Needless to say, the Washington critics had a field day. The Brooklyn Eagle quoted Representative Hitchcock as saying, "You tell Langley for me ... that the only thing he ever made fly was Government money." Representative Robinson characterized Langley as "a professor ... wandering in his dreams of flight ... who was given to building ... castles in the air."
The War Department, in its final report on the Langley project, concluded "we are still far from the ultimate goal, and it would seem as if years of constant work and study by experts, together with the expenditure of thousands of dollars, would still be necessary before we can hope to produce an apparatus of practical utility on these lines." Eight days after Langley's spectacular failure, a sturdy, well-designed craft, costing about $1000, struggled into the air in Kitty Hawk, defining for all time the moment when humankind mastered the skies.
In spite of 18 years of well-funded and concerted effort by Langley to achieve immortality, his singular contribution to the invention of the airplane was the pair of 30-lb aerodromes that flew in 1986. He died in 1906 after a series of strokes, a broken and disappointed man.