The American scientist Samuel Pierpont Langley (1834-1906) was a pioneer experimenter with airplanes and in the science of aeronautics.

Samuel Langley was born in Roxbury, Mass., on Aug. 22, 1834. As a boy, he studied diligently and read widely in history, the classics, and various branches of science, but his formal education ended with graduation from high school in 1851.

For the next several years Langley worked as an engineer and architect. After a trip abroad in 1864-1865 to visit observatories and research centers, he received an assistantship in the Harvard Observatory, Cambridge, Mass. Later he was put in charge of the small observatory at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md. In 1867 he became director of the Allegheny Observatory and professor of physics and astronomy at the Western University of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh).

During the next few years Langley devised and sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad a method...