ing out the shop tests. At last, on the 7th of October 1903, from a
house-boat moored in the Potomac river, about forty miles below
Washington, the first trial was made. The machine caught in the
launching mechanism, and fell into the river, where it broke. It was
repaired, and a second trial was made on the 8th of December 1903. Again
the machine failed to clear the launching car, and plunged headlong into
the river, where the frame was broken by zealous efforts to salve it in
the dark. Nine days after this final failure the Wrights made their
first successful power-driven flight, at Kitty Hawk, on the coast of
North Carolina.

Langley was almost seventy years old when his last and most ambitious
machine failed. He lived for two years more. If his contributions to the
science of flight, which are his chief title to fame, were ruled out of
the account, he would still be remembered as something more than a good
astronomer--a man of many sciences, who cared little for his own
advancement, and much for the advancement of knowledge.

From what has been said it is now possible to conceive how things stood
when the brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, first attacked the problem
of flying in the air. Men had flown, or rather had glided through the
air, without engines to support and drive them. Machines had flown,
without men to control and guide them. If the two achievements could be
combined in one, the problem was solved; but the combination, besides
bringing together both sets of difficulties and dangers, added new
dangers and difficulties, greater than either. Plainly, there were two
ways, and only two, of going about the business. Professor Langley held
that in order to learn to fly, you must have a flying machine to begin
with. Wilbur Wright, whose views on the point never varied from first to
last, held that you must have a man to begin with. The brothers were
impatient of 'the wasteful extravagance of mounting delicate and costly
machinery on wings which no one knew how to manage'. When they began
their experiments they had already reached the conclusion that the
problem of constructing wings to carry the machine, and the problem of
constructing a motor to drive it, presented no serious difficulty; but
that the problem of equilibrium had been the real stumbling-block, and
that this problem of equilibrium was the problem of flight itself. 'It
seemed to us', says Wilbur Wright, 'that the main reason why the problem
had