There’s no need to guess. Langley relied on assumptions made by other experimenters in flight. While they were pretty far off from correct, their data worked on small glider models and piloted gliders. That Otto Lilienthal had been killed in part due to his incorrect assumptions didn’t faze Langley. The data just didn’t scale up to something the size of his ‘Aerodrome’. It was also overweight, wasn’t strong enough structurally, and underpowered. In other words Langley was shite at being an engineer.
The Wrights took a more scientific, methodical approach. When their early experiments didn’t jibe with what other experimenters claimed, they built a wind tunnel and tested a large number of aerofoil shapes to find the best one. What they used on their first ‘Flyer’ still wasn’t right (due to the issues with scaling up from a small wing to full size) but they were far less wrong than everyone else.
Langley and the Smithsonian were quite perturbed that a couple of small town guys had beaten them. So they set about attempting to discredit the Wrights. The Smithsonian had Glenn Curtiss rebuild and drastically redesign the ‘Aerodrome’ to brute force it into a short hop. Then the museum put it on display as the first heavier than air machine capable of flight. The goal was to invalidate the Wrights’ patents. Ultimately the Smithsonian had to swallow their pride and admit to the truth, and put the ‘Flyer’ on display. I suspect some of the Smithsonian people quietly snickered knowing that the ‘Flyer’ on display was not exactly the one that first flew at Kill Devil Hill. Orville had assembled it from pieces of the wrecked ‘Flyer’ and several subsequent prototypes that had led up to their first production model.
This article couldn’t be more wrong about the reasons Langley failed. He wasn’t overconfident due to support and praise, he was simply incompetent, then vengeful when his incompetence was very publicly put on display by having his “aircraft” slide off the end of their launch boat into the Potomac.
