Kitty!

My kitten is sick.

Charlie the cat is on fluids and is spending the night in the vet's office, so forgive a little lack of focus today. (Poor kitten! If he were home, he would totally be sitting on the couch with me watching Project Runway right now.)

My main interest in the Aviation realm, lately, has been Samuel Langley, who spent serious time in the 1890s building steam-powered airplanes, and time before that testing the aerodynamics of taxidermied birds. (On a similar note, I'd like to refer you a fantastic John Hartford album, for what it's worth.)

In the 1880s, he was launching unpiloted, steam-driven planes via catapult, and they worked -- one in particular (his number 6 model) could fly something like a mile. Of course, this isn't the same kind of aviation our badge is talking about -- first, there's no pilot, and second, many of these planes were models, scaled down to something like 1/4 size.

However, the really interesting thing about Langley comes some years after his flight experiments. See, he donated one of his planes (the Aerodrome #5) to the Smithsonian where, after significant refurbishment (including a new engine), a Smithsonian refurbisher was able to make a few small, short flights in it. Clearly, since the Aerodrome #5 was in service prior to the Wright Bros. Kittyhawk flight, that would make it the first "man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight." Right?

The Wright Bros. were furious, and reasonably so, especially given that the Aerodrome #5 had, well, crashed, which is generally not a characteristic of a successful airplane. There's a lot of weirdness in this story, especially given the fact that Langley was the secretary of the Smithsonian and received much of his research funding due to his position there. (It's porbably important to clarify something here -- Langley, despite the whole mess surrounding his planes, was not invovled in the situation. He died in 1906, just 3 years after the Wrights' flight, and more than fifteen years before the disputes.)

Ultimately, Orville Wright (Wilbur was long-dead) sent the Wright Flyer to London, where the British might respect the venerable plane. And there it stayed, until a 1942 report by the Smithsonian ("The 1914 Tests of the Langley Aerodrome") essentialy recanted their story -- finaly, they admitted that, well, the Aerodrome #5 as originally built was unsuccessful.

And there we have it. In 1948 the Wright Flyer returned to the Smithsonian. It does not share a hall with the Aerodrome, which today occupies the "Early Flight" exhibit, with the Wright military flyer (a later model). The Wright Flyer itself, currently in its own special exhibit, is usually located in a place of honor in the center of the "Milestones of Flight" gallery.

So much for the Aerodrome.