The Daily Alaska empire., 1944-02-11
Age of Flight
Washington Post)

The famous controversy to who should be con- sdered the real inventor of the arpane now appears to have been settled by an agreeable compromise Not very long ago President Roosevelt announced that the most celebrated airpane in the world-the one Tn which Orville Wright made the first real flight at Kitty Hawks to be transferred from the British Museum in London to the Smithsonian Institution here Thus it will share honors and admiration with
 that other prototypcal power driven machine invented by the late Dr. Samuel Perpont Langley.
 Tn the retrospect of 40 years this seems eminently
 just It has recently been asserted that if Orville and Wilbur Wright had only minded their own busi- ness and gone on repairing bicycles the history of this twentieth century would have been much different and much happier. This strikes us as wholly fal- facous It almost certain that had neither the Wright brothers Professor Langley ever lived, somebody else would have applied the same set of principles to this very ancient problem, and would have had just about the same success. Just why certain inventions tremendous in their consequences occur at certain historic moments rather than at others one of those questions which as far as we know been satisfactorily answered by his torians Men as we all know were working on the problem of human flight long ago as the time of Roger Bacon, and perhaps long ago as the heyday of Minoan Crete.
 Why were there virtually no important practical results from this study until our century? Why is it that some peoples and certain historical ages more preoccupied with techniques than others? Why did the Mayans who, it is said made such advanced and complicated scientific discoveries the transit of Venus never think of things homey and prac- tica as the blow and the wheel? Was it merely the absence of raught animals that failed to send their thoughts in such directions? Why did the classical Greeks with all their intelligence and curiosity know nothing about central heating systems and sanitary plumbing both of which to have been well understood by engineers and architects of ancient Knossos?
 Again why is it the same discoveries or inven-
 ons had such vastly different consequences for different times and places? The Chinese knew gum powder and printing from movable types centuries before the Europeans had any inklng of such things Yet neither of these inventions seems to have pro- duced in China anything like the revolutionary consequences that immediately followed their intro duction into Medieval Europe Why did people with such an extensive literature the Chinese never think of employing phonetic alphabet and why did the much less cultivated Phoenicians, who seem to have used it almost entirely for such unmagnative purposes as bills of lading ships manfests and pos sibly advertisements for purple dies, think of it?
 Anyway, there is no justice in blaming Professor Langley or the Wright brothers for the fearfuly de- sructve purposes which in the past 4 years their invention has been put The destructive energy sides not in the machine but in mankind itself and was much in evidence long before there were either guns bombs or planes in the world Still, it does seem pity that some of the thought which in the past 200 years has been devoted to the study and tanning of nature not devoted to the studying and tanning of human nature.