The Universe: 1879-1949

Icarus on the Mall

Langley's astronomical work as director of the Allegheny Observatory, particularly with regard to solar energy, had made him famous. His bolometer, then the most accurate instrument for measuring radiation, encouraged new investigations of solar composition and power.

Tall and reserved, an impressive lecturer and an accomplished prose stylist, Langley at age 53 was a perennial if most eligible bachelor who enjoyed hard, often tedious work. Highly motivated, he embodied the contradictory aspects of the Gilded Age: a strict outward propriety and a taste for material and intellectual adventure. His professional strength lay in testing current theories, and in experimentation.

Though known for precision, Langley sometimes rationalized his own research to obtain what he thought were the proper ends, and he also consistently overvalued the solar constant, the density of solar radiation at the outer layers of the Earth's atmosphere-an error that would be corrected by his successor. Langley insisted upon privacy, and distrusted reporters, allowing the grass to grow around the Castle to discourage their visits.

He would get more adverse coverage than either of the Secretaries who preceded him. Already disposed toward difficult, some would say impossible, problems, Langley's passions-the sun and aeronautics-led him to demand of others the same toil and devotion he evinced, and many at the Smithsonian came to fear his irritability and impatience.

Langley had little regard for precedent, and quickly abandoned the Smithsonian's tradition of correspondence, using telegraph wires on the theory that telegrams brought results more quickly than letters. His view of the world and his role in it was paternalistic and aristocratic. As Secretary, he felt he should receive credit for Institution work regardless of his involvement. Though by nature cautious, he harbored another characteristic of the Gilded Age: As one biographer has pointed out, "a certain part of Langley was attracted to the spectacular."

Langley moved into the Cosmos Club after arriving in Washington. There he dined with Supreme Court justices and United States Senators. At the Smithsonian, he quickly established himself as the august director of projects and studies. The Institution now had a curatorial and clerical staff of about 100. Because of Langley's administrative duties, his purely scientific investigations began to flag.

This he protested, but he found time to pursue such pet projects as "lighter than air" machines and to maintain control of the Allegheny Observatory. There, in the summer of 1887, he helped design a "whirling table," two 30-foot armatures on a revolving vertical shaft capable of speeds of 70 miles an hour. With it, he hoped to reproduce mechanically the aerodynamics of flight.

Langley wanted to see if sufficient lift for flight could be generated by a flat plane. Eventually, electric motors with propellers were attached to the whirling table, as were model airplanes, which he called "aerostats," and stuffed frigate birds and California condors borrowed from the Smithsonian-thus conducting what at the time were imaginative, daring experiments. Langley was determined to prove that the impediment of gravity could be overcome through science.

In Washington, he pursued his other passion: the sun. In his 1888 report to the Regents, he announced that he would seek funds from Congress for an astrophysical observatory. When Congress proved unwilling, Langley raised money himself to augment Smithsonian funds, including $5,000 from Alexander Graham Bell, for any research the Secretary deemed necessary.

The Institution's earlier patron, John Quincy Adams, would have approved of the project, at least in principle, though the wooden structure that went up in the 20-acre "Smithsonian Park" south of the Castle- where the Enid A. Haupt Garden now blooms-was unsuited to pure science, surrounded as it was by commerce and, in summer, more oven than laboratory. (It looked like a stable, and housed the astrophysical observatory until 1955, at which point the observatory was moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Langley eventually installed refrigerated coils- an early version of air conditioning-and there employed his bolometer to measure the capital's abundant solar energy. He was not so much interested in the sun itself as in its effects: "My intention [is] to give greater place to one of the chief objects of the Institution, the direct addition of knowledge by original research"-an echo of Joseph Henry.

Another fledgling bureau of the Smithsonian was emerging: the National Zoo. Talked about for years, its creation was the inspiration behind the Washington Zoological Society, to which Spencer Baird had belonged. Baird had discussed the possibility of having PT. Barnum finance the zoo and then use it as a repository for his animals.

The real, eponymous force behind the zoo was William T. Hornaday, a taxidermist for the National Museum. On behalf of the Smithsonian, Hornaday had traveled to Montana to obtain bison skins and skeletons for mounting, and had returned fearful of the species' extinction. He urged the Smithsonian to found the zoo specifically to prevent this, even though it was a politically unpopular cause. (General Phil Sheridan suggested that medals be given to buffalo killers, who, he believed, had done more than the Army to bring American Indians into subjugation.)

At Hornaday's urging, George Brown Goode, Assistant Secretary and director of the National Museum, created the Division of Living Animals. The justification for this new bureau was the supposed need for live animals as models for Hornaday's large cadre of taxidermists. Prior to this, donated animals were turned over to the U.S. Insane Asylum. It was Goode who sent Hornaday west again to search for live animals, which were brought back in empty boxcars used by the U.S. Fish Commission: a "cinnamon" bear, a white-tailed deer, a Columbian black-tailed deer, some prairie dogs, a red fox, badgers, and a golden eagle.

Friends and collectors sent more animals, and, by 1888, the Smithsonian possessed 58 animals, which lived in pens set up between the Castle and the National Museum. The first bison arrived later, followed in 1889 by several more, one of which became the model for the buffalo on an American $10 bill.

Langley approved of the proposed zoo, although many in Congress did not. When the Secretary requested an appropriation of $200,000, a Congressman from Tennessee suggested that the Vice President of the United States, a member of the Board of Regents, "has not the time to go out and look after the monkeys, and the members of the Senate and House...have no time to give to bear farming."

A Representative from Texas stated more succinctly, "I do not believe it is ever proper to tax men and women to support monkeys and bears...." Despite this opposition, funds were voted, and the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was retained to draw up plans for a zoological park near Rock Creek.

Langley involved himself closely in the project. He clashed with Hornaday, who had enjoyed an easy relationship with Baird but found his successor dictatorial. Finally Hornaday resigned, and was replaced by the anatomist Frank Baker, who acceded to Langley's demands. One of these was that a large portion of the zoo grounds be reserved for Langley's astrophysical observatory, something that Congress did not allow.

On April 30, 1891, a procession led by two donated elephants, Dunk and Gold Dust, made its way to the new zoo, and the National Zoo was formally inaugurated. The hiring of William H. Blackburne, head animal keeper of the Barnum ~ Bailey circus, brought in to tend the animals a professional who would remain for 53 years.

Langley, typically, found his own use for the zoo: He spent hours in specially erected towers observing the flight of birds, particularly vultures. Photographers used electronically synchronized cameras with telephoto lenses to photograph the vultures, producing simultaneous images. The cameras were designed by his young assistant at the Astrophysical Observatory, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Charles Greeley Abbot.

Meanwhile, the century of discovery that began with the daring trek of Lewis and Clark ended with another expedition, this one led by a captain of industry who embodied the optimism and extravagance of the age. The lavish Alaska trip of railroad tycoon Edward Henry Harriman in 1899 launched the notion of large-scale forays by American philanthropists into the groves of quasi-science. In this case, it was to collect specimens, make observations, and afford Harriman the chance to shoot a Kodiak bear.

Possibly there was a hidden agenda: reconnaissance for Harriman's dream of a New York-to-Paris railway. Two years earlier, the railroad tycoon had merged the Union Pacific Railroad with the Southern Pacific, and had taken on a struggle for control of the Northern Pacific; he was rumored to be interested in a tunnel under the Bering Strait.

More realistic goals gained the cooperation of the Smithsonian. Interdisciplinary socializing was to be done by 25 of the nation's top natural scientists, professors from schools as distant from one other as Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, photographers, and artists, all under the sway of triumphant capitalism.

Harriman also brought along a number of friends and relatives, numerous personal servants, two stenographers, a doctor and a nurse, a chaplain, 11 hunters, and assorted packers and camp assistants. The entourage traveled first class from New York to Seattle, where it boarded the ship George W. Elder and steamed slowly up the Alaskan coast.

Among the notables leaning on the ship's rails were William Healey Dall, now the grand old man of Alaskan exploration; geologist G.K. Gilbert; the British- born naturalist John Muir; Henry Gannett, chief geographer with the USGS; C. Hart Merriam, physician and chief of the Biological Survey; John Burroughs, ornithologist and writer; Robert Ridgway, curator of birds at the Smithsonian's National Museum; artist Frank Dellenbaugh; George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream; several veterans of the surveys of the American West; and a young Seattle portraitist, Edward Curtis, who would become famous for his photographs of American Indians.

In two months, the party covered 9,000 miles, and made about 50 stops. There were lectures ranging in subject matter from glaciers to Somaliland. A certain easefulness reigned, uncharacteristic of the society of scientists and academicians, exemplified by an expedition cheer: "Who are we? Who are we?/We are, We are H.A.E."-the initials "H.A.E." standing, of course, for the Harriman Alaska Expedition.

Muir, who had been promised access on the Harriman Alaska expedition to parts of the country he had not visited, wrote on the way home, "We had...much twaddle about a grand scientific monument of this trip, etc...." But a huge collection, including 5,000 pinned insects and 600 species described as "new to science," was brought back, and the shrimp that were collected inspired a review of all 50,000 specimens at the National Museum, from lower California to the Arctic.

After the expedition, a dozen well-bound, illustrated volumes were published in a cooperative arrangement between Harriman and the Smithsonian. They included narratives of the journey and studies of starfish and mollusks. Overall, in Dall's judgement, it was a venture. of which America may justly be proud."

Historians differ on the subject of Langley's happiness while in Washington. He has been seen as both a social lion and a lonely figure of authority without family, longing for friends. An essentially closed person, he was interested in children-the Children's Room was installed during his tenure, later subsumed in the Smithsonian's wartime activity-and yet without children of his own. His Assistant Secretary, Cyrus Adler, wrote of long winter carriage rides with Langley: "We could both be silent for hours, and thus established a friendship which was free from dialectics."

Among those who considered Langley a worthy, even inspiring, companion was Henry Adams, the intellectual light of late-19th-century Washington who turned to Langley with questions about scientific phenomena. "Langley listened with outward patience," Adams wrote. "He. too, nourished a scientific passion for doubt...."

Langley also professed "to know nothing between flashes of intense perception"--an uneasy condition for the administrator of the Smithsonian Institution.

What Langley styled "aerodromics," based on the Greek word aerodrome, meaning a place where machines traverse the air, remained his focus. He had transformed the Smithsonian's workshops into amateur aeronautical-assembly plants, and regularly inspected them in striped trousers and morning coat. He had found support among the growing cadre of Washington aeronautical enthusiasts, among them Carl Barus, of the Bureau of Standards, and Charles Doolittle Walcott, director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Langley's demands for perfection and his domineering attitude, however, took a toll on the nerves of some of his underlings.

They had turned out various rubber-band-driven model airplanes and steam-powered machines that lifted themselves at speed. But the twin problems of weight and power plagued the initial versions of Langley's "aerodromes." The engines of Aerodromes 1 and 2 proved inadequate to their task, while Aerodrome 3- equipped with a new type of fuel burner-was also too underpowered to fly.

A much larger version came next, weighing just over 10 pounds, its four front and rear wings covering 14 square feet. It had an improved steam-powered engine, and was launched from a specially adapted houseboat- called the "scow" by the Secretary-on the Potomac River. After nine unsuccessful attempts during the winter of 1896, however, a new design was sought.

In May 1896, the year the Smithsonian celebrated its 50th anniversary, an unmanned Aerodrome Five flew for more than half a mile before setting down in the water. It then was dried off and flown again. Alexander Graham Bell photographed Aerodrome Five, and later wrote that "no one who was present on this interesting occasion could have failed to recognize that the practicability of mechanical flight had been demonstrated."

This was revolutionary-the first successful engine-driven, heavier-than-air flight in history. In November, Langley's next craft, Aerodrome Six, flew farther-,200 feet. Langley claimed that he had proved his thesis, and that a larger aerodrome would be capable of carrying a person on a sustained flight.

He continued his search for funds, including among potential donors the government. Money was needed on a scale beyond the available resources of the Smithsonian. Walcott suggested the military option, and placed Langley's proposal before President William McKinley. The country faced a conflict with Spain, and airborne fighting machines suggested military advantage. (Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt also became interested in the project.)

Langley met with the Board of Ordnance and Fortification in November 1898 to present his work and answer questions. He insisted on sole responsibility for the project and its funds, and also on absolute secrecy. He was thus shocked and dismayed when, two days later, the Washington Post reported on the meeting and the purpose of the project: "an investigation of the possibilities of flying machines for reconnoitering purposes and as engines of destruction in time of war." He subsequently sent a letter to the board reiterating the conditions of their agreement, and was awarded $50,000 to develop an airplane.

The following year, Langley received a request for information about aeronautics from a bicycle maker in Ohio named Wilbur Wright. Apparently Langley wasn't the only person working on the prospect of manned flight.

Among Langley's friends was John Wesley Powell. Langley and the major had exchanged papers on scientific philosophy; according to Assistant Secretary Adler, they quarreled "violently on the subject as to whether there was or was not a soul, or whether there was or was not a future life." They even vacationed together; in 1900, Powell traveled to Cuba with William Henry Holmes, and Langley asked them to join him in Jamaica, where he was studying the flight of turkey vultures.

Langley's earlier attempt at taking control of BAE personnel and money had been deflected by Powell, who had written, "To have these duties assumed by the Secretary of the Smithsonian, would place the Secretary in the position of performing the duties of a Bureau officer...." Powell prevailed, and their friendship survived through the last years of Powell's life.

The Secretary's reserve remained a source of friction, however. W.J. McGee, Powell's alter ego in the BAE, now objected to it. No field anthropologist -- McGee's second expedition in search of "wild" Seri Indians in Mexico had approached farce-he was, however, an astute inside operator who consistently promoted Powell's views-and his own.

McGee enjoyed the support of Franz Boas, the influential professor of anthropology at Columbia University and honorary philologist at the bureau who believed in the importance of linguistics and mythology. Boaz- and McGee-thought the "museum school" of Holmes, Mason, and others focused too much on the collections and not enough on original research.

The various tensions between the Smithsonian and the bureau did not approach the antipathy Langley developed toward McGee, even as the Secretary continued to tolerate the bureau's independence. McGee's referring to himself as "ethnologist in charge" during Powell's tenure didn't help matters.

Another source of friction between Langley and the BAE was James Mooney, whose emphasis on cultural deprivation, later to become a mainstream view in 20th- century anthropology, struck Langley as deviant. Mooney's suggestion that Christianity had been founded on dreams and visions seemed to Langley a kind of blasphemy. Although Powell was not fond of Mooney's ideas either, he valued his abilities as an ethnologist.

Then Mooney wrote an account of the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children by the U.S. Army during the battle of Wounded I(nee that was sympathetic to the Indians' side. Published in 1896, it angered both Langley and Powell. Such candor brought on more criticism of the Smithsonian in Congress, which already was thick with opponents of the limited and orderly Western development Powell had championed. The victim of this renewed criticism was the BAE.

John Wesley Powell died in 1902, and with him went the notion of an independent Bureau of American Ethnology. Langley already considered McGee too outspoken on current social issues and lacking in scientific objectivity, as well as personally irritating. He thus decided to clean out and subordinate the bureau, which had lost favor with the politicians. Charles Royce's History of Land Cessions of the Indian Tribes was the only publication

Langley had as evidence of the BAE's ability to produce useful information, its primary reason for existence. McGee's writings on the Seri, like Mooney's description of the massacre and his Myths of the Cherokees, had aroused pointed Congressional criticism.

Soon after Powell's death, Langley appointed a reluctant William Henry Holmes "chief"-not director- of the BAE after informing him that from then on the bureau would have the same relationship with the Smithsonian as its other divisions, and that "...its work must be popularized and shown to be practical."

A storm of controversy followed, with attacks on Langley's entire administration by McGee, whose position Langley had abolished. Appeals on McGee's behalf came from noted scientists, among them Boas, but to no avail. Langley claimed that by disciplining the BAE-by insisting that various studies finally be completed and that the bureau's informational function be reinstated-he was saving it from the Congressional budget knife. "On [Powell's] death," Langley wrote, "a new day begins for the Bureau-partly a reversion to the policy of his own vigorous years." He focused the BAE on the completion of The Handbook of American Indians.

This had been a fight between institutional administrators and anthropologists, and the former had triumphed. No self-respecting choice remained for McGee than to leave the Smithsonian, which he did in July 1903. He had become a symbol of the decline of highly individualistic, sometimes idiosyncratic pursuits in anthropology and other natural sciences. Personal achievement and the pursuit of one's life work had been subordinated to the bureaucracy.

McGee's life seemed to fall apart during the next four years, but then he rallied. In 1907, he went to work for the Department of Agriculture; that summer, he and Gifford Pinchot, head of the U.S. Forest Service, conferred on a plan for conserving parts of the country, which has since been characterized as the basis of the modern conservation movement For five hectic, often frustrating years after Aerodrome Six, Langley experimented with different designs and various components: a light, rotary-radial engine, an improved catapult for launching, biplane and monoplane-all coordinated by Charles Matthews Manly, his chief aeronautical assistant and, later, recipient of the Langley medal. It was Manly who had to deal with talented, unpredictable inventors-chief among them Stephen Balzer-and who finally succeeded in perfecting an engine of sufficient power to support manned flight.

In 1901 they ran out of money, and were forced to dip into general research funds established earlier by Alexander Graham Bell and English-born Thomas George Hodgkins. By October 7, 1903, the new Aerodrome was ready for test piloting. Manly, at the controls, revved up the engine, and started the craft along its track mounted on the roof of the modified houseboat. "Just as the end of the track was reached," he later wrote, "and at the moment when the machine should have become entirely free from the launching car, I experienced a slight jerk...." He quickly found himself in the water.

Langley's disappointment was compounded by public exposure. A reporter described the Aerodrome as entering the Potomac "like a handful of mortar." On top of the flight's failure, further damage was done to the craft as it was towed back to the houseboat.

The Secretary blamed the catapult for the plunge, but the craft itself was at fault, according to numerous authorities, among them Tom Crouch, a historian of aeronautics. After consulting with aeronautical experts who later reconstructed the Aerodrome, Crouch wrote in A Dream of Wings, "The weakness of the smaller models suggests that the scaled-up version was incapable of even marginal flight."

Unwilling to admit structural weakness, Langley forged ahead. On December 8, Manly again took the controls, wearing a cork-lined vest to keep him from drowning in the chilly Potomac. Again he felt a jerk at the end of the catapult, but this time the Aerodrome flipped over backwards before plunging into the river. Manly narrowly escaped from beneath the icy water, and the project was a shambles -- technically and politically.

Some members of Congress, always quick to ridicule the intellectual and erudite, took full advantage of Langley's embarrassment as well as the Smithsonian's and the War Department's. One Representative described Langley as "a professor...wandering in his dreams of flight...." Another mused, "[I]f it cost us $73,000 to construct a mud duck, how much is it going to cost to construct a real flying machine?"

Langley had been trying for 18 years to build a flying machine. His critics in and out of government agreed that many more years and thousands of dollars lay between Langley's dream and reality, if indeed such reality was possible. Langley disagreed. In his essay "The Laws of Nature," he wrote, "We must not consider that anything is absolutely settled or true...." He still believed in the possibility of his dream, and he was soon proven correct.

On December 17, 1903, a mere nine days after Langley's humiliation and as the recriminations continued Orville Wright took the controls of a gasoline-powered biplane near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and traveled 120 feet through the air in 12 seconds, officially becoming the first human being to fly.

Probably the most significant shortcoming of Langley's machine was the fact that it couldn't be steered. The Aerodrome, with its four wings in tandem pairs, was inherently stable, and thus couldn't be diverted easily from a straight line. The Wright brothers, on the other hand, realized that control was one of the essential secrets of flight. That realization made them the recognized pioneers in the field.

Langley entered a period of decline, but his work at the Smithsonian was not done. Opportunity had arisen that same year in the unlikely guise of art. With the death of Mrs. Harriet Lane Johnston, President Same Buchanan's niece, had come news of her bequest of a collection of paintings and other objects to a national gallery, should one ever be established. A friendly suit was brought in court determining that the Smithsonian, as originally set up by Congress, was qualified as the recipient; a national gallery was an inevitability.

Then, in the spring of 1904, just a few months after his disastrous experiment with flight, Langley had a second such opportunity. He received a visit from a retired Detroit industrialist named Charles L. Freer, who was prepared to give the Smithsonian more than two thousand art objects, among them unique collections of American painters, most notably James McNeill Whistler, and an unparalleled assemblage of Asian art and pottery going back to the 10th century.

The highly conventional Smithsonian Secretary, no doubt still despondent, was faced with a fastidious aesthete and wealthy former industrialist who knew what he wanted in all categories, whether it be Chinese porcelain, stone for his Detroit mansion, caviar, his dandified clothes, or the flower artfully placed in the vase by a precisely instructed servant. Years before, Langley had recalled the paintings, engravings, and etchings that Joseph Henry entrusted to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, but he was not knowledgeable about Freer's valuable, highly focused collection, nor appreciative of it.

Yet neither Freer's collection nor the fact that it came with half a million dollars for a proper gallery could be taken lightly. Langley put the collector off temporarily, and, at a board meeting in January 1905, raised the proposal with the Regents, who were equally indecisive. They asked Freer to put his offer in writing, which he did, adding, "No addition or deduction shall be made to the collections after my death, and nothing else shall ever be exhibited with them...." He also specified that no work of art could ever be removed from the building.

Freer suggested the Regents travel to his home in Detroit to view the treasures he had so passionately collected. This was considered an ordeal by the Regents, all of whom were elderly, as well as by Freer, who wrote to a fellow collector, "What they do not know about art would fill many volumes...."

In Detroit, Langley, Alexander Graham Bell, Dr. James Burrill Angell, and Senator John B. Henderson sat through four days of viewings conducted by Freer. "The things are all very well of their kind," the Senator confided to a companion, "but damn their kind!" The decision to accept the collections was put off yet again.

The Regents were concerned about lack of space and the ultimate shape of a national gallery, and uncertain how to maintain Freer's collection before his Florentine Renaissance gallery could be built. Then, in December, President Theodore Roosevelt instructed the Regents, "Gentlemen, accept this collection whether you care for it or not."

This they did, on January 24, and Freer telegraphed Roosevelt, "Without your good influence it could not have been accomplished."

The Johnston bequest and Freer's generosity performed a function larger than just providing treasures; they enhanced the popularity of the Institution's already existing art department, and forced the Smithsonian to deal with America's growing interest in the highest expressions of imagination.

The man given immediate responsibility over the collections and thus a new component of power was the veteran of geology, ethnology, and art, William Henry Holmes.

At the time of the regents' acceptance of Freer's bequest, Langley was dying in South Carolina, where he had gone after suffering a stroke the previous November. He had been a bold, controversial, and, to the end, enigmatic Secretary. The failure of his flying machine had overshadowed real accomplishment, including publication of the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, which continued for decades.

Langley's research efforts had furthered the goals of the first Secretary's. Langley's name would eventually be used to define a unit of solar radiation, the langley, and one of his last official acts would have been equally pleasing to Spencer Baird. In 1904 Langley turned the first spadeful of earth on the north side of the Mall, launching the construction of a new museum building.

This structure, when completed, would dwarf existing Smithsonian buildings, and solve, at least for a time, the Institution's perennial problem of increasing the collections while promoting the search for knowledge.

Return to the Universe: 1879-1949

		Contacts | FAQ | Press Room | Privacy | Copyright	Top