This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue here with our American stories.

And up next, the story of the Wright brothers and their battle to be the first in space.

It was the early 20th century and world leaders everywhere were in a race to create what we now call

the airplane, and not just for the sheer wonder of it, till the winner would go the spoils of commerce

and war.

The stakes were high, and our government feared that the British, Germans, or French might

win the first race to space.

What was the American response?

We chose to invest in a person, Samuel Langley, and his team of experts. Langley at the turn of the 20th century

was a big name. He was the head of the Smithsonian, our nation's preeminent source of government

research and an acclaimed scientist, having taught mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy and Physics

and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. He also wrote a lot about aviation.

The prevailing wisdom was simple, give the nation's top government scientist a pile of cash

and see if his band of scientific appointees could crack the man-powered flight code.

That's precisely what happened when the War Department handed Langley a princely sum

and set his team to work. What did the American people get for their government investment in

flight? Langley and his team called it the Great Aerodrome, but there was nothing great about it.

In front of a crowd of onlookers and reporters, Langley's machine launched from a

catapult on a houseboat in the Potomac River, and after a short time in air, quickly plunged into

the river. It fell like a ton of mortar, one journalist wrote. A few months and tweaks later,

Langley tried again and got the same result.

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