Various smoothings of the long line and their tangent bundles (Q1191726)

The long line and long ray are the two best known examples of nonmetrizable manifolds. It has been known for a long time that these manifolds admit smooth structures, but it was not known if the smoothing was unique. This paper gives \(2^{\aleph_ 1}\) non-diffeomorphic smoothings, the maximum number possible. To show that the smoothings are different, it is shown that the tangent bundles are not homeomorphic. In some cases, the tangent bundles are distinguished by elementary topological properties.