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.
[Illustration: _Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute_
Samuel Pierpont Langley]
“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.
A POET-SOLDIER: RUPERT BROOKE
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there ’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
RUPERT BROOKE.
It sometimes happens that a hero is remembered more for the true man he
was than for any fair deeds he may have wrought. Such a man was that
“very perfect gentle knight,” Sir Philip Sidney. A scholar and a poet, a
courtier and a soldier, he walked with grave men without becoming dull
and with kings without becoming vain. In the “spacious times of great
Elizabeth,” when brave men like Grenville, Drake, and Raleigh were
finding a new world overseas for England, and rare souls like those of
the Mermaid Tavern--Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and “best
Shakespeare,” himself--were building up a mighty kingdom of the mind and
heart, Sir Philip Sidney was a bright figure in the realms of high
adventure and of song.
It was not because of epic deeds or lyric verse, however, that all
England mourned the death of the young soldier. It is not for his sword
or for his song that he lives in the deathless company of England’s
heroes, but for his knightly heart. The oft-repeated tale of how,
mortally wounded, he forgot his own parching thirst and held out the
water they brought him to a dying comrade, with the words, “Thy need is
greater than mine,” lives in memory because in it the true Sidney still
lives.
This is the story of one who has been called the Sidney of our own
day--a young poet to whom the gods, it seemed, had given all their best
gifts, graces of body and of mind. When it was known that he had gone to
“do his bit” in the great war, people said fearfully, “Death loves a
shining mark!” When news came that he was dead, it seemed as if the
shadow of loss could never be lightened. Yet it is not for the song of
the poet or the sacrifice of the soldier that he will be remembered, but
for something rare and beautiful in the man himself that won the hearts
of all who knew him.
They said of Rupert Brooke, “He is the ideal youth of England--of merry
England!” It seemed as if something of all that was fair and brave and
free in English days and English ways had passed into the bright
blueness of his eyes, the warm glow under the tan of his cheeks, and the
live, shining hair that waved back from his broad clear brow.
From the very beginning his country took him to herself. He first saw
the light of a summer day at Rugby, under the shadow of the ivy-covered
turrets where that great friend of boys, Thomas Arnold, was headmaster
in the days of Tom Brown. Rupert’s father was assistant master at the
school, and so the boy grew up on “The Close,” where the happy haunts of
many happy boys were the charmed playground of his earliest years, and
the football field the ringing plain of his first dreams of glory and
achievement.
“What a wonderful world it was to be born into, that little England that
was mine,” said Rupert, “and how it seemed as if the days were not half
long enough for one to taste all the joys they brought. How I loved
everything--sights and sounds, the feel and breath of living, stirring
things! I loved not only rainbows and dewdrops sparkling in cool
flowers, but also footprints in the dew and washed stones gay for an
hour. Wet roofs beneath the lamplight had their gleam of enchantment,
and the blue bitter smoke of an autumn fire was like magic incense.”
Most people have eyes to see only that which is exceptional--the
exclamation marks of nature’s round, like sunset, moonrise, mountains
wrapped in purple mists, or still water under a starry sky. They do not
see the beauty in the changes of the common daylight, in familiar trees,
a winding path, and a few dooryard posies.
But Rupert noted with lingering tenderness the shapes and colors of all
the simple daily things.
“White plates and cups, clean-gleaming,
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
And oaks; and brown horse-chestnuts, glossy-new;
And new-peeled sticks; and shining pools on grass;--
All these have been my loves--”
he said, when dreaming fondly and whimsically of his boyish days. And
how he loved little shy, half-hidden things--elfin moss flowers, downy
curled-up ferns under the dry leaves, the musty smell of the dead
leaves themselves and of the moist, moldy earth. But he was never one of
those who must seek beauty in the haunts of nature untouched by man. The
splendid copper beech, kingly and kind, in the headmaster’s garden, and
Dr. Arnold’s own fern-leaved tree, whose tender gleams and flickerings
gladdened every one who lingered in its shade, were dearer than any
aloof forest monarchs could have been.
It seemed as if all the things that Rupert saw and loved somehow became
part of himself. Something of the swift life of darting birds, of
quivering winged insects, and furtive scurrying creatures in fur was in
the alert swiftness of his lithe young body. One found oneself thinking
of fair fields under a bright sky, of hedgerows abloom, of all the
singing, golden warmth that makes an English summer sweet, in looking
into the glowing beauty of the boy’s eager face.
“Rupert can’t be spoiled or he would have been long ago,” said one of
the Rugby boys. “He never stops to bother about what people say of him.
Of course a chap who can play football and carry off school honors at
the same time has something better to think about.”
It was true that young Brooke found his world full of many absorbing
things. He was already entering upon the poet’s kingdom. Words, he
found, could work mighty spells. All the rich pageantry of the days of
knights and crusaders passed before him as a few verses sounded in his
ears. Another line--and he saw
... magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
How splendid it would be to make fine, thrilling things live in words!
He knew, though, that he could never live in the past or in the dream
pictures that fancy painted. His life was in the real things of the
present, and his song must be of the life he knew and felt. Would he
ever be able to find singing words for all the singing life about him
and within?
Sometimes he all but gave up the trial. How foolish to bother about
writing poems when one might live them! A rush--a fine scrimmage--a
chance for the goal--life in doing--that was better than any printed
page. As he played on the eleven for Rugby it seemed as if mind and
body were one. Life was strength and swiftness, and victory after
effort.
But the young athlete, who knew the joy of playing and winning for his
school, swept on by the cheers of his comrades, knew too the joy in the
play of the mind, urged on by the secret longing of his heart. This
inner athlete “rejoiced as a strong man to run a race” when he wrote his
prize poem, “The Bastille.” He laughed to himself to think of how he had
gone to the traditions of an old French prison for inspiration for the
finest, freest verse he had yet made. It was plain now that he must be a
poet. The things he loved should find an immortal life in his song. His
successes at cricket and football could not compare with this triumph.
There was no power like the mastery of the mind.
Going from Rugby to Cambridge, he soon won an enviable reputation as a
man of parts and a poet of much promise. His keen appreciative mind, his
ready wit and personal charm, made him a favorite with the best men of
the university.
“I do not see why he need be a poet,” said Henry James, the American
novelist and critic, who lived for many years in England. “Any one who
can give such all around satisfaction as a human being should not be
encouraged to specialize. Surely one who can _be_ so much that makes
life more worth while for every one who knows him, ought not to have to
struggle to _do_ things.”
Rupert had other friends of this mind, but as the months went by and the
youth grew to the full stature of his manhood, the longing to win fuller
power as a poet grew with him. More than ever it seemed the one gift he
would have. Not as others had sung, but a new song for a new age would
he sing. He could never be merely “an idle singer of an empty day.”
In the meantime he carried off the prize of a fellowship at King’s
College, which gave him means to go on with his study and writing. Just
as scholarship helps a student with his college expenses, so a
fellowship gives a graduate an income to enable him to carry forward
some special work for which he has proved particular fitness, and which
bids fair to be of value to the world.
The fellowship allowed Rupert Brooke to study where he would. He spent a
year in Germany--in Munich and Berlin--but he learned there, above
everything else, a new appreciation of his own England. In his charming,
whimsical poem “Grantchester,” written in Berlin in May, 1912, he
pictures his home by the river Cam in lilac time, and nothing in the
perfectly regulated, efficient German world that surrounds him can
compare with that place his heart knows.
... _there_ the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose; ...
... I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of _that_ district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
Once again at home in the cozy vicarage at Grantchester, when he tired
of his book-littered study he could walk through the shadowy green
tunnel that the great chestnut trees made beside the river and dream of
the poems that he would some day have power to call into being. More
than anything else he loved to swim in the laving waters of “Byron’s
Pool,” at night or in the magic half-light of dawn. Then it seemed as if
the past and the present were one, and as if the shades of those other
poets who had found refreshment and inspiration near that same fair
stream came again to linger lovingly by its waters.
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by....
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night.
He felt himself in a very real sense “heir of all the ages” as his body
cut and darted through the water; the life of the past no less than the
life of the present surrounded him, buoyed him
[Illustration: _Photo by Brown Bros._
Rupert Brooke
]
up. His clean strokes gave him a sense of happy mastery.