University of Virginia Library

How Lilienthal Was Killed.

In 1895, Otto Lilienthal, the father of modern aviation, the man to whose method of experimenting almost all present successes are due, after making something like two thousand glides with monoplanes, added a superposed surface to his apparatus and found the control of it much improved. The two surfaces were kept apart by two struts or vertical posts with a few guy wires, but the connecting joints were weak and there was nothing like trussing. This eventually cost his most useful life. Two weeks before that distressing loss to science, Herr Wilhelm Kress, the distinguished and veteran aviator of Vienna, witnessed a number of glides by Lilienthal with his double-decked apparatus. He noticed that it was much wracked and wobbly and wrote to me after the accident: "The connection of the wings and the steering arrangement were very bad and unreliable. I warned Herr Lilienthal very seriously. He promised me that he would soon put it in order, but I fear that he did not attend to it immediately."

In point of fact, Lilienthal had built a new machine, upon a different principle, from which he expected great results, and intended to make but very few more flights

with the old apparatus. He unwisely made one too many and, like Pilcher, was the victim of a distorted apparatus. Probably one of the joints of the struts gave way, the upper surface blew back and Lilienthal, who was well forward on the lower surface, was pitched headlong to destruction.