Curtiss had a strong motive for wanting to make it appear that the Langley plane could have flown. The United States Court of Appeals had held that the Wrights were pioneers in the field of heavier-than-air flying-machines, and that therefore their patent claims were entitled to a “liberal interpretation.” If Curtiss could demonstrate, or seem to demonstrate, that a machine capable of flight had been built before the Wright machine, then he could weaken their claims, to his financial advantage, in a patent suit he expected to have to defend. In consequence of the important changes that were made, Curtiss finally was able to make several short hops, of less than five seconds, with the reconstructed machine, in May and June, 1914, over Lake Keuka, at Hammondsport, N. Y. Then the Smithsonian, in its annual report of the U. S. National Museum for that year, falsely stated that the original Langley plane had been flown “without modification”! And the annual report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1914, with equally glaring falsity, said: “It [the Langley machine] has demonstrated that _with its original structure and power_, it is capable of flying with a pilot and _several hundred pounds of useful load_. It is the _first aeroplane_ in the history of the world of which this can truthfully be said”! (Italics supplied.) The Institution’s annual report for 1915 continued to repeat such untruths. “The tests thus far made have shown that former Secretary Langley had succeeded in building the first aeroplane capable of sustained free flight with a man.” Similar misstatements were made in the Institution’s reports for 1916, 1917, 1918, and afterward. Altogether here had been something probably unique in scientific procedure. A test was made purporting to determine if the original Langley plane was capable of flight; but the test was not made with the machine as designed and built by Langley, nor with an exact copy of it. No disinterested official observer was present. Misstatements were published about the results, and no information was furnished, regarding the changes made, to enable anyone to learn the truth. To have made one more honest test of the Langley plane that had immediately crashed each time it was launched over the Potomac would have been permissible. But for a scientific institution officially to distort scientific facts, and in collaboration with a man who stood to gain financially by what he was doing, has been called worse than scandalous. After the Langley machine had been restored as nearly as possible to its original state, it was placed on exhibition by the Smithsonian. Soon afterward it bore a label that falsely proclaimed it to be “the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free flight.”