He took his lessons from the birds, Lilienthal said, and he saw, as many “prominent investigators” had not, that the secret of “the art of flight” was to be found in the arched or vaulted wings of birds, by which they could ride the wind. He had no use for gas balloons as a means of flight, as they had nothing in common with the birds. “What we are seeking is the means of free motion in the air, in any direction.” And only by flying oneself could one achieve “proper insight” into all that was involved. To do this, one had to be on “intimate” terms with the wind.
Over the years Lilienthal had designed and built more than a dozen different gliders, his normal segel apparat (sailing machines). One he particularly favored had wings shaped like the “fly-fans” to be seen at the tables of restaurants and men’s clubs of the day, and a big vertical rudder shaped like a palm leaf. All but a few of these different models were monoplanes, the wings arched like a bird’s and made of white muslin tightly stretched over a frame of willow. As pilot, he would hang by his arms below the wings. The setting for Lilienthal’s flights, Wilbur learned, was a range of barren hills known as the Rhinow Mountains, a two-hour train ride north of Berlin.
A squarely built figure with red hair and a beard who dressed for his flights in knickers with heavily padded knees, Lilienthal would position himself on a steep slope, the wings held above his head. As one American eyewitness described the scene, he “stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol.” Then he would run down the slope and into the wind. Hanging on as the wind lifted him from the ground, he would swing his body and legs this way or that—as his means of balancing and steering—glide as far as possible and land on his feet.
Lilienthal also had himself repeatedly photographed in action, something no gliding enthusiast had yet done. With advances in the technology of photography, the dry-plate camera had come into use. Reproduction of photographic half-tones had also been achieved, and thus unprecedented photographs of the daring “Flying Man” and his gliders appeared the world over. In the United States, his fame was greater than anywhere. A long article in the popular McClure’s Magazine, illustrated with seven photographs of Lilienthal in flight, reached the largest audience of all.
In 1894 Lilienthal had crashed and lived to tell the tale. On August 9, 1896, flying a favorite “No. 11” glider, he crashed again, falling from an altitude of fifty feet. He died of a broken spine in a Berlin hospital the following day at age forty-eight.
“It must not remain our desire only to acquire the art of the bird,” Lilienthal had written. “It is our duty not to rest until we have attained a perfect scientific conception of the problem of flight.”
News of Lilienthal’s death, Wilbur later wrote, aroused in him as nothing had an interest that had remained passive from childhood. His reading on the flight of birds became intense. On the shelves of the family library was an English translation of a famous illustrated volume, Animal Mechanism, written by a French physician, Etienne-Jules Marey, more than thirty years before. Birds were also an interest of Bishop Wright, hence the book’s presence in the house, and Wilbur had already read it. Now he read it anew.
“Aerial locomotion has always excited the strongest curiosity among mankind,” the author said by way of introduction.
How frequently has the question been raised, whether man must always continue to envy the bird and the insect their wings; whether he, too, may not one day travel through the air, as he now sails across the ocean. Authorities in science have declared at different periods, as the result of lengthy calculations, that this is a chimerical dream, but how many intentions have we seen realized which have been pronounced impossible.
Marey’s serious, largely technical study led Wilbur to read more of the kind, including such treatises as J. Bell Pettigrew’s Animal Locomotion; or Walking, Swimming, and Flying, with a Dissertation on Aeronautics. For most readers the title alone would have been too daunting. For Wilbur the book was exactly what was needed.
Those authors who regard artificial flight as impracticable [wrote Pettigrew] sagely remark that the land supports the quadruped and the water the fish. This is quite true, but it is equally true that the air supports the bird, and that the evolutions of the bird on the wing are quite as safe and infinitely more rapid and beautiful than the movements of either the quadruped on the land or the fish in the water.
But, the book stressed, “the way of ‘an eagle in the air’ must of necessity remain a mystery,” until the structure and uses of wings were understood.
Of all animal movements, flight is indisputably the finest. . . . The fact that a creature as heavy, bulk for bulk, as many solid substances, can by the unaided movements of its wings urge itself through the air with a speed little short of a cannonball, fills the mind with wonder.
Wilbur was to draw upon and quote Pettigrew for years. Like the inspiring lectures of a great professor, the book had opened his eyes and started him thinking in ways he never had.
Once fully recovered from his illness, Orville proceeded with the same reading list. They “read up on aeronautics as a physician would read his books,” Bishop Wright would attest proudly.