I believe Samuel Langley spent around $80K of taxpayer money, and failed. He blamed insufficient funding. The Bishop’s Boys spent $5,000 OF THEIR OWN MONEY. And the rest is history.
The government-funded R101 airship went well over budget, never got tested properly, and went down in flames on its first real flight. It was an earlier example of what happens when you let the politicians overrule the engineers. Like the Challenger disaster. The privately-funded R100 met its objectives, and didn’t kill anyone. For much less money.
NASA’s Space Launch System, a political boondoggle driven by the need to distribute boodle to the maximum number of congressional districts, costs 1000 X as much per orbited pound as the anticipated cost of the SpaceX Starship. Some damn body’s making a buck!
Glenn Curtiss proved a few years later that Langley’s machine was perfectly capable of powered flight, carrying a man. The failure of Langley’s last attempt was apparently due to a malfunction in the launching catapult, not due to the design or construction of the plane. The engine he commissioned was considerably better than the Wrights’ was, too.
So the Wrights did, solely by dint of Langley’s bad luck, make the first flight, but they were consummate assholes ever after. Their airplane was intentionally unstable in pitch, which made it extremely difficult to fly, and they kept it a deep dark secret for years while they tried to obtain an all-encompassing global patent on very concept of powered flight itself.
Glenn Curtiss, with backing from Alexander Graham Bell, soon built a far better machine that was inherently stable, and humiliated the Wrights repeatedly whenever there was any sort of head-to-head competition.
The book to read is “Unlocking the Sky” by Seth Shulman.