After 36 years of being lost, the patent for the Wright Brothers’ flying machine has finally been recovered. To be fair, nobody realized it was missing until it couldn’t be located in the “treasure” vault at the Washington Archives building back in 2000.
The 110-year-old document was last seen when it was returned to the National Archives back in 1980, after being loaned to the Smithsonian. With so many legal and historical documents under it’s watch the National Archives has its fair share of trouble keeping track of them all.
“If somebody puts something back in the wrong place, it’s essentially lost. In this case, we didn’t know. We had to ask ourselves, “Is it something that could have been stolen?” National Archives and Records Administration Chief Operating Officer William J. Bosanko said.
Back in 2012 the National Archives suffered a series of robberies, resulting in the presumed loss of priceless artifacts, including Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, hand-written letters from Abraham Lincoln, photos from the moon, and a US Coast Guard Academy class ring given to Lyndon B. Johnson.
The problem is so pervasive the Archives have a team dedicated to tracking down and recovering stolen or missing items, which is probably the most Indiana Jones thing an archivist can hope for. Members of the Archival Recovery Program dedicate their time to hunting down the missing documents and artifacts. There is even a “cold case squad” which was recently beefed up with the inclusion of two extra members back in February. How the History Channel has not made this into a reality series is beyond me.
The Archives increased efforts paid off when volunteer archivist Bob Beebe, was able to locate the Wright Patent in a special underground storage cave in Kansas. At the behest of archivist Chris Abraham, Beebe presumably used a whip to scale the 15ft-stack of boxed documents he had to shift through in order to recover the patent.
Abraham knew there were other patents, which had been filed by the Wright Brothers located at the Lenexa limestone cave, and urged Beebe to begin searching there. His intuition paid off and now parts of the recovered file for patent No. 821,393 are set to be exhibited in the National Archives Museum’s West Rotunda Gallery starting May 20.
Wonder what else has been “lost” over the years by human error? The National Archives website keeps a running list.
Featured image by Marino González via Flickr under Creative Commons license.
