With the December 17 birthdate of the Wright Brothers first flight, a recent article in the Washington Post posed the question once again, if Wilbur and Orville Wright were the first to truly fly a powered aircraft.
The article very much comes down on the side of the Wright Brothers but it goes into some depth about the controversy that raged at the Smithsonian for a number of years.
The controversy was more about the politics of invention than it was science.
At the same time the Wright Brothers were experimenting with flight, Samuel Langley was diving into the subject. Langley was the Director of the Smithsonian and was able to garner $$50,000 in government funding…around $1.6 million in todays dollars.
On October 7, 1903, two months before the Wright Brothers flight, Langley had the Buzzard—as he named his aircraft—ready. At 12:15 the aircraft trundled down a catapult on top of a houseboat, rose briefly into the air and quickly tumbled into the water.
Langley, supremely confident his aircraft would fly, invited the press and the reports described the airplane as “sinking like a load of mortar” and “all was wreck and ruin,“ and it “would not in any sense be termed a flight.”
But the Smithsonian, though, took, 45 years to fully acknowledge that the Wright Brothers truly were first in flight. And, in fact, displayed Langley aircraft indicating it was the first airplane in history capable of carrying a man.
The made that claim based on work Glenn Custis, a bitter business rival to the Wrights, did to demonstrate what would have been necessary for the Buzzard to have flown.
Custis was a brilliant engineer and he was able to show that the Langley’s launch system was inadequate and he proposed adding ailerons to the wings for control. Even if Langley’s aircraft had been able to fly, it still would have lacked the controls the Wright Brothers had created…and patented.
Eventually the feud was settled and the Wright Flyer came home from the British Museum where it had been on display. The Smithsonian put the aircraft on display in 1948 where it remains properly acknowledged as the first heavier than air airplane.
December 17 is a great celebration of flight on the Outer Banks at the Wright Brothers Monument in Kill Devil Hills. Take some time and plan your stay at a Brindley Beach Vacations home to explore the Outer Banks.