Finding a Misplaced Piece of History at the Archives
Summer 2016, Vol. 48, No. 2
By David McMillen
Drawing for the Flying Machine, page 1, May 22, 1906. Filed with patent application 821393.
Photographs of the Wright flyer during flight, no date. Filed with patent application 821393.
We were looking for a needle in a haystack
The haystack was more than 12 billion pages of government records held by the National Archives in 43 facilities across the United States. The needle was a patent application. But this was not just any patent application. This was the application by Orville and Wilbur Wright for a patent on their flying machine.
The good news is we found it. The interesting news is how.
The National Archives, since it was founded in 1934, holds the historical records on patent applications. Occasionally, we lend important documents to other agencies to celebrate historic events. In 1978, the Wright patent was loaned to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space museum for a celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first flight.
After the exhibit closed, the Wright patent was returned to the National Archives, namely the Washington National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland, where all the patent files were stored. In 2003, all of the patent files were moved to a cave in Lenexa, Kansas, the site of one of our federal records centers.
As the centennial of flight approached, National Archives staff went looking for the Wright patent.
It was not there. That was the beginning of the search.
The National Archives does not take missing documents lightly. In fact, there is a special unit within the Archives whose job is to search for missing documents, the Archival Recovery Program.
Despite extensive research in 2000, the patent was not found. The archivists did, however, put together complete documentation on the movement of the patent from its arrival at the National Archives in 1965 to its return from the Smithsonian in 1979.
In 2016, Chris Abraham took up the search. After poring over the documentation compiled in 2000, he developed a theory—the document must have been misfiled. He then set about drawing up a list of likely places to look for the patent file.
At the beginning of the list was a set of documents assembled in preparation for an exhibit titled “The Written Word Endures.” Archivist Judith Koucky drew up that list during her research in 2000, and the missing Wright patent was among those considered for the exhibit.
However, Chris thought it was equally likely that the missing patent had been misfiled with other Wright patents associated with the flying machine. He augmented the list with patents he thought were likely places the missing patent could have been misfiled.
Chris is stationed in our College Park, Maryland, facility, and the patent files are in the cave in Lenexa. The torch was passed to archivist Robert Beebe. Bob began systematically going through the list Christ had compiled. He found where each document was stored, and checked that box to see if the Wright patent was hiding there.
Methodically he went from item to item and box to box, not quite finishing the list by the end of the day. At six o’clock the next morning, Bob went to the shelves and pulled down the box containing Wright Brothers patent 1122348, the Wright Vertical Rudders patent application, and took it back to his desk.
He opened the box and found that a large envelope had been pushed in, crowding all the other files. That’s not the way patent file boxes usually look, he thought, and pulled out the envelope.
In the envelope was the 1903 Wright Brothers patent application 821393.
He took a deep breath and looked again. Yes, that’s it.
The file that had been missing for more than 30 years and had been pursued by some of the best archivists in the agency was found.
Word of the discovery was quickly passed back to Washington and College Park—and to the media. Another records recovery by the Archives staff.