ABSTRACT
The Smithsonian is an ideal, and the men and women who have served it are what has made it great. It has attracted keen minds and extraordinary talent, sometimes genius, in an everchanging continuum. Samuel Pierpont Langley was endowed with a degree of mechanical genius that somehow managed to develop without benefit of college training. Charles Doolittle Walcott had a deep admiration for his predecessor, Langley. His lasting faith in Langley's aeronautical experiments led in a way to the famous but unfortunate Smithsonian-Wright controversy, which took many years to resolve. What turned out to be a brilliant feather in the Smithsonian's hat during the Walcott years was the encouragement and financial help the Institution gave to Robert H. Goddard as early as 1915, at the beginning of his pioneering experiments with rockets. The man who succeeded Walcott, New Hampshire-born Charles Greeley Abbot, was a protégé of Langley and, like Langley, made his greatest contribution to the Smithsonian in the field of astrophysics.
