Missing Wright Brothers' 'Flying Machine' Patent File Discovered In Cave

A patent file for the Wright brothers' "flying machine," which was missing since 1980, has been found by a team from the U.S. National Archives. The record keepers had detected that it was missing in a Washington D.C. vault only in 2000, though it had got lost in 1980. That led to the team enhancing its efforts to find the patent file. At last, they found it in a limestone cave.

Bob Beebe, a volunteer archivist, had discovered it inside a 15-foot-high stack of documents in Kansas. It was identified from a special records storage cave. Beebe had almost given up the search till he happened to search in one additional box and finally found it in patent No. 821,393.

The history of the file's movements is simple. It was stored in the National Archives building and then shifted to a federal records center in 1969. In 1979, a few parts of the file were given over to the Smithsonian during an exhibition and then it came back to the federal records center.

"We had a pull slip from our files saying that the document was returned to the National Archives in 1980," said archivist Chris Abraham. "But... that's where the trail goes cold."

Abraham had thought that the patents were in the Lenexa cave. He had initiated a search in the cave in order to find it.

The paper contains the names of the famous brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, as well as the significant words, "flying machine," which described the world's first successful plane.

The Wright brothers had created history with the first controlled, powered human flight on Dec. 17, 1903. Having filed the patent nine months before its first flight, it was granted in 1906.

"Be it known that we Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright, both citizens of the United States, residing in the city of Dayton and state of Ohio, have jointly invented a new and useful machine for navigating the air," it reads.

The flight took just 12 seconds to complete, and ranged over 37 meters. But it was a breakthrough flight that changed human history.

"If somebody puts something back in the wrong place, it's essentially lost," said William J. Bosanko, the National Archives' boss. "In this case, we didn't know. We had to ask ourselves: 'Is it something that could have been stolen?'"

The rediscovered Wright brothers "flying machine" patent file will be exhibited in the National Archives Museum later in April.