October 7 in A.A. History

	In 1903, test pilot Charles Manly attempted to make the first-ever manned flight, in Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley’s heavier-than-air craft, which was launched by catapult. Although it had been largely designed and built by others, Manly contributed to the design and engineering. The craft lacked landing gear and had controls only for pitch and yaw, but none for roll [left]. It plunged into the Potomac River “like a handful of mortar,” according to one reporter. Langley claimed that the crash resulted from a wing clipping part of the catapult.

    Seven-and-a-half years earlier, on 6 May 1896, Langley had launched—also from a catapult—the 25-pound [~11 kg] Aerodrome Number Five [right], a model which made two flights, one of 1,005 meters [~3,300 feet] and another of 700 meters [~2,300 feet] at 40 kph [~25 mph] landing in the water, as planned. This was 10 times farther than any previous heavier-than-air flying machine, making it the world’s first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. Six months later, on 11 November, his Number 6 model flew more than 1,500 meters [>5,000 feet].
    In 1898, based on the successes, Langley received two War Department grants to develop a piloted airplane, totaling $70,000 [~$2.7 million in 2025] from the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was secretary (top executive).
    Langley would make a second attempt in December, which also would end in failure. Newspapers would mock the unsuccessful flights, and some members of Congress would harshly criticize the project. Remarkably, Manly would survive both crashes.
    The Big Book, Alcoholics Anonymous, makes reference to these events in “We Agnostics” (p. 51) [below: newpaper articles about and photos of these flights, the leftmost image by Alexander Graham Bell].

In 1978, the Finnish Alcoholics Anonymous Convention, which celebrated the 30th anniversary of A.A. in Finland, opened with several delegates in attendance from the 5th World Service Meeting held in Finland in the days prior.

		In 2009, The Red Book [far left: cover; near left: p. 119], a red leather‐bound folio manuscript created by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung [right, c. 1905–15] between 1915 and about 1930, was published, in both German and English. Although The Red Book isconsidered a central work in Jung’s œuvre, the estate of Jung, who died in 1961, would not permit its publication prior to 2000, when they began instead to make preparations for its release.

    The book recounts and comments on Jung’s psychological experiments conducted between 1913 and 1916, drawing from earlier manuscripts—seven private journals—journals—known collectively as the Black Books [right], which he first drafted in 1913–15 and 1917.