A History of Aeronautics. Evelyn Charles Vivian
with the glimmerings that were in that age of the giants, is a fixed and certain thing; the problems of to-day are minor problems, for the great major problem vanished in solution when the Wright Brothers made their first ascent. In that age of the giants was evolved the flying man, the new type in human species which found full expression and came to full development in the days of the war, achieving feats of daring and endurance which leave the commonplace landsman staggered at thought of that of which his fellows prove themselves capable. He is a new type, this flying man, a being of self-forgetfulness; of such was Lilienthal, of such was Pilcher; of such in later days were Farman, Bleriot, Hamel, Rolls, and their fellows; great names that will live for as long as man flies, adventurers equally with those of the spacious days of Elizabeth. To each of these came the call, and he worked and dared and passed, having, perhaps, advanced one little step in the long march that has led toward the perfecting of flight.
It is not yet twenty years since man first flew, but into that twenty years have been compressed a century or so of progress, while, in the two decades that preceded it, was compressed still more. We have only to recall and recount the work of four men: Lilienthal, Langley, Pilcher, and Clement Ader to see the immense stride that was made between the time when Penaud pulled a trigger for the last time and the Wright Brothers first left the earth. Into those two decades was compressed the investigation that meant knowledge of the qualities of the air, together with the development of the one prime mover that rendered flight a possibility—the internal combustion engine. The coming and progress of this latter is a thing apart, to be detailed separately; for the present we are concerned with the evolution of the driven plane, and with it the evolution of that daring being, the flying man. The two are inseparable, for the men gave themselves to their art; the story of Lilienthal’s life and death is the story of his work; the story of Pilcher’s work is that of his life and death.
Considering the flying man as he appeared in the war period, there entered into his composition a new element—patriotism—which brought about a modification of the type, or, perhaps, made it appear that certain men belonged to the type who in reality were commonplace mortals, animated, under normal conditions, by normal motives, but driven by the stress of the time to take rank with the last expression of human energy, the flying type. However that may be, what may be termed the mathematising of aeronautics has rendered the type itself evanescent; your pilot of to-day knows his craft, once he is trained, much in the manner that a driver of a motor-lorry knows his vehicle; design has been systematised, capabilities have been tabulated; camber, dihedral angle, aspect ratio, engine power, and plane surface, are business items of drawing office and machine shop; there is room for enterprise, for genius, and for skill; once and again there is room for daring, as in the first Atlantic flight. Yet that again was a thing of mathematical calculation and petrol storage, allied to a certain stark courage which may be found even in landsmen. For the ventures into the unknown, the limit of daring, the work for work’s sake, with the almost certainty that the final reward was death, we must look back to the age of the giants, the age when flying was not a business, but romance.
Lilienthal with his glider folded after a glide.
Lilienthal’s biplane glider alighting.
Pilcher’s ‘Bat.’
The ‘Bat’, side view.
VII
LILIENTHAL AND PILCHER
There was never a more enthusiastic and consistent student of the problems of flight than Otto Lilienthal, who was born in 1848 at Anklam, Pomerania, and even from his early school-days dreamed and planned the conquest of the air. His practical experiments began when, at the age of thirteen, he and his brother Gustav made wings consisting of wooden framework covered with linen, which Otto attached to his arms, and then ran downhill flapping them. In consequence of possible derision on the part of other boys, Otto confined these experiments for the most part to moonlit nights, and gained from them some idea of the resistance offered by flat surfaces to the air. It was in 1867 that the two brothers began really practical work, experimenting with wings which, from their design, indicate some knowledge of Besnier and the history of his gliding experiments; these wings the brothers fastened to their backs, moving them with their legs after the fashion of one attempting to swim. Before they had achieved any real success in gliding the Franco-German war came as an interruption; both brothers served in this campaign, resuming their experiments in 1871 at the conclusion of hostilities.
The experiments made by the brothers previous to the war had convinced Otto that previous experimenters in gliding flight had failed through reliance on empirical conclusions or else through incomplete observation on their own part, mostly of bird flight. From 1871 onward Otto Lilienthal (Gustav’s interest in the problem was not maintained as was his brother’s) made what is probably the most detailed and accurate series of observations that has ever been made with regard to the properties of curved wing surfaces. So far as could be done, Lilienthal tabulated the amount of air resistance offered to a bird’s wing, ascertaining that the curve is necessary to flight, as offering far more resistance than a flat surface. Cayley, and others, had already stated this, but to Lilienthal belongs the honour of being first to put the statement to effective proof—he made over 2,000 gliding flights between 1891 and the regrettable end of his experiments; his practical conclusions are still regarded as part of the accepted theory of students of flight. In 1889 he published a work on the subject of gliding flight which stands as data for investigators, and, on the conclusions embodied in this work, he began to build his gliders and practise what he had preached, turning from experiment with models to wings that he could use.
It was in the summer of 1891 that he built his first glider of rods of peeled willow, over which was stretched strong cotton fabric; with this, which had a supporting surface of about 100 square feet, Otto Lilienthal launched himself in the air from a spring board, making glides which, at first of only a few feet, gradually lengthened. As his experience of the supporting qualities of the air progressed he gradually altered his designs until, when Pilcher visited him in the spring of 1895, he experimented with a glider, roughly made of peeled willow rods and cotton fabric, having an area of 150 square feet and weighing half a hundredweight. By this time Lilienthal had moved from his springboard to a conical artificial hill which he had had thrown up on level ground at Grosse Lichterfelde, near Berlin. This hill was made with earth taken from the excavations incurred in constructing a canal, and had a cave inside in which Lilienthal stored his machines. Pilcher, in his paper on ‘Gliding,’1 gives an excellent short summary of Lilienthal’s experiments, from which the following extracts are taken:—
‘At first Lilienthal used to experiment by jumping off a springboard with a good run. Then he took to practising on some hills close to Berlin. In the summer of 1892 he built a flat-roofed hut on the summit of a hill, from the top of which he used to jump, trying, of course, to soar as far as possible before landing. … One of the great dangers with a soaring machine is losing forward speed, inclining the machine too much down in front, and coming down head first. Lilienthal was the first to introduce the system of handling a machine in the air merely by moving his weight about in the machine; he always rested only on his elbows or on his elbows and shoulders. …
‘In 1892 a canal was being cut, close to where Lilienthal lived, in the suburbs of Berlin, and with the surplus earth Lilienthal had a special hill thrown up to fly from. The country round is as flat as the sea, and there is not a house or tree near it to make the wind unsteady, so this was an ideal practising ground; for practising on natural hills is generally rendered very difficult by shifty and gusty winds. … This hill is 50 feet high, and conical. Inside the hill there is a