My last post on this subject!
Daniel: yes, of course history gets altered with the passage of time. History is not a factual account of things, it is the latter-day view of what happened (which should contain a large proportion of fact, but doesn't necessarily!)
My simple contention is that if something worked then, it will still work now.
Of couse, people with dubious motives attempt to hijack even this premiss. Witness Glen Curtiss rebuilding (and substantially altering) the wretched Langley Aerodrome in a devious attempt to demonstrate 'prior art' in pursuit of his defence against the Wright's legal claims (he lost).
We know that you cannot fly by trapping the morning dew in a glass envelope, as one would-be aviator in the ancient world thought he could, because it doesn't work now and it didn't work then. We know the myth of Icarus is just that - a myth - because you cannot fly too close to the sun with wings made from feathers attached with wax. It's true now, and it was true then.
People build replica Wright Flyers because they respect and admire two great and gifted men. The Flyer worked in 1903, and it still works in 2003. A heap of junk with no aerofoil camber, a designed-to-seize engine copied from steam engineering practice and a prop that would not even cut the mustard as a room fan will not fly now, and didn't fly then.