October 7 in A.A. History

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 [right: both men, respectively]. 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]. The model 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 these successes, Langley received two War Department grants to develop a piloted airplane, totaling $70,000 [~$2.8 million in 2026]. The funds came through the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was secretary (top executive).

Langley would make a second attempt in December, which would also 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).

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

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 [near right, c. 1905–15] between 1915 and about 1930, was published in both German and English. Although it is considered a central work in Jung’s œuvre, his estate (Jung died in 1961) would not permit its publication before 2000, when it began preparations for its release.

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