7 Otto Lilienthal 7Grundlage der Fliegekunst (“Bird Flight as the Basis of
Aviation”) and in an important series of articles that
provided a foundation for the final effort to achieve
mechanical flight. As transmitted by Octave Chanute,
Lilienthal’s friend and American correspondent, the tables
of data served as the starting point for the earliest aircraft
designs of the Wright brothers.
Having explored the physical principles governing
winged flight, Lilienthal began to design and build gliders
on the basis of the information he had gathered. Between
1891 and 1896, he completed some 2,000 flights in at least
16 distinct glider types. The largest number of flights were
made with his standard glider, a monoplane aircraft with
a stabilizing tail at the rear and wings that resembled
“the outspread pinions of a soaring bird.” The wing ribs
and other covered portions of the aircraft were usually
constructed of split willow. The wing covering was cotton
twill shirting, doped with a colloidal solution to make it
more airtight. In the standard glider, the operator hung
suspended between the two halves of the wing. The opera-
tor shifted his weight to move the centre of gravity and
exercise some measure of control over the motion of
the craft. Although Lilienthal recognized the danger
and inadequacy of this method of flight control and
gave some thought to alternative systems, he did not
develop or test them. Lilienthal sold several standard
gliders to other experimenters as far distant as Russia and
the United States.
Lilienthal’s career as a builder and pilot of gliders
coincided with the development of high-speed and strobo-
scopic photography. Images of Lilienthal flying through
the air aboard his standard glider appeared around the
globe in newspapers and the great illustrated magazines of
the period. Those pictures convinced millions of readers
in Europe and the United States that the age of flight was