Otto Lilienthal

Otto Lilienthal (Anklam, Germany, May 23, 1848 - Berlin, August 10, 1896) was a German industrial and aeronautical engineer. He was one of the pioneers of flight and the study of it, after an earlier experimental approach established in the 18th century by Sir George Cayley, became the first person in history to make well-planned, repeated and successful flights with gliders. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of his flights internationally and favorably influenced public and scientific opinion about the possibility that a flying machine could be a plausible reality, after a time of idle fantasy and little scientific development.

Inventing an airplane is nothing,
building one is already something,
And fly, it's all!

Life

Lilienthal was born on May 23, 1848 in Anklam, Pomerania province, in the then German kingdom of Prussia, the son of Gustav Lilienthal and his wife Caroline (née Pohle), a middle-class couple. They had eight children, but only three made it to adulthood: Otto, Gustav, and Marie. The brothers worked together their entire lives on technical, social and cultural projects.

He soon devoted himself to studying the flight of birds with his brother Gustav (1849-1933) and, fascinated by the idea of manned flight, he and his brother made strapped wings but their gliding attempts failed. He later attended the Potsdam Technical College for two years and founded the Schwarzkopf company before becoming an industrial design engineer. He later attended the Royal Technical Academy in Berlin.

In 1867 he began more serious experiments in air force, interrupted by his service in the Franco-Prussian War. As an engineer in various companies, he received his first patent for a mining machine. Five years later he founded his own company manufacturing boilers and steam engines. On June 6, 1878, he married Agnes Fisher, daughter of an MP. Music had united them: he was training piano and voice, while Otto played the French horn and had a good tenor voice. They settled in Berlin and had four children: Otto, Anna, Fritz and Frida.

Career

He experimented, often accompanied by his wife and his brother Gustav, with gliders that evolved according to the movements of the pilot's body and that he flew by launching himself from an artificial hill he built near Berlin and also from natural hills, especially in the region of "Rhinower Berge" (Rhinow Hills). His first designs were monoplane gliders, later designing and building aircraft with other configurations, such as biplanes, tandem-winged, flapping-winged, and folding-winged craft. In 1893, he slid up to 250 meters, a record not surpassed until after his death.

Lilienthal did basic research on the exact description of the flight of birds, especially storks, and used polar diagrams to describe the aerodynamics of their wings. He helped prove that heavier-than-air flight was practical without flapping wings, laying the foundation for Alberto Santos Dumont to successfully build the first airplane a few years later, taking off without external aid. As a result of his studies and his more than two thousand flights, he published articles in specialized magazines and made several publications, the best known being a work called The flight of birds as the basis of aviation, published in 1889. and translated into English in 1911. He corresponded with other aerial pioneers, such as Octave Chanute.

In addition to devoting his life to researching flight, Lilienthal was also an inventor, devising a small engine that was powered by a system of tubular boilers. His engine was safer than other engines of the time. This invention gave him the financial freedom to quit his job and focus on aviation. His brother Gustav was living in Australia at the time, and Otto did not participate in any aviation experiments until his brother's return in 1886.

He founded a boiler and steam engine company and obtained twenty-five patents, one for a machine used in mining and four related to aeronautics.

Lilienthal's greatest contribution was the development of heavier-than-air flight. Working jointly with his brother Gustav, he made more than 2,000 flights in gliders of his design, beginning in 1891 with his first version of the glider, the Derwitzer, until his death in an accident in 1896. Lilienthal suffered a large number of collisions in his experiments, even though his glider could only reach low speeds and altitudes.

On August 9, 1896, he suffered a serious accident, falling from a height of 17 meters, breaking his neck at the level of the third vertebra. His mechanic picked him up and took him by horse-drawn carriage to Stölln, where he was examined by a doctor. Losing consciousness, he was taken by freight train to the Lehrter station in Berlin and, the next morning, to the clinic of Ernst von Bergmann, one of the most famous and successful surgeons in Europe at the time. There he passed away, his last words being & # 34; Opfer müssen gebracht werden! & # 34; ("There must be sacrifices!").

Known as the "Father of Flight," he was credited by the Wright brothers as a great inspiration.

Literary reference

The narrator of the novel Zavist, by the Russian writer Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), remembered Lilienthal thus:

Since a child, the name of Lilienthal, a deaphan and an insect elite, has had a wonderful sound for me... That flying name, as extended on light bamboo tables, is associated in my memory with the beginnings of aviation. Otto Lilienthal, the flying man, killed himself. The flying apparatuses stopped looking like birds. The wings, light and transparent yellow, were replaced by fins. One might think they'll hit the ground during takeoff. In any case, they raise clouds of dust. A flying apparatus now looks like a heavy fish. How quickly aviation has become an industry!