Langley’s machine had flown without a pilot. A little later the inventor announced himself ready for the final test. Like his first model, his machine was a tandem monoplane. Its weight with pilot was 830 pounds and its plane or wing surface was 1040 square feet. It was fifty-two feet long and its arched wings measured forty-eight feet from tip to tip. The gasoline motor with which it was equipped developed fifty-two horse power and with all accessories weighed about 250 pounds. At Widewater, Virginia, September 7, 1903, the machine was tested. On a barge it was carried out into the Potomac River, with Charles M. Manley, Professor Langley’s assistant, who was to pilot it in its first flight. The moment for the supreme test arrived. A mechanical device on the barge shot the machine and pilot into the air. To the disappointment and dismay of the spectators, the machine plunged front downward into the water. It was rescued with the young pilot unharmed. Another attempt was made to launch it in the air with a similar result, except that this time it dropped into the water rear end downward. The government gave the project no further encouragement, and the query ascribed to Darius Green remained unanswered. Professor Langley died a few years afterward, his life shortened, it is believed, through the blighting of the hope that he had long entertained to be the first successfully to navigate the air. Experiments with Gliders Through the latter part of the last century experiments were carried on with gliders. Among those who achieved much success in this field was the German, Otto Lilienthal, the “flying man,” who made remarkable glides in the early nineties. He would run along the crest of a hill, jump from a precipitous declivity and sail on the wings of his glider over the valley below, guiding his course up and down and from side to side with a rudder attached to the machine. It was his idea that the problem of aviation was to be solved by perfecting the glider so that it could be controlled in its downward flight and then adding a propelling power that would sustain it and lift it through the air. After the death of Lilienthal by accident in 1896, others continued experiments along similar lines with the same purpose in view. Among these were Octave Chanute and A. M. Herring. They tried at first a monoplane glider and afterward one of five planes. This number they reduced to two. The rudder was made of movable horizontal and vertical blades. It was found that the glider with two planes, the biplane, was most satisfactory. Herring made for this a compressed air engine and claimed that with this he accomplished a flight of seventy-three feet. There is some doubt, however, as to this claim and some question as to whether it was an upward flight or a downward glide. Aviation at the Beginning of the Present Century