Part 21

“Indeed the Smithsonian does want it!” exclaimed Dr. Bell. He was sincere in thinking so and requested Dr. Walcott to get in touch with Orville Wright.

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.

After the Langley machine had been restored as nearly as possible to its original state, it was placed on exhibition by the Smithsonian. Soon afterward it bore a label that falsely proclaimed it to be “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.”

But neither in connection with the exhibit of the Langley plane nor in any report of the Smithsonian Institution was there any hint of the fundamental changes made at Hammondsport, without which the plane could not possibly have carried its weight. One of these changes had to do with the supporting posts on the wings. Professor Langley had not known--indeed, no one knew until the Wrights’ wind-tunnel experiments established the facts--where the center of the air pressure would be on a curved surface, and consequently he had failed to place his wing-trussing posts where they were most needed. In the attempts to fly the machine over the Potomac, in 1903, the wing that bore the greater part of the weight had each time collapsed at the moment the apparatus left the starting platform. (Lacking the knowledge about curved surfaces that later was available, those in charge of the 1903 trials had blamed the trouble on the launching apparatus.) At the Hammondsport tests, the trussing posts were moved thirty inches rearward. This brought the guy posts almost exactly in the same plane with the center of pressure on the wings and thus eliminated the backward pull that had wrecked the machine in the 1903 tests.

Three fundamental changes were made in the design of the wings themselves: (1) The camber was greatly changed; (2) the shape of the leading edge was entirely different; (3) the aspect ratio--the ratio of span to chord--was increased. These three features are the most important characteristics in determining the efficiency of a wing. The change of the camber of itself may increase the efficiency of a wing by thirty per cent. And not only were the wings changed as to design, but they were strengthened by various means of reinforcing and trussing not used by Langley. Even the cloth on the wings was improved by varnishing, to make the wings more efficient. Langley had not used varnish on the cloth.

Numerous changes were made in other parts of the machine. The large fixed vertical keel surface, situated below the main frame in 1903, was entirely omitted in 1914. This omission improved the machine’s stability. A different kind of rudder was used. The position of the “Pénaud tail” used by Langley was raised about ten inches to increase the stability of the machine, and was connected to a modern steering post, to give better control. The forward corners of the original Langley propellers were cut off in the manner of the early Wright propellers to increase their efficiency. As the system of control Langley had used was not adequate, the aileron system, covered by Wright patents, a system unknown to Langley, was added.

How did all these changes become known? Orville Wright called attention to them in an affidavit in 1915 in the Wright-Curtiss lawsuit. One way to learn most of the facts is astonishingly simple. All that is necessary to any observer who knows what to look for is to make careful comparisons of the Smithsonian photographs of the original Langley machine with Smithsonian photographs of the machine tested at Hammondsport.

It was learned, too, that even the engine used by Langley was changed in several respects. A modern type carburetor, a new intake manifold, a magneto ignition, and a modern radiator were installed.

Though all these changes and many others were made in the machine at Hammondsport, the Smithsonian published only a few of them--the less important. It did not tell of the fundamental changes. And the Institution made statements that, by implication, practically amounted to a denial that any changes of importance had been made.

By omitting from its published reports at the time and for many years afterward, the facts about the changes in the Langley machine, the Smithsonian Institution succeeded in deluding the public. If the stories about these fake tests had been issued by Curtiss, who conducted them, or by an organization less well known than the Smithsonian, they might not have been taken seriously. But when false and misleading announcements were backed by the prestige of a famous scientific institution, it was possible to have the fraudulent character of the experiments pass generally unsuspected. When the reports of Secretary Walcott of the Smithsonian Institution said the “_original_” Langley machine had made “flights,” and when the report of the National Museum said the Langley machine had been flown “without modification,” such statements, untrue though they were, naturally carried weight. Indeed, the misstatements were so widely accepted as fact that they began to find their way into school text-books and into encyclopedias.

Griffith Brewer, the English aeronaut, delivered a lecture before the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, in October, 1921, and exposed the fraudulent nature of the Hammondsport tests. In this lecture he mentioned many of the vital changes made in the Langley plane before any attempt was made to fly it. Dr. Walcott made a statement in reply to Brewer. Up to this time Orville Wright had thought that Walcott could have been ignorant of those changes; but after reading the Walcott statement he was convinced that there was nothing accidental or unintentional about the misstatements published by the Smithsonian regarding the tests at Hammondsport.

While the Kitty Hawk plane rested in its storage place, subject to possible fire hazards, officials of the Science Museum at South Kensington, London, England, had made requests to have the machine for exhibition there. After Orville Wright became convinced that none of the Members or Regents of the Smithsonian Institution or any other influential persons were enough interested in establishing the facts in controversy to go to the trouble of making an investigation, he reluctantly decided, in 1923, to accede to the requests from London. In reply to letters deploring this decision, he has expressed his reasons as follows:

I believe my course in sending our Kitty Hawk machine to a foreign museum is the only way of correcting the history of the flying-machine, which by false and misleading statements has been perverted by the Smithsonian Institution.

In its campaign to discredit others in the flying art, the Smithsonian has issued scores of these false and misleading statements. They can be proved to be false and misleading from documents. But the people of today do not take the trouble to examine this evidence.

With this machine in any American museum the national pride would be satisfied; nothing further would be done and the Smithsonian would continue its propaganda. In a foreign museum this machine will be a constant reminder of the reason of its being there, and after the people and petty jealousies of this day are gone, the historians of the future may examine impartially the evidence and make history accord with it.

Your regret that this old machine must leave our country can hardly be so great as my own.

Reluctant to carry out his intention to send the Kitty Hawk plane out of the country, Orville Wright in 1925 proposed that the controversy be settled through the investigations of an impartial committee. But the suggestion got no response. He wrote a letter, on May 14, 1925, to Chief Justice William Howard Taft, as Chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution, in the hope that it might yet be possible to have an impartial hearing. In this letter, after reviewing the relations of the Wrights and the Smithsonian, he said:

It was not until 1921 that I became convinced that the officials of the Smithsonian, at least Dr. Walcott, were fully acquainted with the character of the tests at Hammondsport. I had thought up to that time that they might have been ignorant of the fundamental changes which had been incorporated in the machine before these tests were made, and that when these changes were pointed out to them they would hasten to correct their erroneous reports. They did not do this, but have continued to repeat their early statements. By these the public has been led to think that flights were made in 1914 with the original Langley machine, with no changes, excepting such as were necessary to attach floats for the new system of launching.

When the proofs on both sides concerning these changes are shown, I do not think it will take you five minutes to make up your mind whether the changes were made and whether they were of importance.

It seems to me possible that you as Chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution may wish me to present personally to you my evidence on these points and to have Dr. Walcott present at the same time to give his proofs to the contrary. It may be a way of cutting short a long and bitter controversy.

Chief Justice Taft replied that his position as Chancellor and head of the Smithsonian was purely nominal; that his other duties were such that he did not have the time to give any real attention to questions that have to be settled by the Institution’s Secretary.

A similar preference to stand aside was shown by others nominally in a position to exercise authority over the acts of the Smithsonian. That Institution has as its members the President of the United States, the Vice President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and members of the President’s cabinet. Its Board of Regents is made up of the Chief Justice, the Vice President, three members of the Senate, three members of the House of Representatives, and six citizens appointed by joint resolution of Congress. Any one of these members of the Board of Regents could doubtless have forced an investigation of any reported injustice committed by the Smithsonian. But all had other duties to occupy their time and, like Chief Justice Taft, they were willing to let the Secretary of the Smithsonian act as he saw fit. Thus the Secretary of the Smithsonian, which administers several important government bureaus besides the National Museum, could exercise great influence. That is how it came about that the attempt to mislead the public regarding the epochal achievements of the Wrights went so long unchecked by official action. And as Orville Wright once said he had discovered, “Silent truth cannot withstand error aided by continued propaganda.”

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.

In a letter a few weeks later, Dr. Abbot suggested that, if it were agreeable to Orville Wright, he would ask three public officials each to name an expert to serve on “an impartial committee” of three to investigate and report on the experiments at Hammondsport in 1914, and their bearing on the capacity of the Langley machine for flight in 1903. But all three of the Government officials that he mentioned were members of the Smithsonian. If the suggested plan had been followed, presumably Dr. Abbot himself would have had the naming of the investigating committee, for in organizations, such as the Smithsonian, appointing of committees by members is usually referred to the Secretary. (Chief Justice Taft, Chancellor of the Smithsonian, had written that because he did not have the time, he let questions regarding the Institution be settled by the Secretary.) It appeared to Orville Wright that Dr. Abbot did not have too much confidence in the findings of a committee, even if wholly appointed by the Smithsonian, for Abbot specified just what questions the committee was to investigate. And most of these were wholly irrelevant.

A little later, Orville Wright, in reply to a letter from Dr. Abbot, made this suggestion: That the Smithsonian publish a paper presenting a list of specifications in parallel columns of those features of the Langley machine of 1903 and of the Hammondsport machine of 1914 in which there were differences, along with an introduction stating that the Smithsonian now finds it was misled by the Zahm report of 1914; that through the Zahm report the Institution was led to believe that the aeroplane tested at Hammondsport was “as nearly as possible in its original condition”; that as a result of this misinformation the Smithsonian had published erroneous statements from time to time alleging that the original Langley machine, without modification, or with only such modifications as were necessary for the addition of floats, had been successfully flown at Hammondsport in 1914; that it ask its readers to disregard all of its former statements and expressions of opinion regarding the flights at Hammondsport in 1914, because these were based upon misinformation as the accompanying list of changes would show. (The accuracy of the list of changes was to be settled before publication by the Smithsonian, Orville Wright and a mediator.)

But the suggestion was not followed.