STOEY OF EXPERIMENTS Il<5^ MECHANICAL FLIGflT.i 



By Samuel Pierpont Langley. 



The editor of The Annual has asked me to give matter of a somewhat 

 personal nature for a narrative account of my work in aerodromics. 



The subject of flight interested me as long ago as I can remember 

 anything, but it was a communication from Mr. Lancaster, read at the 

 Buffalo meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of 

 Science, in 1886, which aroused my then dormant attention to the sub- 

 ject. What he said contained some remarkable but apparently mainly 

 veracious observations on the soaring bird, and some more or less para- 

 doxical assertions, which caused his communication to be treated with 

 less consideration than it might otherwise have deserved. Among 

 these latter was a statement that a model, somewhat resembling a soar- 

 ing bird, wholly inert, and without any internal power, could, neverthe- 

 less, under some circumstances, advance against the wind without 

 falling f which seemed to me then, as it did to members of the associa- 

 tion, an utter impossibility, but which I have since seen reason to 

 believe is, within limited conditions, theoretically possible. 



I was then engaged in the study of astrophysics at the Observatory 

 in Allegheny, Pa. The subject of mechanical flight could not be said 

 at that time to possess any literature, unless it were the publications of 

 the French and English aeronautical societies, but in these, as in every- 

 thing then accessible, fact had not yet always been discriminated from 

 fancy. Outside of these, almost everything was even less trustworthy; 

 but though, after I had experimentally demonstrated certain facts, 

 anticipations of them were found by others on historical research, and 

 though we can now distinguish in retrospective examination what 

 would have been useful to the investigator if he had known it to be 

 true, there was no test of the kind to apply at the time. I went to 

 work, then, to find out for myself, and in my ov^^n way, what amount of 

 mechanical power was requisite to sustain a given weight in the air 

 and make it advance at a given speed, for this seemed to be an inquiry 

 which must necessarily precede any attempt at mechanical flight, which 

 was the very remote aim of my efforts. 



1 From tlie Aeronautical Annual. 1897. 



169 



