A few days after the final court decision had been delivered, Lincoln Beachey, a Curtiss stockholder, telegraphed to Secretary Walcott, of the Smithsonian, asking permission to attempt a flight with the original Langley machine. That proposal was not accepted; but two months later, when Glenn H. Curtiss himself said he would like to test the Langley machine, his request was granted. The Smithsonian entered into a deal with Curtiss in which he was to receive a payment of $2,000, and was permitted to take the original Langley plane from the Smithsonian to his shop at Hammondsport, New York. There he made numerous vital changes in the machine, using knowledge of aerodynamics discovered by the Wrights but never possessed by Langley. No information is available to indicate that the Smithsonian offered any objection to these alterations being made. The Smithsonian’s official observer, in connection with the tests of the machine, was Dr. A. F. Zahm, who had been technical expert for Curtiss in the recent lawsuits and was to serve again in that capacity in another suit soon to follow. No one officially representing any disinterested scientific body was present during the time the changes in the machine were made nor during the time it was tested. It seems highly improbable that Dr. Walcott could have been so unintelligent or so uninformed as not to know about the recent decision of the U. S. Court of Appeals against Curtiss; and equally improbable that he could have been unaware of Zahm’s relations with Curtiss as expert witness and adviser. One may well wonder, too, if Dr. Walcott could have failed to understand why Curtiss had recently become interested in testing the Langley plane. In hundreds of pages of direct testimony in the lawsuits, neither Curtiss nor Zahm had mentioned Langley’s name, though they had more than once referred to Chanute, Maxim, Henson, Marriott, Boulton, Pilcher, Harte, and other pioneers. One may further wonder if Walcott could have been unaware when, in 1913, the Smithsonian awarded the Langley medal to Curtiss, that he had already been pronounced an infringer of the Wright patents by a Federal court, and that another decision in a higher court was pending. It almost looked as if there might have been an intent to try to influence that decision.