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The Man Who Inspired the Wright Brothers
At half past ten on the morning of December 17, 1903, the Wright Flyer I went airborne four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and flew into history. At the controls of the spruce-and-muslin aircraft was Orville Wright; he flew 120 feet in twelve seconds, at an altitude of roughly 10 feet. On some subsequent flights, his brother Wilbur piloted the machine.
The brothers have been (justifiably) lauded for their pioneering work on powered aircraft, but they didn’t invent in a vacuum. Indeed, they found considerable inspiration in the work of Otto Lilienthal, a towering figure in the early history of flight, but whose contributions were somewhat overshadowed in subsequent decades by the Wrights’ accomplishments.
“Lilienthal was without question the greatest of the precursors, and the world owes to him a great debt,” Wilbur Wright would write in September 1912.
Lilienthal was a German engineer and a student of aerodynamics. His early ideas for human-powered flight came from birds; of the various gliders he designed, a few even included flapping wings. Those gliders very much resembled their modern equivalents, with the pilot hanging on a frame beneath the wings; and although Lilienthal struggled mightily to balance the weight of his designs, they had a tendency to pitch forward — which would have fatal consequences.
