# The Wright Brothers' 1908 contract in Akoma Ntoso and LegalRuleML The Articles of Agreement of February 10, 1908, between Captain Chas. S. Wallace of the Signal Corps, United States Army, and Wilbur and Orville Wright, trading as Wright Brothers, for the Army's first airplane, with Signal Corps Specification No. 486 attached. It is marked up in Akoma Ntoso XML, with its rules in LegalRuleML, and a CSS stylesheet renders it after the original. It was generated by Claude for Grant Vergottini. This is an experiment. A contract isn't a usual Akoma Ntoso document, and [EXTENSION-NOTES.md](EXTENSION-NOTES.md) records what fit and what didn't. ## Files | File | Purpose | | --- | --- | | `wright-brothers-contract-1908.xml` | The Akoma Ntoso document, with the LegalRuleML rules embedded | | `wright-brothers-contract-1908.css` | The stylesheet, linked from the XML | | `EXTENSION-NOTES.md` | What fit, what needed generic elements, and what's missing | | `index.html` | Landing page for GitHub Pages | ## About the markup - **Standard:** Akoma Ntoso 2.0 (AKN 3.1), with `version="3.1"` on the root element. LegalRuleML Core 1.0, compact form, in its own namespace. - **Validation:** The XML validates against the Akoma Ntoso 2.0 cs01 schema. The LegalRuleML part was not validated against its schema, because that schema couldn't be loaded here. Its structure was checked by hand against the content models in `lrml-compact.xsd`. - **Structure:** A `` holds the form, with the specification as an attachment. The rules are in a second attachment, inside the Akoma Ntoso `` element. - **Print and typewriter:** The original is a printed form filled in by typewriter. ``, `` and `class="typed"` keep the two apart. - **Rules and text:** Each LegalRuleML statement points to the article or paragraph it comes from, by `eId`, through `LegalReference` and `Association`. - **The `wb:` vocabulary:** The predicates under the `wb:` prefix are illustrative. Its address doesn't resolve to a published vocabulary. ## How it looks The stylesheet follows the original: the blackletter heading and title, the printed form in a period roman, the entries in a typewriter face with the form's dashed leaders, the War Department receipt stamp, and script for the signatures. All of it is modern fonts, so this is not a facsimile, and the signatures aren't the real ones. The note on Article X is at the foot of the signature page in the original, and here it follows the article. ## How the text was made Claude read the contract from low-resolution page images and typed the text. The specification was checked the same way against those images and a web transcription, whose OCR errors were corrected, such as `50` for `60 per cent` at 36 miles per hour. Nobody has proofread it against a better copy. ## What's missing or uncertain - **Text missing from the copy:** The images come from a later publication that interleaved the contract and the specification. The end of Article V and the start of Article VI aren't in it. They are marked with ``. The article number in `[ART. VI.]` is inferred. - **Three paragraphs of the specification:** The sentence ending "name and place of the maker" and the Preliminary, Acceptance and Inspection paragraphs fall in a gap between the page images, so they come from the web transcription only. - **The Wrights' proposal:** The contract says it is attached, but it wasn't available. - **Witnesses:** Two signatures weren't readable and are marked `[not read]`. The two others are best readings. - **Stamp:** It is partly illegible, and a handwritten number on it is left out. The labels "Rec'd" and "Ack'd" are partly inferred. - **Left out:** The heading "Contracts and Pricing" and the page numbers 3-1 to 3-4 belong to the later publication, not the contract. ## Sources - Page images and specification text: [Signal Corps Specification No. 486, wright-brothers.org](https://www.wright-brothers.org/History_Wing/Wright_Story/Showing_the_World/Back_in_Air/Signal_Corps_Spec.htm). - History of the contract: Vernon J. Edwards, [The True Story of the Wright Brothers' Contract](https://www.wifcon.com/anal/analwright.htm), 2002. - LegalRuleML: [LegalRuleML Core Specification Version 1.0](https://docs.oasis-open.org/legalruleml/legalruleml-core-spec/v1.0/os/legalruleml-core-spec-v1.0-os.html). ## Fonts The stylesheet embeds Old Standard TT, UnifrakturCook and Mrs Saint Delafield, under the [SIL Open Font License](https://openfontlicense.org/), and Special Elite, under the Apache License 2.0. ## License The Akoma Ntoso markup, stylesheet rules, scripts and landing page are under the MIT License in `LICENSE`. That license does not cover the items below, which keep their own terms. - **Text:** The contract of 1908 and Signal Corps Specification No. 486. Believed to be in the public domain. Details are under Sources above. - **Images:** None. - **Fonts:** Old Standard TT, Special Elite, UnifrakturCook and Mrs Saint Delafield, under the licenses in `FONT-LICENSES.md`. This is an unofficial copy, not an official version of the text.