Charles Manley smoked his cigarette nervously and looked at the assembled reporters, other scientists, assorted government officials, and family members who had come to see man fly. He stared at the giant aerodrome on top of the houseboat. The fog was light off the river, and he brushed the droplets from the wings. The wings flexed. This bothered him. He had built a 52-horsepower engine to power the aerodrome, and it was heavy. It was more powerful than any engine so far that had been mounted to an airplane.

The aerodrome, according to his boss—the secretary of the Smithsonian, Samuel Langley—should fly like a bird. The model aerodrome had flown very well, and this was just a large version of that model, with floats for landing on water and a small cockpit mounted under the plane. The thing that bothered Langley was the flimsiness of the craft and the position of the cockpit. Even if he could land the plane, he would be underwater. The thought was that he could just swim out, but the water looked damn cold for swimming. Manley finished his cigarette and looked at the men who were waiting for his signal. It was October 7, 1903.

Another man who felt nervous was Charles D. Walcott; he was then the chairman of the executive committee of the National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics for the government, and he would eventually take over as secretary of the Smithsonian when Langley died. He had convinced the War Department to give Langley $50,000 to develop an airplane. The money was now gone, and five years had passed. He had been asked more than a few times where the airplane was. Secretary Langley had the dilettante's attitude. His model aerodrome had flown and, in his mind, this proved that man could fly in heavier-than-air ships. This would just put the seal on the bottle. It was the same design, only larger and with a very powerful engine. The aerodrome should lift very easily into the sky, fly in great circles, and then land. Walcott could then tell the War Department its money was well spent. Secretary Langley was so confident, he didn't bother coming out onto the deck of the houseboat to observe. He would be notified by telegraph of the success.

Manley stripped down to his flying suit, dashed his cigarette, and climbed into the cockpit through the guide wires. He started the engine and allowed it to heat up. The engine was so large that it vibrated through the plane and shook Manley's body. He waited. This was the Smithsonian's big moment. Secretary Langley would prove that cutting-edge aeronautics were in the possession of the august institution and would not be in the possession of cranks flying out of garages, in backyards, or across the sands of Kitty Hawk. Manley gave the signal, and the great catapult shot him down the guiding ramps of the houseboat. He felt himself pressed back against the rickety chair in the bottom of the aerodrome, with the engine roaring furiously. Manley reached the end of the catapult track and found himself staring straight down at the water. The aerodrome fell like a sack of cement. The motor screamed in his ears the whole way down. There was no lift at all, just a horrible plunge straight down. It was as if they had built a fifty-thousand-dollar brick.

Manley felt the freezing water like an electric shock. He was beneath the plane under the surface of the icy Potomac. He struggled to get free of the sinking plane and had a moment of panic when he couldn't get free of the cables from the wings. The motor was an anchor heading for the bottom of the river. Manley finally managed to get to the surface, spitting out river water, where he waved to the reporters, family members, witnesses, and government officials who were staring at him from above as if they had just seen a sea creature. Manley could not escape the feeling that they were staring at him as if he were at fault. The term pilot error had not been coined yet, but it was coming.

The man who stared at Manley the hardest was Walcott. This would not do. The War Department was furious. They had spent fifty thousand on a brick with wings. Secretary Langley immediately went into damage control and assured the press that it was a technical glitch with the launching mechanism. The catapult had failed, and that was why the plane took a header into the river. Manley was fished out, and then he smoked a cigarette. He was wrapped in a blanket and later interrogated by Langley. He agreed quickly. He had felt something at the end of the catapult, and that had tripped up the plane. He told Langley that if they would fix that, she would fly like a soaring eagle.

The New York Times ran a headline the next day: “FLYING MACHINE FIASCO Prof Langley's Airship Proves A Complete Failure.” The St. Louis Republic followed with, “FLYING MACHINE BUILT BY LANGLEY AN UTTER FAILURE.” The San Francisco Call wasn't much better: “LANGLEY'S FLYING MACHINE FAILS COMPLETELY.” An editorial in the New York Times went after Langley personally: “The ridiculous fiasco which attended the attempt at aerial navigation in the Langley flying machine was not unexpected, unless possibly by the distinguished Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution who devised it, and his assistants.”1

Brutal. It was all blamed on the launching catapult. Surely it was not the plane itself. On December 8, the aerodrome was ready again. The houseboat was put into anchor at the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. The Potomac had ice on it, and a freezing wind punished the assembled reporters. The press had been alerted again, and the shores were lined with reporters, along with boats chartered by newspapers. Secretary Langley was there this time and had brought a party of friends and Smithsonian employees. People drank champagne and smoked cigars. It had the feeling of a holiday. Christmas was coming. Langley was confident. This time, he would show the world what science can do in the hands of a farsighted and competent man like himself. Walcott was not there but was waiting for news. The press has been brutal to him, too, so Walcott's reputation was on the line as well.

The weather was not cooperating. There was ice in the river, and the sky had darkened. Wind gusts kept moving the houseboat out of position. Manley went down to meet with Secretary Langley and others to make sure they would still launch. They had to. The money was gone. Patience was gone. Besides, it would be a brilliant success, and they all would have some brandy by the fire when it was over. And they sure didn't want to be eclipsed by the bicycle mechanics at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Manley stripped down again. This time, he wore a union suit, a cork-lined jacket, socks, and light shoes. He did not want to drown in the Potomac.

He once again climbed into the aerodrome and ran the engine up. He checked the controls and waited for the engine to warm. At 4: 45 p.m., he gave the signal, and once again he shot down the tracks of the catapult. Manley reached the edge, and this time the plane rose quickly, then turned on its back and headed straight down into the icy Potomac. Once again, the engine whined furiously until the great gulp when the plane flipped over, and then silence. Manley felt the freezing water like a thousand knives. His breath went out, his body feeling the shock like a bucket of ice water on a hot day. Manley began to struggle furiously to get free, but he was even farther under water this time.

The plane had hit the icebound water like a downward-plunging missile. Manley found himself in total darkness underwater and, worse, his jacket had caught on a sharp edge of the plane. He struggled out of his jacket and swam for the surface, where he hit a ceiling of ice. He was blocked under an ice paddy, and he was freezing to death. Manley swam frantically, punching the ice with his fists, until he finally found open water.

He emerged again, this time screaming and swearing. The people on the ship once again stared at him as if he were some sort of beached whale that had washed up on the shore. Manley waved his arms, which felt like they were weighed down by lead, and shouted to get him the fuck out of the water. This was at a time when profanity was seen as very bad form. He didn't care. He was freezing while the people stared down.

Manley was fished out of the water again. He was so frozen that his clothes had to be cut off of him. Workers wrapped him in a blanket, and by the time he reached the houseboat, he had drunk some whiskey. When Secretary Langley came over to him, Manley began to curse and didn't stop. The old man Langley had nearly killed him. Manley was shivering uncontrollably and cussing in a way few had heard before. Listening to the blasphemies of his engineer, Samuel Langley knew that his quest for flight had ended, and the great embarrassment was at hand for himself and the Smithsonian.

Walcott got word that the War Department was done funding anything to do with flight, or the Smithsonian for that matter. Langley tried again to pass it off on the launching mechanism, but nobody was buying it. The verdict on Langley came from “army engineers who finally studied the design and realized that the aerodrome was fatally flawed, lacking both sufficient power and sufficient lift. Going from a model to a full-sized aircraft involved computing weight to thrust ratios that aerodynamicists had yet to formalize; with no background in mathematics and scant in engineering, Langley had ignored computations of scale and had never realized it requires eight times the lift to keep a craft double the weight in the air.”2

Secretary Langley pledged to fight on, but the money faucet was shut off. A congressman from Arkansas, Joseph Taylor Robinson, twisted the knife further: “The only thing Langley ever made fly was government money.”3 Fifty thousand dollars was out the window. Secretary Langley abandoned aviation and died three years later, a defeated man who had dragged the reputation of the Smithsonian down with his aerodrome. The aerodrome had been fished out and lashed to the boat like a harpooned whale and towed back to port. The Langley flyer's wings trailed in the water, and the propeller turned from the current. It was as if the flyer wanted to go again.

After Langley's death, when Charles Walcott became secretary of the Smithsonian, his goal quickly became to restore not only Langley's reputation but also the Smithsonian's, and—more importantly—his own. He had egg all over his bearded visage from Langley's folly. This would not do. Something had to be done. The damaged Langley aerodrome was crated and stored in a Smithsonian warehouse with other artifacts. The pilot Manley, of all people, knew Langley's plane was not airworthy, and, had someone told him that it would one day fly, he wouldn't have believed it. He knew a brick when he saw one, and that fifty-thousand-dollar brick had almost cost him his life. Charles Manley didn't understand that there were people who would do anything to turn a brick into a plane. He didn't even know Glenn Curtiss's name.