DAYTON, Ohio (AP) - An auction company will sell a letter in which Orville Wright expresses disappointment over the Smithsonian Institution's failure to display the 1903 flyer he built with his brother.
Wright was 54 when he wrote the letter in 1925 to George Kunz, president of a New York Museum of the Peaceful Arts, apparently one of the many institutions seeking to display the plane.
The Wright brothers were upset with the Smithsonian's support of rival aviator Samuel Langley, its assistant secretary, and the institution's failure to credit the Dayton natives' flight as the world's first.
Langley received $50,000 from the Smithsonian to build a machine that inched above the Potomac River and crashed into the water on Dec. 8, 1903, nine days before the Wrights succeeded at Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
Wright wrote in the typed, one-page letter that ``the Smithsonian has not cared to exhibit our plane of 1903, which was the first to fly, because it would overshadow the 1903 Langley machine, which failed to fly.''
Bob Eaton, president of R&R Enterprises of Bedford, N.H., said the letter came from ``a collector of aviation material in Ohio.''
The letter carries a minimum bid of $2,000 and is expected to bring $4,000 to $6,000 at auction Wednesday, Eaton said.
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