4 
ADLER. 
such importance and originality as to have won the inter- 
national scientific reputation and recognition which caused 
Professor Baird to invite him to the Smithsonian Institution 
as Assistant Secretary and the Regents to elect him later as 
its chief executive officer. 
His early years at Pittsburg were spent largely in securing 
the proper instrumental equipment for the observatory, which 
upon his arrival was one only in name. It consisted of “a 
building in which was mounted an equatorial telescope of 
thirteen inches aperture, bought by the university of a local 
club of amateur astronomers. Besides this, there was no ap- 
paratus whatever, not even a clock, and the equatorial itself 
was without the necessary accessories.” 
This was before the period of great endowment for as- 
tronomical, or indeed other scientific research in America, 
and the group of men whose wealth has since enriched Pitts- 
burg and many other places in this country and elsewhere 
were, with a single exception, either at the beginnings of 
their fortunes or without perception of the needs of science, 
ft was imperatively necessary that money be secured for the 
purchase of apparatus if the Allegheny observatory were to 
do proper work and its director have the ' opportunity of 
pursuing his own investigations. 
Many affairs of ordinary life, but more especially the 
growth of railroads, demanded that the common clock, upon 
which every dweller of a civilized land depends, should be 
correct, and that some plan be devised whereby other than 
solar time should serve over considerable areas. 
Tentative efforts in this direction had been made by the 
Greenwich observatory, by the Naval observatory, by Har- 
vard College at Albany, at Brussells, and at other places; 
but nowhere systematically, nor upon any really practical 
or useful plan. To the needs of the Allegheny observatory 
and the fruitful mind of Mr. Langley we owe the establish- 
ment of the time service, and its outgrowth, the standard- 
ization of time in the United States and in other countries, 
and through its financial returns the instrumental equip- 
