Reporters crowded around, eager to bear witness. Charles Manly would do the honors. The 27-year-old engineer had played a pivotal role in the creation of The Great Aerodrome, but all present recognized that the true credit belonged to Samuel Pierpont Langley. The older man was 42 years his partner’s senior and in possession of a long, illustrious resume. Nine years before Manly’s birth, Langley became the first director of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Observatory.
It was here he developed the Allegheny Time System, an astronomically-rooted subscription service that offered precise times to the area’s railroads. Within two decades, it played an integral part in the standardization of North American timezones. By then, he had secured dual roles as a professor of astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh and the third secretary of the Smithsonian.
Langley had also developed a near obsession with the race to create the first heavier-than-aircraft, tinkering with gliders and rubber band models. Experiments soon extended to full-size crafts outfitted with miniature steam engines required to generate the induced drag necessary to lift the craft off the ground. Writer Rudyard Kipling -- who was introduced to the “old man” through mutual friend, New York Governor Theodor Roosevelt – wrote of witnessing an early experiment on a trip to the U.S.,
It flew on trial over two hundred yards, and drowned itself in the waters of the Potomac, which was cause of great mirth and humour to the Press of his country. Langley took it coolly enough and said to me that, though he would never live till then, I should see the aeroplane established.
After successfully flying a model more than 5,000 feet, Langley’s experiments were bolstered by generous funding from the U.S. War Department and his own employer, the Smithsonian. He soon hired early automobile entrepreneur Stephen M. Balzer to build an engine. When the creation wasn’t up to spec, Manly stepped in to the finish the job.
It was French railroad civil engineer Octave Chanute who made Langley aware of another group performing their own heavier-than-air experiments some 300 miles away. Langley, who was eager to trade notes with likeminded individuals, quickly reached out. A pair of telegrams received in response were cordial, but less than enthusiastic – cagey even, as they offered various reasons why such a meeting could not take place.
“The only experiments made at Kitty Hawk were with a large gliding machine,” brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright explained. “If Mr. Chanute spoke of experiments with special curved surfaces it must have been in reference to some experiments which we made last winter with special pressure testing machines of new design. The surfaces tested were planes, arcs, and odd shaped surfaces of various kinds to the number of about forty in all. No publication of our results has yet been made.”
Disappointed by undeterred by the rebuff, Langley and Manly had enough confidence in their own progress to invite the media to their first test flight. A 70-foot track was mounted to the top of a houseboat docked in the Potomac. The demonstration was more than just The Great Aerodrome’s first public exhibition, it was Manly’s first time piloting an aircraft. Outfitted in a cork life vest, with a compass mounted to his left-leg, he entered the plane and waved to the crowd, indicating that the idling craft was ready for takeoff.
“The speed was not great, apparently not more than 40 or 50 feet a second,” The Washington Evening Star reported with retroactively bated breath. “It took to the air fairly well. For a fraction of a second the ‘aerodrome’ stood up in the face of the five-mile wind then blowing. The next instant the big and curious thing turned gradually downward. It disappeared beneath the waves.”
The craft had clipped the catapult used for launch. Manly escaped the crash unscathed, while The Aerodrome was less fortunate, its wings twisted from impact. Both men emerged undeterred, scheduling a follow up on the same houseboat two months later. On this second attempt, the wings folded on takeoff, before the tail collapsed and the plane flipped. The outcome was the same, landing Manly in the river. He dove away from the sinking craft and had to be rescued by a nearby rowboat.
Criticism piled up from the media and politicians alike. "You can tell Langley for me,” one Nebraska congressman told the media, “that the only thing he ever made fly was government money.”
Nine days after the second failure, Wilber Wright won a coin toss. On the 121st anniversary of the Montgolfier Brothers’ first hot air balloon test, he took control of the Wright Flyer for its first powered test flight. Wilber would deem the flight a “partial success,” after spending three seconds airborne.
“Langley’s Folly,” as the pressed deemed it, was a bitter coda to a successful career and the last high-profile project before his death less than three years later. The Smithsonian, however, was determined to rehabilitate the inventor. Eight years after Langley’s death, museum head Charles Walcott enlisted Glenn Curtiss (then in the midst of an on-going patent battle with the Wright Brothers) to fly the Aerodrome.
The aviator retrofitted the craft with new technologies that, indeed, made it capable of flight during tests above a lake in New York State. The Smithsonian then ordered the modifications removed before the plane was returned to its exhibit. Fellow aeronautics pioneer Albert Francis Zahm was commissioned to write a report on the flight.
He summarized his findings in five points,
1. His aerodynamic experiments, some published and some as yet unpublished, were complete enough to form a basis for practical pioneer aviation.
2. He built and launched, in 1896, the first steam model aeroplane capable of prolonged free flight, and possessing good inherent stability.
3. He built the first internal-combustion motor suitable for a practical man-carrying aeroplane.
4. He developed and successfully launched the first gasoline model aeroplane capable of sustained free flight.
5. He developed and built the first man-carrying aeroplane capable of sustained free flight.
The final point was adapted for a plaque that that hung in the Smithsonian next to the Aerodome.
This proved the opening salvo in a decades-long war between the museum and the surviving Wright Brother. Orville penned an open letter highlighting the fraud perpetrated to undermine the Wrights’ legacy. He also feared the Flyer would not be safe at the Smithsonian after what had been done to the Aerodome.
“No one could possibly regret more than I do that our machine must go into a foreign museum,” he concluded. “It is not safe where it is. It suffered in one flood and has always been liable to fire. Excepting the National Museum or the Smithsonian, I know of none in this country so suitable for such an exhibit as the Science Museum at South Kensington, London.”
Fears the country might lose one of the most iconic representations of 20th century innovation sparked Congressional hearings on the matter. But it was two more decades of public backlash that finally caused the Smithsonian to back down from its stance. The museum formally apologized to Orville and promised “the highest place of honor” should the Wright Flyer return to the museum.
“I am glad to be able to tell you that Orville Wright is going to bring the Kitty Hawk plane back from England where it has been in the British Museum,” President Franklin Roosevelt announced the following year. “The nation will welcome it back as the outstanding symbol of American genius.” '
Sources:
To Conquer the Air The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight by James Tobin
Wright brothers vs. Smithsonian: The bitter feud over who invented the airplane https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/12/11/wright-brothers-smithsonian-airplane/
Approach Volume 17, Issue 5 (1971)
Samuel P. Langley: Aviation Pioneer (Part 2) https://www.sil.si.edu/ondisplay/langley/part_two.htm
Stories from the Smithsonian https://siarchives.si.edu/history/featured-topics/stories/letter-dated-november-7-1902