The Airplane - Jay Spenser [18]
Among the massed German troops witnessing all this from below was a tall, strongly built Prussian fusilier with bright red hair. The twenty-two-year-old’s upturned face betrayed wonder, a look he had reserved since early childhood for birds and anything else that flew.
Fortunately for posterity, Otto Lilienthal survived the war. Returning to Pomerania, in northeast Germany, this intense young man completed formal training and embarked on a successful career as a civil engineer. Lilienthal opened a small machine shop and fabrication plant in Berlin. In his free time, he applied his newfound engineering knowledge to the close observation of birds and experiments with airfoils. By 1878, he was using a whirling arm to test wing designs.
In 1889, Lilienthal published all that he had learned in Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegerkunst (Bird Flight as the Basis of Aviation), a seminal work in aviation. In it Germany’s great pioneer did his best to lay out a groundwork for the emergence of human flight. Although incomplete and flawed, this volume offered those following in his footsteps a wealth of information about wings, airfoils, lift, and camber.
Like William Henson, Sir George Cayley’s other disciple, Otto Lilienthal strove to build further on the Yorkshire baronet’s brilliant insights. Fortunately, his success as an engineer and inventor gave him the wherewithal to undertake flight experiments, even paying for the construction of an artificially graded hill.
Picking up where Cayley had left off four decades earlier, Lilienthal became the first human being ever to make repeated gliding flights. This he accomplished with fixed wings he designed and built himself. Because Lilienthal strapped himself into these nonflapping wings and used his feet as the landing gear, these devices were by definition hang gliders. Like their modern counterparts, they were controlled in flight by shifting one’s body weight.
All his life, Otto Lilienthal had dreamed of flying like a bird. At the age of thirteen, he had even fashioned a fixed-wing glider with the help of his brother Gustav. That crude effort had been entirely unsuccessful. Now, armed with superior knowledge in his early forties, he succeeded at last. Sailing through the air became his life’s all-consuming passion.
This experimentation spanned five years and at least sixteen different glider designs. It won Lilienthal wide acclaim and an international following. Photographs of Germany’s “flying man” were manifest proof that heavier-than-air constructions could indeed carry people aloft and that they did not have to flap their wings to fly.
To those dreaming of flight, these images were a bracing tonic. With his full beard, piercing eyes, and purposeful scowl, Lilienthal looked like a champion, and experimenters around the world took heart. But it was one flight of Lilienthal’s in particular that would change the course of history.
By August 9, 1896, Otto Lilienthal had logged some two thousand flights. On that fateful summer day, the barrel-chested man stood again poised like an eagle on a crag wearing wings he had fashioned. As he had done so many times before, he raced headlong down the hill and launched himself into the air.
As he sailed aloft, a savage gust of wind slammed into him. His desperately flailing legs failed to keep his glider upright. Over he went, plummeting 50 feet (15 meters) to the ground and breaking his back on impact. Doctors, family members, and friends did their best for him, but it was no use—aviation’s towering figure of the latter part of the nineteenth century succumbed the next day.
The fall that shattered Lilienthal’s spine also severed the link between Cayley and those who would actually invent the airplane. At least, that’s how it seems.
In 1799, Cayley had advocated designing an airplane with its wings toward the front and a stabilizing tail at the rear. Being