[neutralid]

> If the latter features are of interest to our Government, we shall be pleased to take up the matter either on a basis of providing machines of agreed specification, at a contract price, or, of furnishing all the scientific and practical information we have accumulated in these years of experience, together with a license to use our patents; thus putting the Government in a position to operate on its own account.

I took this to mean that they were inquiring whether the government would be interested in a system manufactured according to specifications agreed to by both parties (or just providing the IP according to a license agreement), not necessarily for a pre-existing system. Necessary modifications to a system do not make for a fully developed machine.

If you're implying that the Wright brothers are not looking for R&D funding like Langley, I agree. They made that explicit in a later letter to the government. It's too bad that the government gave funding to Langley yet somehow rejected contracts to complete a working system with the Wright brothers, despite their initial successes.

[lordvon]

I was not implying they were not looking for funding, I explicitly stated so. They were principally interested in selling units, or, as in your cited text, the means to build them. Again this is clearly not funding for development. The qualitative difference is that, unlike contemporaries, the Wrights were out to provide what they had (or were easily capable of), not what they were yet to have if given money.