Samuel Pierpont Langley

Samuel Pierpont Langley was an American aviation pioneer, astronomer and physicist who invented the bolometer, born in Roxbury, Boston, on 22 August 1834. He attended Boston Latin School and English High School of Boston and became an assistant in the Harvard College Observatory, then worked at the United States Naval Academy, where he was sent to restore the Academy's small observatory. In 1867 he became the director of the Allegheny Observatory and a professor of astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, a post he kept until 1891 even after he became the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1887. He founded the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1875, and in 1886 received the inaugural Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences for his contributions to solar physics.