After the exchange of letters with Chief Justice Taft, Orville Wright still delayed sending the Kitty Hawk plane to England. There was nothing impetuous about what he did. Not until early in 1928, or fourteen years after the fraudulent tests at Hammondsport, with the Smithsonian still showing no intention to correct its false record of those flights, did he send the machine to the Science Museum at South Kensington. The arrangement he made with the Science Museum was that the plane should stay there for not less than five years, and permanently unless brought back to the United States within his lifetime. Early in 1928, a bill was introduced in Congress to ascertain which was the first heavier-than-air flying-machine. Shortly afterward the Smithsonian adopted a resolution declaring that “to the Wrights belongs the credit of making the first successful flight with a power-propelled heavier-than-air machine carrying a man.” That resolution was, of course, superfluous, for there had never been any question, even by the Smithsonian, as to the first machine to make a sustained flight. But the Smithsonian continued to claim for Professor Langley credit for the _invention_ of the first machine _capable_ of flight. Dr. Charles G. Abbot became the Secretary and Director of the Smithsonian Institution in 1928, succeeding Dr. Walcott, who had died in 1927. Soon after he became the head of the Institution, Dr. Abbot invited Orville Wright to go to lunch with him at the Carlton Hotel in Washington. In the course of their talk Dr. Abbot expressed the wish that they might come to an agreement by which the Kitty Hawk plane could be returned to America and placed under the care of the Smithsonian in the National Museum. Orville Wright said that this could easily be done. All that he asked for, he said, was a correction in the Smithsonian publications of the false and misleading statements previously made in those publications. Dr. Abbot expressed a willingness to do so, provided this could be accomplished without injuring the reputation of his predecessor or the prestige of the Institution. But the painful fact was that the Smithsonian, however spotless its previous reputation, had committed a reprehensible act, and its reputation and prestige were bound to suffer when its guilt became known. Having committed a serious offense, one or the other of two courses were open to it: (1) to confess its guilt and make a full, frank correction; or (2) to try to keep the misdeed concealed. Unfortunately, the Institution adopted, at the beginning, the latter course, evidently in the belief that its great prestige, acquired through an honorable past, could crush any imputation against it. Indeed, that course did prove successful up to the time Orville Wright sent the Kitty Hawk plane abroad.