When the Wright’s machine became successful, those experts who spent years ridiculing the Wrights in public had to execute all kinds of twisted “face saving” manuvers to avoid looking like fools. This is a well-known effect in the sociology of science: when someone publicy ridicules an idea, they tend to go deeply irrational when that idea later proves valid. Their dishonesty still infests historical documents.
This stuff about secrecy is one such deception. In reality the Wrights flew their craft in an open field near a rail line near Dayton OH for about ten months. They gave rides. Local businessmen were involved with the experiments. The Dayton newspaper was bombarded with letters from passersby asking why there were no articles about the incredible events going on. The newspaper people (like most scientists of the time) confidently “knew” that flying machines were impossible, so they refused to send a reporter (and they even complained about all the crazy people who kept sending them letters about the flights.)
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” - Lord Kelvin,
president, Royal Society, 1895.
“Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant,
if not utterly impossible.” - Simon Newcomb, 1902.
“The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances,
known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a
practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through
the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the
demonstration of any physical fact to be.” - astronomer S. Newcomb,
1906
At the same time the Scientific American was deriding the Wrights as “The Lying Brothers” and refusing to investigate their claims. In a uniquely twisted bit of reasoning they justified their refusal:
“If such sensational and tremendously important experiments are being conducted in a not very remote part of the country, on a subject in which almost everybody feels the most profound interest, is it possible to believe that the enterprising American reporter, who, it is well known, comes down the chimney when the door is locked in his face – even if he has to scale a fifteen-storey skyscraper to do so – would not have ascertained all about them and published them broadcast long ago?” - Sci. Am. Jan 1905
But they didn’t realize that all the other reporters were using the same bit of flawed reasoning, with the result that the entire American news industry talked themselves into actively ignoring a genuine discovery of earthshaking magnitude.
The Wrights finally became fed up with this sort of thing, so they took their demonstration on the road. People in Europe weren’t trapped in the same “skeptic/scoffer” circular reasoning as the Americans, and in fact there were a number of flying-machine hobbyists demonstrating their devices in Paris at the time, flying in straight lines for a few seconds. The Wrights strode in and blew them all away.
…
One of the later stories I vaguely recall: the head of the Smithsonian had been publicly ridiculing the Wrights, and even when their machine was proved genuine, he still insisted that they had lied about all their early work. When the Wrights needed a home for their remaining original flyer, the artifact did not go to the Smithsonian, it ended up in a Paris museum (I don’t recall whether the Smithsonian refused it or whether the Wrights refused to deal with Smithsonian.) Only decades later after all the nasty politics ended and the people in question were dead did the remaining original Wright flyer move from Paris to the Smithsonian.
Heh. Then the same thing happened all over again with Robert Goddard and rocketry. If the Nazis hadn’t started dropping genuine space ships on London, I think there’s a good chance that we’d have no space flight today. The “Scientific American effect” is nothing to take lightly. If every member of a crowd turns his back on an idea only because all the other members also turn their backs, then a valid idea can be “disproved” in the eyes of the experts without anyone ever bothering to examine the evidence. Scientific concensus can become a very negative thing if “concensus” emerges like the random motions of a herd of sheep. Each member of the stampede is very confident of the direction of travel, after all, since so many other sheep are going that way, travel in that direction must be very important. 