SCIENCE AND INVENTION 



horizontal flight at a rate of about forty-five miles an 

 hour. Langley had in fact furnished experimental 

 proof that the aerial locomotion of bodies many t 

 heavier than air was possible. He reserved for fur- 

 ther experimentation the question of aerodromics, the 

 form, ascent, maintenance in horizontal position, and 

 descent of an aerodrome (aepofy>o/xo9, traversing the 

 air), as he called the prospective flying machine. I Io 

 believed, however, that the time had come for seriously 

 considering these things, and intelligent physicists, 

 who before the publication of Langley 's experiments 

 had regarded all plans of aerial navigation as Uto- 

 pian, soon came to share his belief. According to Oc- 

 tave Chanute there was in Europe in 1889 utter 

 disagreement and confusion in reference to fun- 

 damental questions of aerodynamics. He thought 

 Langley had given firm ground to stand upon con- 

 cerning air resistances and reactions, and that the 

 beginning of the solution of the problem of arrial 

 navigation would date from the American scien : 

 experiments in aerodynamics. 



Very early in his investigations Langley thought 

 he received through watching the anemometer a clue 

 to the mystery of flight. Observations, begun at Pitts- 

 burgh in 1887 and continued at Washington in 1893, 

 convinced him that the course of the wind is ** a se- 

 ries of complex and little-known phenomena," and 

 that a wind to which we may assign a mean velocity 

 of twenty or thirty miles an hour, even disregarding 

 the question of strata and currents, is far from being 

 a mere mass movement, and consists of pulsations 

 varying both in rate and direction from second to sec- 

 ond. If this complexity is revealed by the stationary 



