7° 



The National Geographic Magazine 



S. P. LANGLEY 



S. P. LANGLEY, Secretary of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, 1887- 

 1906, who died on February 27, was 

 probably the first astronomer to succeed 

 in making money for the public out of his 

 profession. When he was appointed di- 

 rector of the observatory at Allegheny its 

 resources comprised a building and very 

 few instruments. He had to raise money 

 before he could do any scientific work, 

 and it occurred to him that the easiest 

 and most useful way of doing this was to 

 sell a standard time to the railways. In 

 1866 the railroads east of Chicago were 

 running on different local times, and 

 there was considerable confusion in con- 

 sequence. Mr Langley proposed to de- 

 termine his time from the sun and to sell 

 it to the railways. His plan proved very 

 popular with them, and the writer was 

 informed by Professor Langley a few 

 months before his death that he obtained 

 in this way about $60,000, with which he 

 equipped the observatory and continued 

 his solar work. Mr. Langley thus origi- 

 nated our system of standard time in the 

 United States. 



Professor Langley believed that the 

 most important work for astronomers 

 was to study the sun, which is the basis 

 of all life on the earth. 



He wrote a delightfully entertaining 

 book on this subject, illustrated from his 

 own drawings and published by The 

 Century Company, called "The New 

 Astronomy." 



At the Allegheny Observatory and on 

 his various expeditions to Mount Whit- 

 ney and elsewhere, as well as during the 

 twenty years he directed the Astrophysi- 

 cal Observatory at Washington, the char- 

 acter of the sun, sun-spots, the solar con- 

 stant, etc., formed the principal object of 

 his researches. 



His invention of the bolometer, which 

 registers as small a change in tempera- 

 ture as one-hundred-millionth of a degree 

 of heat, enabled him to extend the visible 



spectrum many times beyond what was 

 previously seen. 



It is not the purpose of this brief note 

 to enumerate Professor Langley's scien- 

 tific achievements, but rather to direct at- 

 tention to the wide range of subjects to 

 which he actively contributed. An archi- 

 tect in early life; later a professor of 

 mathematics in Harvard University ; 

 the originator of our system of standard 

 time ; he re-established the solar constant ; 

 discriminated and accurately determined, 

 by their temperature alone, over 700 

 lines in the invisible infra-red spectrum; 

 discovered important principles in me- 

 chanical flight; was one of the principal 

 promoters of our National Zoological 

 Park, and possessed a literary talent 

 which enabled him to describe the most 

 abstruse scientific facts in a manner in- 

 telligible and fascinating to all. 



But his greatest contribution was his 

 work in aerodynamics and on the in- 

 ternal energy of the wind. His experi- 

 ments and published results on the dyna- 

 mics of the air are the foundation of the 

 flying machines of the future. Mr Lang- 

 ley was the first American to maintain 

 that the flying machine must be of the 

 "heavier than air" instead of the balloon 

 type, demonstrating that less energy is 

 required to support a heavy body in rapid 

 velocity than in slow velocity. 



EXTINCT REPTILES FOUND IN 

 NODULES 



THE sandy cliffs of the river 

 Dwina, near Archangel, in 

 northern Russia, are discolored in 

 places by pockets of darker material, 

 from which the local road-builders have 

 been accustomed to extract nodules 

 of stone for mending the roads. 



Professor Amalitzky, of Warsaw, on 

 visiting this locality a few years ago r 

 was astounded to find that each nodule 

 contained the bones of an extinct ani- 

 mal. Some of the larger nodules con- 

 tained the head, limbs, and even the 



