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A
renowned American astrophysicist and astronomer, Samuel Langley made model
airplanes powered by whirling arms and steam engines. Samuel Langley built
a unmanned model of an airplane that included a steam-powered engine. In
1891, his model flew for 3/4s of a mile before running out of fuel.
Samuel Langley received a $50,000
grant from the United States War Department to build a full sized aerodrome,
the Aerodrome A with a gas powered engine. In 1903, it crashed immediately
after being launched from a house boat over the Potomac River. It was too
heavy to fly. Samuel Langley was very disappointed and he gave up trying
to fly.
Other Achievements
His major contributions to flight
involved attempts at adding a power plant to a glider. He was also well
known as the director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Samuel
Langley started his scientific career as an astronomer in Ohio, where he
became interested in measuring how much energy the sun was radiating. He
built instruments, called calorimeters, to make these measurements. He
built others, called bolometers, designed to make similar measurements
on stars. Interestingly, the bolometers Samuel Langley built are very similar
to the detectors scientists at NASA's Langley Research Center use to measure
the Earth's radiation budget.
Model of
Langley Aerodrome
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