Walcott on December 23, 1916, wrote what Orville considered a perfunctory letter saying: “... the importance of securing for the National Museum the Wright aeroplane which was exhibited at the opening of the new buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been suggested to me.”
Orville Wright replied that he would be glad to take up the question with Dr. Walcott in a personal interview. A few days later the two met in Washington, but it was soon evident to Orville that Dr. Walcott’s attitude had not changed; that he did not want that original Wright machine which had flown exhibited beside the Langley machine which had failed to fly.
When Orville found that Walcott’s attitude had not changed in the six years since the former correspondence, he gave the question no further consideration.
Meanwhile, in 1914, after the Federal courts had upheld the Wright patents in the suits against Glenn H. Curtiss and others, and recognized the Wrights as “pioneers” in the practical art of flying with heavier-than-air machines, an astounding thing happened.
A few days after the final court decision had been delivered, Lincoln Beachey, a Curtiss stockholder, telegraphed to Secretary Walcott, of the Smithsonian, asking permission to attempt a flight with the original Langley machine. That proposal was not accepted; but two months later, when Glenn H. Curtiss himself said he would like to test the Langley machine, his request was granted. The Smithsonian entered into a deal with Curtiss in which he was to receive a payment of $2,000, and was permitted to take the original Langley plane from the Smithsonian to his shop at Hammondsport, New York. There he made numerous vital changes in the machine, using knowledge of aerodynamics discovered by the Wrights but never possessed by Langley. No information is available to indicate that the Smithsonian offered any objection to these alterations being made. The Smithsonian’s official observer, in connection with the tests of the machine, was Dr. A. F. Zahm, who had been technical expert for Curtiss in the recent lawsuits and was to serve again in that capacity in another suit soon to follow. No one officially representing any disinterested scientific body was present during the time the changes in the machine were made nor during the time it was tested.
It seems highly improbable that Dr. Walcott could have been so unintelligent or so uninformed as not to know about the recent decision of the U. S. Court of Appeals against Curtiss; and equally improbable that he could have been unaware of Zahm’s relations with Curtiss as expert witness and adviser. One may well wonder, too, if Dr. Walcott could have failed to understand why Curtiss had recently become interested in testing the Langley plane. In hundreds of pages of direct testimony in the lawsuits, neither Curtiss nor Zahm had mentioned Langley’s name, though they had more than once referred to Chanute, Maxim, Henson, Marriott, Boulton, Pilcher, Harte, and other pioneers. One may further wonder if Walcott could have been unaware when, in 1913, the Smithsonian awarded the Langley medal to Curtiss, that he had already been pronounced an infringer of the Wright patents by a Federal court, and that another decision in a higher court was pending. It almost looked as if there might have been an intent to try to influence that decision.
Curtiss had a strong motive for wanting to make it appear that the Langley plane could have flown. The United States Court of Appeals had held that the Wrights were pioneers in the field of heavier-than-air flying-machines, and that therefore their patent claims were entitled to a “liberal interpretation.” If Curtiss could demonstrate, or seem to demonstrate, that a machine capable of flight had been built before the Wright machine, then he could weaken their claims, to his financial advantage, in a patent suit he expected to have to defend. In consequence of the important changes that were made, Curtiss finally was able to make several short hops, of less than five seconds, with the reconstructed machine, in May and June, 1914, over Lake Keuka, at Hammondsport, N. Y. Then the Smithsonian, in its annual report of the U. S. National Museum for that year, falsely stated that the original Langley plane had been flown “without modification”! And the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1914, with equally glaring falsity, said: “It [the Langley machine] has demonstrated that with its original structure and power, it is capable of flying with a pilot and several hundred pounds of useful load. It is the first aeroplane in the history of the world of which this can truthfully be said”! (Italics supplied.)
The Institution’s annual report for 1915 continued to repeat such untruths. “The tests thus far made have shown that former Secretary Langley had succeeded in building the first aeroplane capable of sustained free flight with a man.”
Similar misstatements were made in the Institution’s reports for 1916, 1917, 1918, and afterward.
Altogether here had been something probably unique in scientific procedure. A test was made purporting to determine if the original Langley plane was capable of flight; but the test was not made with the machine as designed and built by Langley, nor with an exact copy of it. No disinterested official observer was present. Misstatements were published about the results, and no information was furnished, regarding the changes made, to enable anyone to learn the truth. To have made one more honest test of the Langley plane that had immediately crashed each time it was launched over the Potomac would have been permissible. But for a scientific institution officially to distort scientific facts, and in collaboration with a man who stood to gain financially by what he was doing, has been called worse than scandalous.