Relics

In a businesslike office on the second floor of Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History President F. Trubee Davison one morning last week picked up his telephone, heard a voice say: "Colonel Lindbergh calling." An acquaintance but no close friend of the onetime Assistant Secretary of War, the Colonel came quickly to his point: Would Mr. Davison's museum like to have, for keeps, the airplane and all equipment with which the Lindberghs had just flown to Labrador, Greenland, Europe, Africa, South America and back? When he recovered his composure President Davison managed to say he would be delighted.

Before Jan. i Museum visitors will see hanging in the new Hall of Ocean Life the sturdy red Lockheed monoplane in which the Lindberghs made a transcontinental record of 14 hr. 45 min. 32 sec. in 1930, flew to Japan and China in 1931, jaunted 30,000 mi. over 21 countries since last summer.

Ranged in cases around the hall will be the Lindbergh equipment: parachutes, electrically heated clothes, sun helmets, mosquito netting, emergency food rations, landing flares, sextant, chronometers, goggles, stove, tent, cooking utensils, sledge, sea anchors, collapsible rubber boat with mast & sail, emergency outboard motor, fur boots, rifles, revolvers, ammunition, wireless sets, ship's log, maps, charts.

President Davison, scanning the inventory, asked: "How about the engine? and the aerial cameras?" Colonel Lindbergh demurred. The engine, a Wright Cyclone, was practically new, having flown only 250 hours out of a possible 4,000. The cameras, too, would come in handy. Mr. Davison, able museum man that he is, pointed out that the Colonel had offered all his equipment. A nod of the Lindbergh head threw in engine and cameras.

Nine days before Orville Wright made his first flight 30 years ago last month at Kitty Hawk, N. C., the late Samuel Pierpont Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had a four-winged flying machine called the Dragon Fly ready to take off from the top of a houseboat in the Potomac River. With a mighty chug-chugging the contraption reared up, flopped into the water. Several years later the Dragon Fly was patched up and flown. The Smithsonian secured it for exhibit, labeled it "... The First Machine Capable of Flight Carrying a Man." Enraged, the Wright Brothers refused to give their first machine to the Smithsonian. In 1928 Orville Wright shipped it to the Science Museum at London.

Fortnight ago, Dr. Charles Greeley Abbot of the Smithsonian began new 'negotiations to get the Wright plane back in the U. S. He would let Orville Wright write his own label if only the Museum might have the ship. For mediator of the old quarrel Dr. Abbot proposed Colonel Lindbergh, whose Spirit of St. Louis hangs permanently at the Smithsonian.

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