While the Kitty Hawk plane rested in its storage place, subject to possible fire hazards, officials of the Science Museum at South Kensington, London, England, had made requests to have the machine for exhibition there. After Orville Wright became convinced that none of the Members or Regents of the Smithsonian Institution or any other influential persons were enough interested in establishing the facts in controversy to go to the trouble of making an investigation, he reluctantly decided, in 1923, to accede to the requests from London. In reply to letters deploring this decision, he has expressed his reasons as follows: I believe my course in sending our Kitty Hawk machine to a foreign museum is the only way of correcting the history of the flying-machine, which by false and misleading statements has been perverted by the Smithsonian Institution. In its campaign to discredit others in the flying art, the Smithsonian has issued scores of these false and misleading statements. They can be proved to be false and misleading from documents. But the people of today do not take the trouble to examine this evidence. With this machine in any American museum the national pride would be satisfied; nothing further would be done and the Smithsonian would continue its propaganda. In a foreign museum this machine will be a constant reminder of the reason of its being there, and after the people and petty jealousies of this day are gone, the historians of the future may examine impartially the evidence and make history accord with it. Your regret that this old machine must leave our country can hardly be so great as my own. Reluctant to carry out his intention to send the Kitty Hawk plane out of the country, Orville Wright in 1925 proposed that the controversy be settled through the investigations of an impartial committee. But the suggestion got no response. He wrote a letter, on May 14, 1925, to Chief Justice William Howard Taft, as Chancellor of the Smithsonian Institution, in the hope that it might yet be possible to have an impartial hearing. In this letter, after reviewing the relations of the Wrights and the Smithsonian, he said: