DAYTON, Ohio (AP) – A New Hampshire auction company will sell a letter in which Orville Wright expresses disappointment about the Smithsonian Institution’s failure to display the 1903 flyer he built with his brother.

Wright was 54 when he wrote the letter in 1925 to George Kunz, president of a New York “Museum of the Peaceful Arts,” apparently one of the many institutions seeking to display the plane.

The Wright brothers were upset with the Smithsonian’s support of rival aviator Samuel Langley, its assistant secretary, and the institution’s failure to credit the Dayton natives’ flights as the world’s first.

Langley received $50,000 from the Smithsonian to build a machine that inched above the Potomac River and crashed into the water on Dec. 8, 1903, nine days before the Wrights succeeded at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

“… the Smithsonian has not cared to exhibit our plane of 1903, which was the first to fly, because it would overshadow the 1903 Langley machine, which failed to fly,” Wright wrote in the typed, one-page letter.

Bob Eaton, president of R&R Auction of Bedford, N.H., said the letter came from “a collector of aviation material in Ohio.”

The letter carries a minimum bid of $2,000 and is expected to bring $4,000 to $6,000 at auction Wednesday, Eaton said.

On July 21, the company is expected to sell a 1908 letter handwritten by Wilbur Wright.

More money is expected, Eaton said, because Wilbur Wright items are rare. Orville Wright lived until 1948 and wrote many letters or had them typed by his secretary. Wilbur Wright died in 1912 at age 45 from typhoid fever.

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On the Net:

R&R Auction: www.rrauction.com

AP-ES-06-19-04 1443EDT