Half a Loaf

I wonder if the race to invent the wheel was as fraught with drama as the headlong, down-to-the-wire race to be the first man to fly. Few people know that at the same time the Wright Brothers were struggling in lonely anonymity on the dunes of North Carolina, Samuel P. Langley, then head of the Smithsonian Institute, and his friend Alexander Bell were inching closer to launching a heavier-than-air machine off a houseboat in the Potomac River. It helped that they had a huge government grant. Only days before Orville Wright made his ground-breaking flight, Langley and Bell failed on their final attempt. The Wrights knew about their efforts, and got word of the failure. Talk about schadenfreud. But getting the plane off the ground wasn't the real challenge, getting it to fly in a straight line was. Therein lies another tale. This time the Wrights beat Bell and his new partner Glen Curtis to the punch, after which Bell and Curtis engaged in some extraordinarily nefarious industrial spying in an attempt to steal the Wrights' secret and beat them out in getting the first patent on the flying machine. In the end courts decided nobody could patent flying. The poor fellow who invented the wheel never even got credit.