The Wright Brothers

by Fred C. Kelly

After the exchange of letters with Chief Justice Taft, Orville Wright still delayed sending the Kitty Hawk plane to England. There was nothing impetuous about what he did. Not until early in 1928, or fourteen years after the fraudulent tests at Hammondsport, with the Smithsonian still showing no intention to correct its false record of those flights, did he send the machine to the Science Museum at South Kensington. The arrangement he made with the Science Museum was that the plane should stay there for not less than five years, and permanently unless brought back to the United States within his lifetime.

Early in 1928, a bill was introduced in Congress to ascertain which was the first heavier-than-air flying-machine. Shortly afterward the Smithsonian adopted a resolution declaring that “to the Wrights belongs the credit of making the first successful flight with a power-propelled heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.”

That resolution was, of course, superfluous, for there had never been any question, even by the Smithsonian, as to the first machine to make a sustained flight. But the Smithsonian continued to claim for Professor Langley credit for the invention of the first machine capable of flight.

Dr. Charles G. Abbot became the Secretary and Director of the Smithsonian Institution in 1928, succeeding Dr. Walcott, who had died in 1927. Soon after he became the head of the Institution, Dr. Abbot invited Orville Wright to go to lunch with him at the Carlton Hotel in Washington. In the course of their talk Dr. Abbot expressed the wish that they might come to an agreement by which the Kitty Hawk plane could be returned to America and placed under the care of the Smithsonian in the National Museum. Orville Wright said that this could easily be done. All that he asked for, he said, was a correction in the Smithsonian publications of the false and misleading statements previously made in those publications. Dr. Abbot expressed a willingness to do so, provided this could be accomplished without injuring the reputation of his predecessor or the prestige of the Institution.

But the painful fact was that the Smithsonian, however spotless its previous reputation, had committed a reprehensible act, and its reputation and prestige were bound to suffer when its guilt became known. Having committed a serious offense, one or the other of two courses were open to it: (1) to confess its guilt and make a full, frank correction; or (2) to try to keep the misdeed concealed. Unfortunately, the Institution adopted, at the beginning, the latter course, evidently in the belief that its great prestige, acquired through an honorable past, could crush any imputation against it. Indeed, that course did prove successful up to the time Orville Wright sent the Kitty Hawk plane abroad.

Dr. Abbot had not been responsible for the disgraceful situation he inherited when he became Secretary of the Smithsonian and found himself in the unenviable position of having to make an embarrassing decision. But it seemed as if he could not quite muster the courage to break away from the course the Institution had been following. Instead, he at first tried to justify the Institution’s previous attitude, though he did concede that it was not true that the Langley plane had been flown at Hammondsport “without modification” as the Smithsonian had published. There were “many differences,” he admitted. “Some of the changes were favorable, some unfavorable, to success,” he declared. “Just what effects, favorable or unfavorable, the sum total of these changes produced can never be precisely known.” Orville Wright, on the other hand, insisted that the “effects, favorable or unfavorable” could easily be determined by experts if only the changes were made known to them.

But Dr. Abbot still failed to publish the changes.

Since then Orville Wright more than once let the Smithsonian know what he thought should be done to settle the controversy. In a letter he sent to Dr. Abbot on December 23, 1933, he wrote:

The points involved in the straightening of the record are not on matters of mere opinion. They are on matters of fact, which at this time can be easily and definitely established. All that I have demanded in the past has been that there be an impartial investigation of the matters in controversy and that the record then be made to agree with the facts.

The suggestion made by me in 1925, three years before the plane left this country, that a committee be appointed to make an impartial investigation and settle the controversy, received from the Smithsonian no response. Nevertheless, I shall be most happy now to join with you in the selection of such a committee, with the understanding that the committee will fully investigate the matters in controversy and will make a full report of its findings.