Though the Wright brothers were the first to make a practical man-carrying, power-propelled aeroplane, they were not the first men to be carried off the ground by such a machine. The first man admitted by most authorities to have flown in a power-driven aeroplane was Clement Ader, a Frenchman, who had spent his life in the study of air navigation. His first machine was of monoplane type driven by a forty-horsepower steam engine. It was called the _Eole_ and it had its first test before a few of the inventor's friends near the town of Gretz on October 9, 1890, making, according to witnesses, a free flight of 150 feet. Ader built two more machines in subsequent years and succeeded in interesting the French military authorities. In October of 1897 he made several secret official tests of his last machine, the _Avion_. It had a spread of 270 square feet, weighed 1,100 pounds, and was driven by a forty-horsepower steam engine. The day for the trial was squally but he persevered. The flier ran at high speed over the ground, several times lifted its wheels clear off its track and finally turned over, smashing the machine. The officials did not consider the exhibition successful, and the support of the army was withdrawn. Ader in disgust gave the _Avion_ to a French museum and abandoned aviation, with success almost within his grasp. Shortly before this time Prof. Samuel Pierpont Langley of the Smithsonian Institution and Octave Chanute, the great American pioneers in aviation, were making their early experiments. Professor Langley experimented with numerous kinds of model fliers, and finally, on May 6, 1896, launched a steam-propelled model over the Potomac River. According to the scientist Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, who was present, it flew between 80 and 100 feet and then "settled down so softly and gently that it touched the water without the least shock, and was in fact immediately ready for another trial." The second test was equally successful. The speed was between twenty and twenty-five miles an hour and the distance flown about 3,000 feet. Professor Langley's first aerodrome, as he called it (the word is now used to mean aviation field), was made in the form of a tandem monoplane about sixteen feet long from end to end and with wings measuring about thirteen feet from tip to tip. The steam engine and propellers were placed between the forward and aft planes. The whole machine weighed about thirty pounds and of course was too small to carry a pilot.