It is everywhere acknowledged that the Wright brothers were the first to make sustained flights in a heavier-than-air machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903.

Mainly because of acts and statements of former officers of the Smithsonian Institution, arising from tests made with the reconditioned Langley plane of 1903 at Hammondsport, New York, in 1914, Dr. Orville Wright feels that the Institution adopted an unfair and injurious attitude. He therefore sent the original Wright Kitty Hawk plane to England in 1928.

It is shown that weight can be saved, and stiffness gained by a proper choice of the design, that is the type of frame of any truss. A method is developed first to choose the best among several statically determinate designs. It is then demonstrated that, when a redundant truss has to carry one set of loads, it is always possible, by the removal of some bars, to get a statically determinate truss which is lighter, for the same ultimate stress. But the redundancy keeps its advantages when the structure has to carry several sets of loads in turn.