People: Sweep in the Nation's Attic

In the vast, quiet, faintly musty, gewgaw-cluttered chambers of the antique, red brick Smithsonian Institution, history is put to rest—there goes good news when it dies. But last week the Institution's "new" secretary (he has been there only 14 years and is only 70), Dr. Charles Greeley Abbot, made live news. The gaunt, grave, full-mustached museum man had had on his mind the matter of Samuel P. Langley v. the Wright Brothers. The world regards Wilbur and Orville Wright as the country's true airplane pioneers, but Langley, onetime Smithsonian secretary, has been the Institution's choice as the A-1 ace. In the...