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Biography of Samuel Pierpont LangleyName: Samuel Pierpont LangleyBirth Date: August 22, 1834 Death Date: February 2, 1906 Place of Birth: Roxbury, Massachusetts, United States Nationality: American Gender: Male Occupations: scientist Samuel Pierpont Langley 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 of regulating railroad time …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…He enjoyed a very high scientific reputation and published many scientific articles and reports, as well as popular accounts of his astronomical and aeronautical experiments. He died at Aiken, S. C., on Feb. 2, 1906. Further Reading Langley's writings include The New Astronomy (1888) and Experiments in Aerodynamics (1891; 2d ed. 1901). See also C.M. Manly, Langley Memoir on Mechanical Flight (1911). There are few complete accounts of Langley's life; a useful appreciation of his early achievements is in G. B. Goode, ed., The Smithsonian Institution, 1846-1896 (1897). Bernard Jaffe, Men of Science in America (1944), contains an excellent summary of Langley's work. Langley's life is also dealt with in Charles Doolittle Walcott, Biographical Memoir of Samuel Pierpont Langley (1912), and in Joseph Gordon Vaeth, Langley: Man of Science and Flight (1966). The early history of flight is recorded in Archibald Black, The Story of Flying (1940), and Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., and others, eds., The American Heritage History of Flight (1962). |