WASHINGTON, D.C.—According to a report in LiveScience, the 1903 patent paperwork for the Wright brothers’ “Flying Machine” has been recovered from a special records storage cave in Lenexa, Kansas. The file includes a diagram of the flying machine, the petition for patent approval, the patent registry form, and the brothers’ patent oath. The missing documents had been part of a 1979 exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, and had been marked returned to the National Archives in 1980, but archivists were unable to locate the file in a vault of precious documents in Washington in 2000. They have been looking for the file ever since. “Unfortunately, with billions of pieces of paper, things sometimes go where they shouldn’t be,” said National Archives and Records Administration Chief Operating Officer William J. Bonsanko said in a report in The Washington Post. The historic documents had been filed with the brothers’ other, less famous patents, and placed in the storage cave. For more on the archaeology of airplanes, go to "Last Flight of a Tuskegee Airman."
