin of the great aerodrome. They knew, of course, as John Manly said, that “this was . . . not the great test, the final test, the test of the man-carrying aerodrome, but it was felt by all to be of almost equal importance, for if the balancing of the small aerodrome was correct, the large one would maintain its equilibrium, and the problem of human flight would be solved practically as well as theoretically.”
Manly acted quickly because the air that morning was very still. First, the crew mounted the model on its launch car. John Manly, stationed on the tugboat with a camera several hundred yards away, saw a signal rocket shoot skyward, and “instantly there rushed towards us, moving smoothly, without a quiver of its wings, with no visible means of motion and no apparent effort, but with tremendous speed, the strange new inhabitant of the air.” It came on with “wonderful speed” and “strange, uncanny beauty. It seemed visibly and gloriously alive.” For a moment Manly felt “a wild fear” that the aerodrome would crash into the tug, but then it swerved gracefully to one side. For ten more seconds it flew straight; then it curved again and skimmed into the water.
This “entirely successful” flight, Manly told Rathbun, “completely reassured me as to the equilibrium, power and supporting surface of the large machine.”
But with the lovely spectacle over, an ugly scene ensued. As the tugboat hauled the machine out of the water, its grappling hooks splintered some of the woodwork. So the reporters, rushing to the scene in boats, arrived to see what looked like the aftermath of a wreck. One of the Smithsonian men only fueled their suspicions by trying to throw a sheet over the machine. “As the reporters were swarming about us only a few feet away,” Manly told Rathbun, “the machine appeared to them to have been seriously injured and caused them to think that an accident had occurred and the flight had been a failure.”
At first Manly refused to answer the shouted questions. Then, seeing that the reporters were about to write up the experiment as a bust, he “thought it wise to make a brief statement to them correcting this impression, in order that the Secretary may not be disturbed by another lot of bitter and unfair criticism.” So he called the reporters back and assured them that “all the data which this machine was designed to furnish were obtained,” that “the equilibrium was perfect, the power adequate and the supporting surface ample,” and that n
o accident had occurred. “I can give you no further information at this point.”
The headlines were grudging: “Langley’s Ship Flies But Falls Into River.”
DESPITE HIS IRRITATION with the reporters, Manly had been transfixed by the flight of the quarter-scale model. He said photographs gave “no adequate idea of the wonder and beauty of the machine when actually in flight.”
For while the graceful lines of the machine make it very attractive to the eye even when stationary, yet when it is actually in flight it seems veritably endowed with life and intelligence, and the spectacle holds the observer awed and breathless until the flight is ended. It seems hardly probable that anyone, no matter how skeptical beforehand, could witness a flight of one of the models and note the almost-bird-like intelligence with which the automatic adjustments respond to varying conditions of the air without feeling that, in order to traverse at will the great aerial highway, man no longer needs to wrest from nature some strange, mysterious secret, but only, by diligent practice with machines of this very type, to acquire an expertness in the management of the aerodrome not different in kind from that acquired by every expert bicyclist in the control of his bicycle.
That night Manly sent the houseboat back to Washington for final preparations on the great aerodrome. “The situation at the club made me very angry,” he told Rathbun, “but fortunately I had no time to think of my anger.” His mind was already focused. He stayed around Quantico for another day, going up and down the river and making notes. “I must . . . become thoroughly familiar with this portion of the river, so that I can readily recognize all the landmarks while flying through the air.”