>>14341080Samuel Langley had to die before the American press was allowed to acknowledge that the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Langley was the boss of government science at the time and he was spending a massive fortune of other people's money trying to invent a flying machine with no success, part of the failure due to Langley spending a surprisingly large fraction of the money on liquor and throwing cocktail parties for the D.C. socialite crowd.
For the first 5 years after the Wrights invented the airplane, the coastie press was denying the story by saying that it was just a crazy rumor that only stupid country bumpkins believed in. It would've been too embarrassing for Samuel Langley for the press to acknowledge that Langley has spent $10 million of taxes trying to invent the flying machine and failed, but "stupid country bumpkins" had managed to do what Langley couldn't for less than $100.
Kinda like how Elon can put cargo into space at less than 5% of what NASA spends to do the same thing. Wheres the other 95% of the NASA money go? What are they spending it on?
