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THE FIRST MAN-CARRYING AEROPLANE CAPABLE
OF SUSTAINED FREE FLIGHT: LANGLEY’S
SUCCESS AS A PIONEER IN AVIATION
BY
A. F. ZAHM, Ph. D.
FROM THE SMITHSONIAN REPORT FOR 1914, PAGES 217-222
(WITH 8 PLATES)
(Publication 2329)
WASHINGTON
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
1915
THE FIRST MAN-CARRYING AEROPLANE CAPABLE OF
SUSTAINED FREE FLIGHT—LANGLEY’S SUCCESS AS A
PIONEER IN AVIATION.
By A. F. Zahm, Ph. D.
[With 8 plates.]
It is doubtful whether any person of the present generation willbe able to appraise correctly the contributions thus far made to thedevelopment of the practical flying machine. The aeroplane as itstands to-day is the creation not of any one man, but rather of threegenerations of men. It was the invention of the nineteenth century;it will be the fruition, if not the perfection, of the twentieth century.During the long decades succeeding the time of Sir George Cayley,builder of aerial gliders and sagacious exponent of the laws of flight,continuous progress has been made in every department of theoreticaland practical aviation—progress in accumulating the data ofaeromechanics, in discovering the principles of this science, in improvingthe instruments of aerotechnic research, in devising the organsand perfecting the structural details of the present-day dynamicflying machine. From time to time numerous aerial craftsmen haveflourished in the world’s eye, only to pass presently into comparativeobscurity, while others too neglected or too poorly appreciated in theirown day subsequently have risen to high estimation and permanenthonor in the minds of men.
Something of this latter fortune was fated to the late Secretary ofthe Smithsonian Institution. For a decade and a half Dr. Langley hadtoiled unremittingly to build up the basic science of mechanical flight,and finally to apply it to practical use. He had made numerous modelaeroplanes propelled by various agencies—by India rubber, by steam,by gasoline—all operative and inherently stable. Then with greatconfidence he had constructed for the War Department a man flierwhich was the duplicate, on a fourfold scale, of his successful gasolinemodel. But on that luckless day in December, 1903, when heexpected to inaugurate the era of substantial aviation, an untowardaccident to his launching gear badly crippled his carefully and adequa