Founding the Astrophysical Observatory: The Langley Years

Goode G. B. , The Smithsonian Institution, 1846–1896: The history of its first half-century (Washington, D.C., 1897).

Jones B. Z. , Lighthouse of the skies: The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Background and history 1846–1965 (Washington, D.C., 1965). Bessie Zaban Jones wrote her scholarly and enduring biography of the SAO as an editor on the publications staff. Much of the inspiration and many of the background facts for the present paper were drawn from this source.

Barr E. S. , “The infrared pioneers, III: Samuel Pierpont Langley”, Infrared physics , iii (1963), 195–206. In Barr's Scott E. knowledgeable review of Langley's contributions to infrared astronomy are warm insights into the life of the little-known Langley.

Langley's brother, John , seven years his junior, had taken a post in chemistry a year earlier at the same university, which is now known as the University of Pittsburgh. He later moved to the University of Michigan and then to the Case Institute of Technology, which was founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1880 ( Barr , op. cit. , 200).

Ibid. , 201.

Langley's famous sunspot drawing served as the frontispiece for Young's Charles A. The Sun (New York, 1881) and in many subsequent monographs dealing with the Abbot Sun. C. G. was still using it, 38 years later, as the frontispiece for his own The Sun (New York, 1911).

Eddy J. A. , “The Great Solar Eclipse”, Sky & telescope , xlv (1973), 2–8. Langley's drawing of the corona, made at the top of Pike's Peak on 29 July showed equatorial streamers extending more than 6° from the Sun. It was hardly dry when it was commandeered in St George Stanley's engraving of a mountaintop scene of eclipse viewers, published on the cover of the 24 August 1878 issue of Harper's weekly (no. 1130). It was published formally in the U.S. Naval Observatory report on the 1878 eclipse ( Reports on the total solar eclipses of July 29, 1878 and January 11, 1880 (Washington, D.C., 1880), Plate 10).

Meadows A. J. , Early solar physics (Oxford, 1970).

Langley was one of the late nineteenth-century astronomers who raised money for research by selling time signals to the railroads and other commercial enterprises (Barr, op. cit. , 201).

“It is not generally understood that among us not only the support of the Government, but with scarcely an exception every new private benefaction, is devoted to ‘the Old’ Astronomy, which is relatively munificently endowed already; while that which I have here called ‘the New,’ so fruitful in results of interest and importance, struggles almost unaided. We are glad to know that Urania, who was in the beginning but a poor Chaldean shepherdess, has long since become well-to-do, and dwells now in state. It is far less known than it should be that she has a younger sister now among us, bearing every mark of her celestial birth, but all unendowed and portionless. It is for the reader's interest in the latter that this book is a plea” ( Langley S. P. , Preface to The new astronomy (Cambridge, Mass, 1884)). It is safe to assume that in 1884 the Washington home of the “Old Astronomy” was the Naval Observatory, and that Langley's Victorian barb was aimed particularly at its stern and imposing director, Simon Newcomb. As we shall see, Newcomb, in 1903, struck the last blow in this battle of Titans, with a devastating chop at the then-reeling Langley.

Eddy J. A. , “Thomas A. Edison and infrared astronomy”, Journal for the history of astronomy , iii (1972), 165–87, and “Edison the scientist”, Applied optics , xviii (1979), 3736–50.

Barr , op. cit. (ref. 3), 196.

Langley S. P. , “Observations on invisible heat-spectra and the recognition of hitherto unmeasured wave-lengths, made at the Allegheny Observatory”, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , xxxiv (1886), 55–75. Langley had secured funds for the expedition from Thaw William , a Pittsburgh philanthropist.

Ibid. .

Jones , op. cit. (ref. 2), 8.

Ibid. , 127.

Langley S. P. , Report of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution , Exhibit B , Annals of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory , i (Washington, D.C., 1902).

Jones , op. cit. (ref. 2), 134–5.

Langley S. P. , The 1900 Solar Eclipse Expedition of the Astrophysical Observatory of the Smithsonian Institution , Smithsonian Report no. 1439 (1904).

Langley , op. cit. (ref. 17).

Barr , op. cit. (ref. 3), 199.

In his retiring address as President of the AAS, in 1888, Langley had this to say about the real nature of scientific research. “We often hear the progress of science likened to the march of an army towards some definite end; but this, it has seemed to me, is not the way science usually does move, but only the way it seems to move in the retrospective view of the compiler, who probably knows almost nothing of the real confusion, diversity, and retrograde motion of the individuals comprising the body. … I believe this comparison … to that of an army, which obeys an impulse from one head, had more error than truth in it; and, though all similes are more or less misleading, I would prefer to ask you to think rather of a moving crowd, where the direction of the whole comes somehow from the independent impulses of its individual members; not wholly unlike a pack of hounds, which, in the long-run perhaps catches its game, but where, nevertheless, when at fault, each individual goes his own way, by scent not by sight, some running back and some forward; where the louder-voiced bring many to follow them nearly as often in a wrong path as in a right one; where the entire pack even has been known to move off bodily on a false scent; for this, if a less dignified illustration, would be one which had the merit of having a truth in it, left out of sight by the writers of textbooks” ( Langley S.P. , “The history of a doctrine”, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , xxxvii (1888), 1–23, p. 2).

Chapter 7 of Jones, op. cit. (ref. 2), gives a sympathetic account of Langley's pioneering tragedy in aviation.

On my way to the Astronomy at Cambridge Symposium, in January 1989, the airport bus from Logan Airport passed close beside the monument at Bunker Hill, reminding me of the perhaps apocryphal story of how Langley had watched it built. I asked the driver if he thought that someone could see the monument through a telescope from Roxbury, six miles away, at the time of its construction, in the early 1800s. He told me that he lived in Roxbury himself, that he could see it from his home today, and that it would have been much easier when the Boston skyline was not so high. Then I told him who it was who had done this — Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian — as a little boy, long ago. “Langley,” he asked, “Wasn't he the one whose airplane fell into the river?”.

As Langley must have known in 1903, he would be remembered most through time as a kind of comic failure, for events that happened in the closing moments of a brilliant career of nearly forty years in science.