The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-06-17
FLYING.

Professor Langley Has Solved the Dues | ton of Aerial Transit-Taught by n l Buzzard-This Machine Flies as Soaring
 Birds Fly and is in No Sense a Balloon Director of the Smith hsonian Inventor
 is Famous Scientific Man.
 (From the New York Herad5
 It is rather surprising that the an-
 nouncement that Professor s. P. Lang | ley. of the Smithsonian Institution, had | definitely solved the problem of aerial | navigation has not attracted more at tention than it has. Coming from such
 man, and backed by the word of so 1 practical a man of science as Alexan-
 der Graham Bell, it was not such an announcement as might have come from some unknown and obscure in- ventor.
 | Professor Langley would die fla
 nous man if he had never taken up
 acro-dynamics or attempted to build a | flying machine. He is indeed, in his l chosen field of astronomy, the foremost
 man of science whom we have in this | country. Professor Langley ranks
 with the greatest astronomers and | physicists of the world, and he is one
 of the few men America has produced so far who have made any real and solid contributions to pure science. He
 is to the latter something of what Nj
 cola Tesla is to applied science.
 It was g. really remarkable thing that
 a man like Professor Langley should 1 have undertaken to build flying ma
 chine at all. It was still more remark
 able at his age Although he bears
 them lightly, he has now sxty-two years to his credit, and, as l under
 stand it, he did not take up with his in vestigations as to aerial flight until | about six or seven years ago. But he has prosecuted his inquiry with all the | enthusiasm of young man, and is, in | short, one of the type whom you are ] led to describe as sixty-two years
 young.
 Again, in both its matter and man
 ner, Professor Langley's invention, or | his discovery, whichever you may like | to term it, is of unique interest His machine is built upon exactly the oppo-
 site principle from that upon which
 other flying machines have been built,
 and his invention represents a clear
 triumph for pure inductive science.
 Just what I mean by the latter is
 this: When Stephenson built his loco motive he proceeded in his work upon certain definitely known facts-that is, | he was perfectly sure that if he could find a way to push his wheels around | by steam, his engine would run over | the ground just as an ordinary wagon | would. He was venturing into no un- known field of physics. With Profes-
 sor Langley it was just the opposite. 1 Although men of science for two cen | turies or more have been studying the | dynamics of the air. have weigRed it and determined it's cOmpressability, its action under heat &c., yet up to the time Professor Langley took hold of l the matter there existed no definite data which a flying machine, if it is to successfully navigate the air, must be | built To find out these new data was
 his first work,
 | Put in a less technical way Professor
 Langley's problem was this: He says, l Did you ever think what a physical miracle it is for such a bird as one of our common turkey buzzards to fly in
 the way it does? You may see them
 any day along the Potomac, floating in | the air, with hardly the movement of l their feathers. These birds weigh from five to ten pounds; they are far heavier
 than the air they displace; they are
 absolutely heavier than so many flat 1 irons.
 'J fancy if you saw cannon balls
 floating through the air like soap bub-
 bIes you would look upon it as a suffi-
 ciently surprising matter, if not a mir acle. The only reason that we are not