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The most dramatic moment In the history of human flight

It was the most dramatic moment in the history of flight, and the inventor was so excited that he could not gaze upon the scene, but withdrew into the woods.

News of this great success was received with mingled rapture and disbelief. To Langley it seemed that his task was ended. He had solved a scientific problem, and it was for the commercial w′orkl now to develop the idea if it cared to do so; he wanted no financial gain. There the matter rested for some years, when Langley was persuaded to try a man-carrying aeroplane. He made one in 1903, which, with its engine, weighed 125 pounds. He could think of no better way of launching it than of starting from the roof of the same house-boat as before, and so it was all arranged.

But then came a sad mishap. At the fatal moment something went wrong with the starting mechanism, causing the aeroplane to plunge into the river. Fickle public opinion turned against the hapless inventor, and poured ridicule upon him.

The victory of 1896 was swallowed up in the defeat of 1903. Langley uttered no complaint, but he went home and said to a friend: “My life’s work is a failure.” He died in 1906, leaving his machine lying as a curiosity in his workshop at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where Langley was a professor.

In 1914 his old pupils brought out the old aeroplane and fitted floats to it, like those of a modern seaplane. Then they launched it on the Potomac; a pilot took his seat in it; the engine was started, the propeller hummed, the aeroplane scudded for a little way, and then rose and flew like a bird!