SAMUEL TIERPONT LANGLEY. 
19 
A half dozen or more papers illustrating the various ad- 
vances made in the study of the spectrum were also issued 
about this time. The building of the largo aerodrome and of 
models to aid in its construction was rapidly being pushed 
ahead. Since the successful flight of the first aerodrome in 
1896, a further possibility of increased power with com- 
parative lightness had come with the employment of the ga« 
engine, and this was experimented upon with a view to de- 
termining its feasibility for the purpose. 
In the midst of these labors, either of them enough to 
engross the thought of an ordinary man, carried along as 
they were in addition to the management of the Institution 
and its correspondence and the interviews and the appear- 
ances before committees which this work entailed — in the 
very midst, I say, of these labors there appeared an article, 
of all places, in the Saint Nicholas magazine, describing the 
Children’s Room of the Smithsonian prefaced by a letter 
written by Mr. Langley himself, in which he appears as the 
attorney for the children and pleads their cause with a 
grown-up Museum man, and almost at the same time he 
wrote a curious and interesting paper describing the fire-walk 
ceremony in Tahiti, where Mr. Langley spent part of the 
summer of 1901, and where he hoped to find a miracle, but 
witnessed instead an interesting ceremony, which, almost to 
his own regret, he was able to explain by natural law. 
A brief popular account of the subsequent experiments 
with the Langley aerodrome was published in 1905, an 
extended memoir on the subject being yet unpublished, 
though left in such shape as to render its publication certain. 
He describes in the briefer paper the attempt made to pur- 
chase a suitable engine or to secure its building by contract 
elsewhere; the acceptance of such a contract by a mechanical 
engineer, and the failure, after two years, to deliver the 
engine in accordance with agreement; the consequent neces- 
sity of building it at the Institution ; the innumerable de- 
tails of construction that had to be considered, and finally 
the trials, first of the test models, which proved successful. 
