The media and Congress had a field day at the expense of the “professor… wandering in his dreams of flight…who was given to building…castles in the air.” One congressman was quoted as saying, “You tell Langley for me…that the only thing he ever made fly was government money.” The appropriateness of spending public funds on that kind of high-risk research was openly debated. And then, as if to deliberately aggravate an already tender wound, the Wright brothers conducted their first four successful flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C., only nine days later–on December 17.

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As secretary of the Smithsonian, Langley was, in effect, the nation’s chief scientist. Consequently, all the open criticism and public ridicule had a devastating effect on his image and self-esteem. After he died, disheartened and disgraced, in February 1906, Langley was identified with the failure of his Great Aerodrome–his other substantial and lasting accomplishments being overlooked and largely forgotten.

What went wrong? Langley blamed the launch mechanism for the failures. A friend of Orville Wright, Griffith Brewer, dismissed that explanation as little more than an unsupportable excuse. While modern-day aerodynamicists differ somewhat on the details, they agree that the Aerodrome’s flimsy structure was unable to support the transient aerodynamic loads induced on it by the catapult-type launch. The Langley team did not have the scientific understanding or the engineering insight to achieve the dream of “navigating the air.” There was much about aerodynamics and flying that Langley never mastered.

The Great Aerodrome did not pass into oblivion after the 1903 disaster, however. It reappeared in 1914 to become the centerpiece in a long and drawn out public controversy between the Smithsonian and Orville Wright (Wilbur had died of typhoid in 1912) over who invented the first operational airplane. In 1914, the Smithsonian awarded Glenn Curtiss, one of the great innovators and promoters of early aviation who flew after and competed with the Wrights, a $2,000 contract to fly the Great Aerodrome to settle the still unanswered question of whether or not it would have been capable of sustained, piloted flight. The Great Aerodrome was shipped to the Curtiss aircraft factory at Hammondsport, N.Y., where it was extensively modified and rebuilt by his mechanics and actually flown on several short hops over Keuka Lake. The machine was then returned to the Smithsonian and restored to its 1903 condition.

On the basis of the flights of the altered machine, the Great Aerodrome was put on display at the Smithsonian with an exhibit label asserting that it “was the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.” The Smithsonian’s 1914 annual report stated that the Great Aerodrome of 1903, “with its original structure and power,” was “capable of flying with a pilot and several hundred pounds of useful load.” The Wright Flyer was shipped to England for display.

Orville Wright asked the Smithsonian to clarify its claims, initiating a public dispute that was to harm the institution’s credibility and tarnish its reputation for objective scholarship. The controversy would not be fully and finally settled to everyone’s satisfaction for 34 years. In 1942, the Smithsonian published a short paper, reviewed and approved by Orville Wright, that confessed the institution’s sins in the most diplomatic terms. That paper defused the controversy and paved the way for the eventual reconciliation between Orville Wright and the Smithsonian.

On December 17, 1948–45 years to the hour after the Wright brothers’ first flights–the restored 1903 Wright Flyer was returned to public display in an elaborate ceremony at the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. The personalities and events of that controversy, characterized by Griffith Brewer in the 1920s as “the greatest scandal in aviation history,” make a fascinating sidelight to aviation legend that readers will find described in biographies of Langley, Curtiss and the Wright brothers.

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