Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

It was near the end of my two years in Berlin that I made the acquaintance of Otto Lilienthal, whose pioneer work on artificial flight I had followed with interest for years. His early experiments, based on a long study of the flight of birds, had been performed in the outskirts of Berlin, where he had built a small artificial hill, from the top of which he had launched himself supported on wings of bamboo and cotton fabric, gliding off to a landing at some distance from the base of the hill. By this time he had become more ambitious, and practiced his flights on the high rolling hills near Rhinow, some of which were over three hundred feet high and carpeted with long thick grass and spongy moss. Before taking me out to witness his flights, he showed me, in his engine factory in Berlin, a power-driven aeroplane, with twenty-five square yards of wing surface, which was almost completed. On the following Sunday we went by train to Neustadt, some hundred miles north of Berlin, and from there to Rhinow in a peasant’s cart. Storks were flying over the fields all around us, frequently landing close by the roadside, and Lilienthal excitedly explained how they landed, by swinging their long legs out in front just before reaching the ground. This movement threw up the forward edge of their wings and arrested the forward motion. He had learned how to imitate this technique, after many accidents involving sprained ankles and broken bones.

His machine was a “pocket airship”, and was stored on a small cart in the peasant’s barn. We drove over to the mountains, and with the help of the peasant the “glider”, as we should call it now, was put together like a box kite. It was a biplane with wings having arched surfaces, which he had discovered were very superior in lifting power to flat surfaces.

The lower plane measured twenty feet from tip to tip and the upper one, supported on two stout bamboo sticks, was firmly fixed to the lower by tightly stretched guy wires. So perfectly was the machine fitted together that it was impossible to find a single loose wire or brace, and the whole machine “boomed” like a drum when rapped with the knuckles. We carried the machine to the top of the hill, and Lilienthal took his place in the framework, lifting the wings from the ground. He was dressed in flannel shirt and knickerbockers, the knees of which were thickly padded to lessen the shock in case of a too rapid descent, for in such an emergency he had learned to drop instantly to his knees after striking with his feet, thus dividing the collision with the earth into two sections and preventing injury or strain to the machine.

I took my place considerably below him, by my camera, and waited anxiously for the start; he faced the wind and stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol. Presently the breeze freshened a little; he took three rapid steps forward and was instantly lifted from the ground, sailing off nearly horizontally from the summit. He went over my head at a terrific pace, at an elevation of about fifty feet, the wind playing wild tunes on the tense cordage of the machine, and was past me before I had time to train the camera on him. Suddenly he swerved to the left, somewhat obliquely to the wind, and then came what may have been a forerunner of the disaster of the next Sunday. It happened so quickly and I was so excited at the moment that I did not grasp exactly what happened, but the apparatus tipped sideways as if a sudden gust had got under the left wing. For a moment I could see the top of the aeroplane, and then with a powerful thrust of his legs he brought the machine once more on an even keel and sailed away below me across the fields at the bottom, kicking at the tops of the haycocks as he passed over them. When within a foot of the ground he threw his legs forward, and notwithstanding its great velocity the machine stopped instantly, its front turning up and allowing the wind to strike under the wings, and he dropped lightly to the earth. I ran after him and found him quite breathless from excitement and exertion. He said, “Did you see that? I thought for a moment it was all up with me. I tipped so, then so, and I threw out my legs thus and righted it. I have learned something new; I learn something new each time”.

Towards the end of the afternoon, after witnessing perhaps half a score of flights and observing carefully how he preserved his equilibrium, I managed to screw up courage enough to try the machine. We carried it a dozen yards or so up the hillside, and I stepped into the frame and lifted the apparatus from the ground. My first feeling was one of utter helplessness. The machine weighed about forty pounds, and the enormous surface spread to the wind, combined with the leverage of the ten-foot wings, made it quite difficult to hold. It rocked and tipped from side to side with every puff of air, and I had to exert my entire strength to keep it level.