Samuel Pierpont Langley. 

 1834-1906. 



SAMUEL PIERPONT LANGLEY, the third Secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, astronomer and physicist, was born at 

 Roxbury, Massachusetts, August 22, 1834, an< ^ died at Aiken, 

 South Carolina, February 27, 1906. 



He was educated in various private schools and the Boston 

 Latin and High Schools, but owing to circumstances, he was 

 prevented from adding to this the advantage of a college 

 education. Nevertheless, he was a life-long student, was well 

 grounded in literature and the fine arts, in modern languages 

 and mathematics, and was altogether, aside from his scientific 

 eminence, a broadly cultivated man. After leaving school, he 

 devoted himself to architecture and engineering, and at the age 

 of 23 went westward and spent the next seven years in Chicago 

 and St. Louis, devoting his time to his profession, through 

 which he gained a modest competence. In 1864 he abandoned 

 what he had thought his life work and returned to New Eng- 

 land, spending some time constructing a telescope, and later in 

 European travel. Upon his return to Boston, the director of 

 the Harvard College Observatory, Professor Joseph Winlock, 

 invited him to become an assistant in that observatory, an offer 

 which he accepted, and from that time he dated his scientific 

 career. 



In 1866, Mr. Langley became Assistant Professor of Mathe- 

 matics in the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis where 

 he reorganized the small observatory, the work of which had 

 been interrupted by the Civil War. The following year he 

 became associated with the Western University of Pennsylvania 

 as Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Allegheny 

 Observatory, where he remained for a period of twenty years. 

 By his inventions and his original work on the solar spectrum, 

 he gained that eminence which easily ranked him among the 

 foremost scientific men of his day. His turn for business affairs 



Proc. Wash. Acad. Sci., December, 1908. 219 



