The first trial took place at Widewater, Va., on September 7, 1903. The machine was placed on a barge on the Potomac River; the pilot, Charles M. Manley, Professor Langley's able young assistant, took his seat in the little boat amidships, and a catapult arrangement, like the early Wright starting device, sent it into the air. To the bitter disappointment of Langley and his friends the machine dived into the water. It came up immediately, the daring Manley undaunted and uninjured. Investigation showed that in launching it the post that held the guys which steadied the front wings had been so bent that the forward planes were useless. At the next trial, December 8, the rear guy post was injured in a similar accident and the machine fell over backward. This ended the experiments, as the Government appropriation had been spent, and the machine was repaired and stored in the Smithsonian Institution, where it is yet. Professor Langley died a few years after this, feeling that his great work had never been appreciated or understood by the world. Many have declared that he died of a broken heart as a result of the frequent ridicule of the public and press. Although he never saw the triumph of aerial navigation, he died firm in the belief that it was only a matter of time and the working out of theories then laid down until man could fly. His last hours were cheered by the receipt of a copy of resolutions of appreciation passed by the Aero Club of America. In the meantime, the Frenchman Ader had actually flown in a power-driven machine of his own construction, at private tests, while Captain Le Bris and L. P. Mouillard, Frenchmen, and Otto Lilienthal, a German, had been carrying on important glider flights. Also Sir Hiram Maxim, the American-born inventor who was knighted in England, made a great aeroplane that was tested with some success. The machine was built in 1889 and was mounted on a track. It was called a multiplane--that is, it had several planes, one above the other, and was driven by a powerful steam engine. The whole machine weighed three and a half tons and had a total surface of 5,500 square feet. During its tests on the track it lifted a few inches off the ground. Thus Maxim claimed that his was the first machine that had ever lifted a man off the ground by its own power. It was Otto Lilienthal, however, the "flying man," who established a systematic study of one phase of aviation which became general enough to be called the Lilienthal School. This was the system of practising on gliders before attempting to go into the air with power-driven machines. As will be remembered, this was exactly the system the Wright brothers followed out.