Did the Wright Brothers Need Government Help?

That's the provocative question Mike Brownfield explores at the Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog.

Brownfield notes that in a speech this week at Sen. Harry Reid's National Clean Energy Summit, Energy Secretary David Steven Chu said that "the government played an incredibly intimate role in all the technologies that led to prosperity in the United States, and we must not lose sight of that fact."

That included, Chu said, development of powered aircraft. While acknowledging that the Wright Brothers invented their aircraft without federal aid, Chu said that without the support of the military and the Postal Service for aviation, airplanes might never have, so to speak taken off.

But Brownfield argues that the tale of government support for development of the airplane is a bit complicated:

There's a curious fact of history that Chu leaves out. Harry P. Wolfe and John Semmens explain that before the Wright brothers' famous flight (which they funded without government help), Dr. Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian Institution used a $70,000 U.S. government grant to create an airplane. What happened? It crashed into the Potomac River, the Wright brothers succeeded in their flight nine days later, and Langley laid much of the blame on "inadequate" Federal funding. So much for government's "intimate role" in technology.