author
S. P. (Samuel Pierpont) Langley
1834–1906
An astronomer, inventor, and early aviation experimenter, he spent his career pushing at the edges of what science could measure and machines could do. His name is closely tied both to the bolometer and to some of the most ambitious flying-machine trials before the Wright brothers.
2 Audiobooks
The New Astronomy
by S. P. (Samuel Pierpont) Langley
Langley Memoir on Mechanical Flight, Parts I and II Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Volume 27 Number 3, Publication 1948, 1911
by S. P. (Samuel Pierpont) Langley, Charles M. (Charles Matthews) Manly
About the author
Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1834, Samuel Pierpont Langley became one of the best-known American scientists of his era. He worked as an astronomer and physicist, served as director of the Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh, and later became the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
He is especially remembered for inventing the bolometer, a highly sensitive instrument for detecting radiant heat, and for his studies of the Sun. His work helped strengthen the growing field of astrophysics in the United States, and he also played a major role in establishing what became the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
Langley was deeply interested in flight and devoted significant effort to building powered flying machines called Aerodromes. Although his full-scale aircraft experiments ended in famous failures, his smaller models achieved important results, and his aviation work remains a notable part of the story of early flight. He died in 1906 in Aiken, South Carolina.