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Samuel Pierpont Langley (August 22, 1834 – February 27, 1906) was an American aviation pioneer, astronomer and physicist who invented the bolometer. He was the third secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a professor of astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh , where he was the director of the Allegheny Observatory .
Langley's first failure. Samuel Pierpont Langley was secretary to the Smithsonian Institution from 1887 until the year of his death in 1906. During this period, and in due course supported by the United States War Department, he conducted aeronautical experiments, culminating in his manned Aerodrome A.
Claims to the first powered flight: Shivkar Bapuji Talpade in the Marutsakhā (1895), [45] [46] [Note 1] Clément Ader in the Avion III (1897), [47] Gustave Whitehead in his No's. 21 and 22 aeroplanes (1901–1903), [48] [49] [50] [Note 2] Richard Pearse in his monoplane (1903–1904), [51] [52] Samuel Pierpont Langley's Aerodrome A (1903), [47 ...
The Langley Aerodrome is a pioneering but unsuccessful manned, tandem wing-configuration powered flying machine, designed at the close of the 19th century by Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Langley. The U.S. Army paid $50,000 for the project in 1898 after Langley's successful flights with small-scale unmanned models two years earlier.
First failure of Langley's manned Aerodrome on the Potomac River, 7 October 1903. After a distinguished career in astronomy and shortly before becoming Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Pierpont Langley started a serious investigation into aerodynamics at what is today the University of Pittsburgh.
The first bolometers made by Langley consisted of two steel, platinum, or palladium foil strips covered with lampblack. [ 4 ] [ 5 ] One strip was shielded from radiation and one exposed to it. The strips formed two branches of a Wheatstone bridge which was fitted with a sensitive galvanometer and connected to a battery.
Samuel Pierpont Langley, the third Secretary of the Smithsonian, founded the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory on the south yard of the Smithsonian Castle (on the U.S. National Mall) on March 1,1890. The Astrophysical Observatory's initial, primary purpose was to "record the amount and character of the Sun's heat [1]".
February 27 – Samuel Pierpont Langley (born 1834), American astronomer. March 8 – Henry Baker Tristram (born 1822), English ornithologist. April 19 – Pierre Curie (born 1859), French winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics. May 15 – James Blyth (born 1839), Scottish electrical engineer. July 5 – Paul Drude (born 1863), German physicist .