Eight days after the Wrights were declared victorious in the US Circuit Court, Charles D. Walcott sat behind his desk in the Smithsonian and stared at the telegram on his desk with the attached note from the Smithsonian administrator, Richard Rathbun. The telegram was from the famous American stunt pilot Lincoln J. Beachey, who was closely allied with Glenn Curtiss, though Walcott had no way of knowing this. Beachey had flown at the Curtiss school, had been a performer on the Curtiss exhibition team, and was a Curtiss stockholder.

He had wired the Smithsonian “requesting to borrow the surviving parts of the 1903 aerodrome so that he could rebuild and fly the craft.”1 It was a strange request for the Langley flyer of 1903 that had gone down like a rock into the Potomac River. The flyer had been fished out of the river and hung from the side of the houseboat. From there it had been put into permanent storage; everyone wanted to forget the disaster that had cost both the Smithsonian and Langley their reputations.

Walcott had vouched for Langley and cajoled the government into giving him the fifty thousand dollars. When the flyer went down twice, that was it. He took over as secretary of the Smithsonian in 1906, and immediately he tried to resurrect Langley's tarnished, if not destroyed, reputation. He had the Langley Memorial Tablet put into the wall of the Smithsonian castle. He then established the Samuel P. Langley Medal for Aerodromics, and later he created the Langley Laboratory for aeronautical research. He even proclaimed the day in 1896 when the first steam-powered aerodrome models had flown as Langley Day, an official holiday for the Smithsonian.²

None of it worked. There were no funds coming for research anytime soon. Langley was a black eye. Just eight days prior, the Wrights had been declared pioneer patent holders for airplane-control systems, thereby making Orville and Wilbur Wright the patriarchs of modern aviation. It was over, really, until…this.

Walcott picked up the telegram and then looked at Rathbun's recommendation: “I do not think you want to grant Mr. Beachey's request.”3 There was another note, from Alexander Graham Bell, cautioning against trying to do anything with the flyer since it was too valuable an artifact. “An artifact of what?” Walcott almost muttered. Failure. Disgrace. Reputations ruined. It was an artifact alright, down in the dungeon of the Smithsonian, never to be seen again.

Walcott leaned back in his chair and smoothed his beard. That valuable artifact was a cross he and the Smithsonian had to bear ever since the great dunk in the Potomac. It was really a fascinating idea. Fly the Langley aerodrome and prove to the world that Langley had the technology to fly first, and that he should have taken the honors given to Wilbur and Orville Wright. Samuel Pierpont Langley's name could then be side by side with the Wright brothers, and the Smithsonian would be redeemed as the august center of science it once was.

Walcott looked at the telegram again. Still, Beachey was sort of a loose cannon. Bell had suggested that an exact replica of the Langley flyer should be constructed for display. That would be something, but really it had to fly, or what was the point? He would turn Beachey down but leave the door slightly open.

The door was kicked wide open when Secretary Walcott bumped into Glenn Curtiss at a Langley Day celebration. Curtiss had brought down one of his float planes and had mentioned “that he would like to put the Langley airplane itself in the air.”⁴ Walcott had been pressured before by the Smithsonian regents and Bell not to release the flyer to Beachey, but this time he acted alone and consented to give the plane to Glenn Curtiss.

The secretary of the Smithsonian instructed A. F. Zahm, a Curtiss witness in the patent trial who now happened to run the Langley Laboratory, to turn over “the fuselage, engine, propellers, various bits of tubing and a few wing ribs of the old flyer to Curtiss.”⁵ Walcott then gave Curtiss $2,000 for improvements and testing. Zahm, who had been humiliated by Orville Wright during the trials, put out a covering statement: “The main object of these renewed trials was first to show whether the original Langley machine was capable of sustained free flight with a pilot, and secondly, to determine more fully the advantages of the tandem wing type aeroplane.”6

The real reason was to show that Langley's plane could have flown in 1903. Everyone involved had a vested interest. “Curtiss, the Smithsonian, and Zahm all stood to benefit if the craft proved airworthy. Curtiss could return to court and argue the pioneer status granted the Wrights patent was unwarranted and he could start selling planes again. Walcott would demonstrate to the world his old friend Langley had not failed after all and restore the Smithsonian's reputation as an institution worth further funding for projects. And Zahm would gain revenge on Orville for supposed slights offered to him at the patent suit in 1910.”⁷

If Curtiss could get Langley's old machine to fly, then everything would work out just fine. The problem was that Walcott was not all that sure it would fly the way it had been originally designed. At the time of the two crashes, the rumor was that Langley really didn't understand lift and that some engineers said the wings could not have provided nearly enough lift for a man and a heavy engine. Walcott had heard that all Langley had done, really, was make a bigger aerodrome model and hope for the best. He was certain Curtiss would get the plane to fly one way or another. After that, he didn't really want to know anything else.

Curtiss and Zahm proclaimed that they would simply restore the Langley plane back to its original design. Nothing was further from the truth. As Tom Crouch observes in The Bishop's Boys, “The wings constructed in the Curtiss plant differed from the originals in chord, camber, and aspect ratio. The trussing system that linked the wings to the fuselage also bore little resemblance to the 1903 original. The kingposts had been relocated and the wires were trussed to different spars at different points. This was particularly important, for most knowledgeable authorities believed that the failure of the wing structure, not a catapult defect, had been responsible for the disaster of 1903.”⁸

Then Curtiss fitted the plane with his own control system. He did away with the catapult system, put the plane on floats, and tied off the original rudder. The tail was altered to serve as both rudder and elevator, something Langley had never thought of. Now all they had to do was fly the plane and prove to the world that the Wright brothers were not the first to build an airplane capable of powered flight. The Wright brothers were the second men to build a plane capable of sustained flight after Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian.