A BOY was lying on his back in a clover-sweet pasture, looking up dreamily at the white clouds that were drifting about on the calm blue sea of the sky. The field sloped down to the beach, and the salt breath of the ocean came to him on the passing breeze. All at once his eye was caught by something that made him start up suddenly, all alert attention. It was a sea-gull rising into the air, its wings flashing white in the bright sunshine.

“How does he do it?” he said aloud. “How is it that he can float about like that without any effort? It is just when he begins to mount into the air that he flaps his wings; now he is hardly moving them at all. He seems to be held up by the air just as a kite is!”

This was not the first time that young Samuel Langley had watched the flight of the sea-gulls. And the sight of a hawk circling above the tree-tops could always set him a-staring.

“There must be something about the air that makes it easy,” he pondered. “The birds know the secret, but I can’t even guess it!”

That night at dinner the boy was more than usually thoughtful.

“Father,” he said after a long silence, “don’t you think it might be possible for people to make some sort of an airship thing to sail through the air, without any gas bag to carry it up?”

“Have you heard that there is such a thing as the law of gravity, son?” quizzed the father, banteringly. “What goes up must come down, you know.”

“But, Father,” the boy persisted, “the hawks and gulls are much heavier than the air. There is nothing of the balloon sort about them.”

“But they have wings, my boy, and they know how to fly,” returned Mr. Langley, looking at the lad’s puckered brow with amused indulgence.

“Well, Father,” retorted Sam, flushing under the teasing smiles that were directed at him, “I’m sure it’s not such a joke after all. Why shouldn’t people learn how to make wings and to fly?”

“Come down to earth, Samuel, and don’t get too far from the ground in your wonderings,” advised his father. “There are enough problems on the good old earth to keep you busy. Your idea has not even the merit of being new and original. The myths of Greece tell us that ‘way back in the legendary past people envied the flight of birds. But all those who have tried to do the trick have, like Icarus who went too near the sun with his marvelous wax wings, come back to earth rather too abruptly for comfort.”

As the days went by, Samuel Langley did indeed turn his attention to other questions, but the problem suggested by the bird’s flight was not forgotten. Years afterward when he had become one of the most distinguished scientists of his time he used often to say: “Knowledge begins in wonder. Set a child to wondering and you have put him on the road to understanding.”

He often liked to recall the days of his boyhood when he had first set his feet on the path that led to the great interests which made his life.

“There are two incidents—little chance happenings, you might call them, if you believe in chance—” he said, “which took root and grew with the years. One was my discovery of the fascinations of my father’s telescope. I remember watching the workmen lay the stones of Bunker Hill Monument through that glass. It taught me the joy of bringing far-away things into intimate nearness. I learned that the man who knows how to use the magic glasses of science can say, ‘Far or forgot to me is near!’”

The great scientist smiled musingly to himself; he seemed to have slipped away from his friend and the talk of the moment. Was he back in his boyhood when he first looked at the moon’s face through his magic glass, or was he pondering over some new problem concerning sun spots which was puzzling learned astronomers the world over?

“What was the other incident you spoke of, Professor?” reminded his companion timidly, for it was not easy to get Dr. Langley to speak about himself, and the spell of this rare hour might easily be broken.

“What is it?—oh, yes,” he went on, picking up the thread, “the other epoch-making time of my young life was the lazy hour when I lay stretched out in an open field watching the flight of the hawks and gulls circling overhead. I noted that their wings were motionless except when they turned them at a different angle to meet a new current of wind. I began then dimly to suspect that the invisible ocean of the air was an unknown realm of marvelous possibilities. It may be that that idle holiday afternoon had more to do with the serious work of the after years than the plodding hours devoted to Latin grammar.”

Samuel Langley had a mind of the wondering—not the wandering—sort. Everything that he saw set him to questioning, comparing, and reasoning. When he noticed the curious way in which nature has made many creatures so like the place in which they live that they can easily hide from their enemies, he said to himself: “It is strange that the insects which live in trees are green, while those that live on the ground are brown. It must be that the ones who were not so luckily colored were quickly picked off, and that only those that can hide in this clever way are able to hold their own.” When he noticed that brightly colored flowers were not so fragrant as white ones, he said, “The sweet blossoms don’t need gay colors to attract their insect friends.” When he saw early spring vegetables growing in a hotbed, he said: “How does that loose covering keep them warm? There must be something that makes heat under there.” Years later he said, “I believe the questions that I kept putting to myself every time I went by a certain garden not far from our house marked the starting-point of my investigations into the work of the sun’s rays in heating the earth. The day came when the idea flashed upon me that the air surrounding our planet acts just like a hotbed, conserving enough warmth to make possible the conditions of life we require.”

Everything in Samuel Langley’s world—animals, plants, rocks, air, and water—had its wonder story and its challenge. There was always some question to be puzzled over. Science was not, however, the only passion of his early years. His delight in beauty was just as keen as his thirst for knowledge. He noted with loving appreciation the changing lights and shades of Nature’s face. He had an eye for “the look of things,” which means that he had something of a gift for drawing.

After completing the course of the Boston High School, he turned his attention to civil engineering and architecture. “I did not go to college because I had to think about paying my own way through life,” he said, “and I argued that a chap who was fond of mathematics and drawing should be able to do some good work in the way of building even if he did not succeed in laying the foundation of either fame or fortune. Besides, it seemed to me that while doing work that was not uninteresting, I should be near the things that were already part of my life; there would be chance and encouragement for further scientific study.”

Going to Chicago when he was twenty-three years of age, Mr. Langley worked for seven years in his chosen profession, gaining in addition to a comfortable income, practical business experience and unusual skill in drafting. All this time his interest in scientific problems was pulling him away from the beaten path of practical achievement. His intellect was of the hardy, pioneer sort that longs to press on where man has never ventured—to make new paths, not to follow in the footsteps of others.

In 1864 the young scientist of thirty years determined upon a bold move. He definitely retired from his profession, returned to New England, and for three years devoted his time to building telescopes. He knew something of the magician’s joy as he planned and developed the special features of his “magic glasses.” The boy who had thrilled over the marvels of the starry heavens which his father’s telescope had revealed was alive within him, exulting to find that he could construct instruments many times more powerful.

“I have never outgrown my love of fairy books,” he said. “To one who spends his time with the wonders that science reveals, the immortal wonder tales of childhood seem truer than any other stories. I delight in the adventures of the youth who had found the cap of invisibility; then I turn to my telescope which brings the invisible into the world that the eye knows. Children and men of science belong to the same realm; no one else has the proper appreciation of true magic.”

After his close work with the telescopes, this lover of marvels spent a happy year in Europe, visiting observatories, museums, and art galleries. It was at this time that he decided that astronomy was to be the serious business of his days, and art the chief delight of his hours of recreation. He was offered the place of assistant in the Harvard Observatory by Professor Winlock, in spite of the fact that he had had no university training.

“This self-made astronomer has a seeing eye, a careful hand, and the instinct for observation,” said Joseph Winlock approvingly. “Besides he has, if I am not mistaken, the imagination to use in a large and constructive way the facts that his experiments yield. He has the making of an original scientist.”

His feet once planted on the first round of the ladder of expert knowledge, advancement was rapid. It might well seem to many passing strange that a man who had written nothing, discovered nothing, and who, moreover, had no brilliant university record behind him, should at once win recognition from the most learned specialists of the day.

“What was there about Langley that earned his rapid promotions?” it was asked.

“There was nothing that remotely hinted at influence or favoritism,” said one who knew him well. “He was impersonal and retiring to a degree. But he had in rare combination an open, alert mind and a capacity for hard work.”

After two years at the Harvard Observatory, he went to the Naval Academy at Annapolis as professor of mathematics and director of the observatory. A year later he accepted the professorship of astronomy and physics in the Western University at Pittsburg. For twenty years he filled this position and also that of director of the Allegheny Observatory, which under his leadership became the center of very important work.

When he took charge at the new observatory, he found no apparatus for scientific observations beyond a telescope, and no funds available for the purchase of the absolutely necessary instruments. How was he to obtain the expensive tools which he required for his work?

“If I can show the practical importance of astronomical observations, the means will be forthcoming,” he said.

At this moment a wonderful inspiration came to the professor. In traveling about the country he had been strongly impressed with the need of some standard system of keeping time. He believed that science ought to be able to come to the rescue and bring order out of confusion.

“This is my chance,” he now said, as he looked about his empty observatory. “If I can prove to the managers of the Pennsylvania Railroad that I can furnish them with a time-keeping system that will do away with the inconvenience of changing time with every forty or fifty miles of travel and all the troublesome reckonings and adjustments which that entails, I feel assured that they will provide the equipment which I need.”

It often happens that the learned masters of science are entirely removed in their interests and experience from the every-day world of business. They work in a sphere apart, and the offices of some practical middleman with an inventive turn of mind are required to make their discoveries of any immediate value. Professor Langley, on the contrary, had an appreciation of the demands of business, as well as the vital interests of science. He had lived in both worlds. Now, through his competent grasp of the needs of such a railroad center as Pittsburg, where the East and the West meet, he succeeded in working out a plan that was so sane and practical that it immediately recommended itself to the busy men in control of transportation problems. His observatory was provided with the apparatus for which he longed, and twice a day it automatically flashed out through signals, the exact time to all the stations on the Pennsylvania Railroad, a system controlling some eight thousand miles of lines. To Professor Langley, more than to any other person is due the effective regulation of standard time throughout the country.

During the years of hard work at Pittsburg, Professor Langley was invited to join several important scientific expeditions. These were the holidays of his busy life. His efficient work as leader of a coast survey party to Kentucky in 1869 to observe an eclipse of the sun won for him the opportunity to join the government expedition to Spain to study the eclipse of 1870. In the summer of 1878, he took a party of scientists to Pike’s Peak, and that winter he went to Mt. Etna for some further experiments on the heights. An article called “Wintering on Mount Etna,” which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly,” proved that he could not only do important work in original research but that he could also write about it in a way calculated to appeal to the average reader.

During these years Professor Langley devoted a great deal of time and thought to astrophysics. This science, which is sometimes called “the new astronomy,” is concerned with special heat and light problems of the heavenly bodies—more especially, of course, with investigations and measurements of the radiant energy of the sun. To carry on his experiments he invented a wonderful electrical instrument called the bolometer, which is so delicately constructed for measuring heat that when one draws near to look at it the warmth of his face has a perceptible effect.

Professor Langley’s tests proved that the lantern of the fire-fly gives a cheaper form of light than is to be found anywhere else. Here Nature has demonstrated the possibility of providing illumination with no waste of energy in heat or in any other way. All the force goes into the light, while man’s devices for defeating darkness waste as much as ninety-nine per cent. of the energy consumed.

The Pittsburg years were rich in the joy of work well done, but they gave little of the inspiration and stimulus that comes from congenial companionship. For the most part, he had to content himself with the society of his book friends. The number of his solitary hours may be to a certain extent measured by the astonishing range of his reading.

“Why, Mr. Langley, I do believe you have read every book that ever was written!” said an admiring young lady on one occasion.

“Oh, no,” he replied dryly, with the hint of a twinkle in his eyes, “there are six that I have not read—as yet.”

In 1886, when he was offered the position of assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution at Washington, he accepted without hesitation, because he felt that he would have a chance for association with his brother scientists.

The next year, when he had succeeded Professor Baird as head of the Institution, he at once inaugurated a change in the character of its publications. “If the Smithsonian is to live up to the ideal of its founder ‘in increasing knowledge among men,’ the written accounts of its work must be plain and interesting enough to appeal to people of ordinary education and intelligence,” he said.

It was largely due to his efforts that the National ZoÖlogical Park was created. “We must have not only live books but live specimens,” he said. “The stuffed and mounted creatures are well enough in their way, but they have monopolized too much attention.”

For a while there was a small zoo housed in cages and kennels almost under the eaves of the Smithsonian offices, until sufficient interest could be aroused in Congress to secure a tract of land along Rock Creek for a national park. Here at last Professor Langley realized his dream of a pleasure-ground for the people, where there might be preserved in places like their natural haunts—on hillsides, in rocky caves, or along streams—specimens of the animal life of the world, which is in a large measure disappearing before the advance of man.

Remembering how his interest in scientific problems had begun in his childhood when he had stopped to wonder about the things that attracted his attention, Professor Langley fitted up a place in the Smithsonian especially for children. Opposite the front door, in a room bright with sunshine, singing birds, and aquariums of darting gold-fish, he put the sort of things that all boys and girls would like to see. There you may see the largest and smallest birds in the world, the largest and smallest eggs, and specimens of the birds that all children meet in their story-books, such as the raven, rook, magpie, skylark, starling, and nightingale. There, too, are all sorts of curious nests; eggs of water birds that look like pebbles; insects that exactly mimic twigs or leaves, and so can hide in the most wonderful way; beautiful butterflies and humming-birds; and shells, coral, and all kinds of curious creatures from the bottom of the sea.

It is said that once a lady who sat next Professor Langley at a dinner-party and found him apparently uninterested in all her attempts at conversation, suddenly asked, “Is there anything at all, Mr. Wiseman, which you really care to talk about?”

The professor roused himself from his fit of abstraction with a start. Then he smiled and said, “Yes, two things—children and fairy-tales.”

It was the lady’s turn to look surprised and smile.

“Now I understand how you were able to make that Children’s Room so exactly what it should be,” she said. “Only some one who understood wonder and loved the wonderful could have done it!”

While Professor Langley was working in this way to make the institution of which he was head a greater power for teaching and inspiration in the lives of the people, he was not relaxing any of his own efforts as a scientific investigator. An astrophysical observatory was founded and there he went on with his special studies and experiments in regard to the properties of sunlight. When people wanted to know the practical value of his minute observations he used to say:

“All truth works for man if you give it time; the application is never far to seek. The expert knowledge of to-day becomes the inventor’s tool to-morrow.”

But while he was working over the problems of sun-spots, and making drawings of the surface of the sun that bear witness to his patience no less than to his skill, he became vitally interested in the subject of mechanical flight. For at last he had made an opportunity to work on the problem that had fascinated him ever since he was a boy. “Nature has solved the problem of flight, why not, man?” he said.

He soon became convinced that the mathematical formulas given in the books concerning the increase of power with increase of velocity were all wrong. “At that rate, a swallow would have to have the strength of a man!” he exclaimed. He devised a sort of whirling table with surfaces like wings to test with exactness just how much horse-power was required to hold up a surface of a certain weight while moving rapidly through the air, and by this means discovered and demonstrated the fundamental law of flight, known as Langley’s Law, which tells us that the faster a body travels through the air the less is the energy required to keep it afloat.

After proving that birds are held up like kites by pressure of the air against the under surface of their wings, he made experiments to show that their soaring flight is aided by “the internal work of the wind,” that is, by shifts in the currents of air, particularly by rising trends, which the winged creatures utilize by instinct. Watch a hawk as it circles through the air, dipping its wings now at this angle, now at that, and you will realize that the wind is his true and tried ally. He trusts himself to the sweep and swirl of the air, just as a swimmer relies on the buoyancy of the water.

Having demonstrated so much through experiments with his whirling table, Dr. Langley determined to construct a real flying-machine, with wide-spreading planes to sustain it in the air while it was driven along by a steam-engine which furnished power to the propellers. This machine, which he called an “aËrodrome” (air run), was put to the test on the sixth of May, 1896. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who was present at the trial and who took pictures of the machine in mid-air, declared, “No one who witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a steam-engine flying with wings in the air, like a great soaring bird, could doubt for one moment the practicability of mechanical flight.”

Now that he had succeeded in solving the problem from the scientific standpoint, Professor Langley wished to leave the task of developing the idea in a practical, commercial way to others. There was, however, a popular demand for him to carry on his experiments with a model large enough to carry a man, and $50,000 was appropriated for the purpose by the Government on the recommendation of President McKinley and the Board of Ordnance and Fortification of the War Department.

Professor Langley constructed the giant bird-machine and selected a secluded spot near Quantico on the Potomac below Washington for the trial. The place was not remote enough, however, to escape the watchful enterprise of the newspaper reporters. A number of them flocked to the spot and actually camped out near the scene. When any one approached the great house-boat on which the aËrodrome was perched ready for launching, they got into boats and gathered about to see everything that should take place.

And now there happened one of the most tragic things in all the history of scientific endeavor. After vainly waiting for a moment of comparative privacy for his tests, Dr. Langley decided that delay was no longer possible, and in the presence of a cloud of unfriendly witnesses—who had been irritated by the failure of the perverse scientists to furnish “scoops” for their papers—essayed the first flight.

A rocket shot up in the air as a signal to the inventor’s assistants to stand by to give aid in case of mishap. There was a sound as of the whirring of many mighty wings when the huge launching-spring shot the aËrodrome off from its resting-place on the house-boat. For a moment the enormous bird-thing was in the air; then, instead of rising and soaring, it floundered helplessly and fell into the water. There had been a defect in the launching, and the machine did not have a chance to show what it could do. This so-called trial was really no test at all.

The reporters, however, had an opportunity to show what they could do. The next day all the newspapers of the country printed long articles describing the spectacular failure of the man of learning who had left the safe and sane ways of scientific investigation to attempt the impossible. “Langley’s folly,” they called the poor aËrodrome. Men read the story at their breakfast tables and said with a laugh, “‘Langley’s folly’ indeed! For the choicest sort of foolishness you have to go to these fellows with the three-decker brains!”

There was such a popular hue and cry that Congress refused to allow any more money to be used on the flying-machine venture. In vain did the men who were really in a position to know and judge, like Professor Bell and other scientists, say that the seeming failure had meant nothing at all but an unfortunate accident at the moment of launching. The ridicule of the crowd outweighed the words of the wise. Most people felt just as Dr. Langley’s father had when his boy talked of making a machine that should sail through the air as a bird does.

Two years after the failure of his hopes, Dr. Langley died. It was said that his disappointment had helped to bring on the illness which caused his death. He never for a moment, however, lost faith in the future of his airship.

“I have done the best I could in a difficult task,” he said, “with results which, it may be hoped, will be useful to others. The world must realize that a new possibility has come to it, and that the great universal highway overhead is soon to be opened.”

While the crowd was still laughing at the absurdity of man’s attempting to fly, there were those who were seriously at work on the problem. After success had crowned their efforts and their aËroplane was the marvel of the hour, the Wright brothers declared that it was the knowledge that the head of the most prominent scientific institution in America believed in the possibility of human flight which had led them to undertake their work. “He recommended to us, moreover, the books which enabled us to form sane ideas at the outset,” they said. “It was a helping hand at a critical time, and we shall always be grateful.”

So it was that the work of our hero of flight was carried on, as he had faith that it would be. Is it not strange to reflect to-day, when aËroplanes are used so generally in the Great War, that it is only a little more than a decade since people were laughing at “Langley’s folly”?

For ten years the ill-fated aËrodrome hung suspended among the curiosities in the National Museum. Then in May, 1914, Mr. Glenn H. Curtiss obtained permission from the Government to make some trial flights in the first of the heavier-than-air flying craft. After making a brief skimming flight above the water of Lake Keuka, New York, he declared that with a more powerful engine the pioneer aËroplane could sustain itself perfectly in the air.

Returned in triumph to the museum, it now shares honors with the models of Watt’s steam-engine, the first steam-boat, and other epoch-making inventions. “Langley’s folly” is completely vindicated, and Samuel Pierpont Langley is to-day numbered as chief among the many heroes of flight.