462 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



EXPERIMENTS WITH THE LANGLEY AERODROME 1 



By Db. S. P. LANGLEY 



SECRETARY OF THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



THE experiments undertaken by the Smithsonian Institution upon 

 an aerodrome, or flying machine, capable of carrying a man have 

 been suspended from lack of funds to repair defects in the launching 

 apparatus without the machine ever having been in the air at all. As 

 these experiments have been popularly, and of late repeatedly, rep- 

 resented as having failed, on the contrary, because the aerodrome could 

 not sustain itself in the air I have decided to give this brief though 

 late account, which may be accepted as the first authoritative state- 

 ment of them. 



It will be remembered that in 1896 wholly successful flights of 

 between one half and one mile by large steam-driven models, unsup- 

 ported except by the mechanical effects of steam engines, had been 

 made by me. In all these the machine was first launched into the 

 air from "ways," somewhat as a ship is launched into the water, the 

 machine resting on a car that ran forward on these ways, which fell 

 down at the extremity of the car's motion, releasing the aerodrome for 

 its free flight. I mention these details because they are essential to 

 an understanding of what follows, and partly because their success 

 led me to undertake the experiments on a much larger scale I now 

 describe. 



In the early part of 1898 a board, composed of officers of the army 

 and navy, was appointed to investigate these past experiments with a 

 view to determining just what had been accomplished and what the 

 possibilities were of developing a large-size man-carrying machine for 

 war purposes. The report of this board being favorable, the Board of 

 Ordnance and Fortification of the War Department decided to take 

 up the matter, and I having agreed to give without compensation what 

 time I could spare from official duties, the board allotted $50,000 for 

 the development, construction and test of a large aerodrome, half of 

 which sum was to be available immediately and the remainder when 

 required. The whole matter had previously been laid before the board 

 of regents of the Smithsonian Institution, who had authorized me to 



1 Dr. Langley's pioneer experiments in aerial navigation are of such con- 

 temporary interest that we reproduce this article, written shortly before his 

 death, and printed in the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1904. 



