I believe that 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.
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"We have at last succeeded in making a machine that will fly."
"The course of the experiment was not exactly according to program. The machine started to make a series of dives and dashes in various directions. It was a rather wild ride."
"I confess that in 1901 I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years. Ever since I have distrusted myself and trusted him."
"We have not been able to do much with the machine on account of the bad weather."
"I have not the time for both a wife and an airplane."
American aviation pioneers who achieved the first sustained powered controlled airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, NC, on December 17, 1903. Closely associated with Octave Chanute (their gliding mentor and aeronautical correspondent). For an intellectual contrast, see Samuel Pierpont Langley, Smithsonian Institution Secretary and government-funded aviation researcher — Langley's Aerodrome crashed twice into the Potomac in October-December 1903 with $50,000 of War Department funding; the Wright Brothers' bicycle-shop empiricism beat Langley's institutional Big Science by 9 days. The most-cited example in engineering history of empirical-tinkerer beating institution-funded credentialism.
Orville Wright, in a letter to the Smithsonian, explaining his decision to send the Flyer to a London museum due to a dispute over historical credit.
Date: 1928
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Orville Wright is defending his decision to send the original 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer to a museum in England rather than keep it in America. He argues this drastic step is the only way to force an honest historical record, because the Smithsonian has been publishing distorted claims about who truly invented the airplane, and he refuses to let that falsification stand unchallenged on American soil.
This reflects Orville's decades-long feud with the Smithsonian, which credited Samuel Langley's Aerodrome as the first machine 'capable' of flight, minimizing the Wrights' 1903 achievement. Fiercely protective of their legacy after Wilbur's 1912 death, Orville shipped the Flyer to London's Science Museum in 1928. It stayed abroad until 1948, embodying the brothers' meticulous, evidence-driven character and Orville's stubborn insistence on documented truth over institutional prestige.
In the early 20th century, the Smithsonian held enormous authority as America's official arbiter of scientific history. Aviation was a young, fiercely contested field where national pride and patent battles shaped reputations. Secretary Charles Walcott promoted Langley, the Smithsonian's former chief, to elevate the institution. With no internet or independent archives, museum labels effectively wrote history, making Orville's exile of the Flyer a rare public protest against establishment gatekeeping during aviation's formative decades.
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