Introductory Film, Full-Size Flying Machines @museum.de

If you look up, you’ll see three historic aircraft suspended above our heads – three out of a total of 17 different types of flying machine developed and built by Otto and Gustav Lilienthal! The full-size reconstructions convey a sense of the brothers' engineering achievements...

... and of the dexterity and muscle power needed to control “apparatuses” like these. In 1891, Otto Lilienthal would have hung inside his "Derwitz Apparatus" rather like the display dummy does today. The two gliders on either side represent further refinements: one is the "Normal Soaring Apparatus" of 1894, and the other an almost identical biplane version.

The modern hang glider operates along the same lines as Lilienthal's early aircraft. They all fly without artificial propulsion, relying only on the air currents – entirely in accordance with the principle of bird flight. It was not until a few years after Lilienthal that the Wright brothers built the first motorised aircraft.

You might like to look at the walls, too. Our encyclopaedia of flight lists the most important German technical terms from the fields of aeronautics and aviation history. After all, Lilienthal wasn’t the first to look into creating flying apparatuses. Three and a half centuries earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had designed spectacular flying machines.

A hundred years before Lilienthal, the brothers Montgolfier had established the "lighter than air" principle and ascended in a hot air balloon. Then there were the airships, or Zeppelins, that were still soaring across the sky long after Lilienthal's death. They, too, were only able to take to the air because they were filled with a “lifting gas” – one that’s lighter than air.

Lilienthal, on the other hand, was interested in actually flying. He wanted to discover the "heavier than air" principle. He conducted a wide range of different physics experiments and carried out at least 3,000 flying attempts, which he recorded in detail. Our exhibition in the room upstairs, to the left of the ticket office, tells the story of how Lilienthal went from studying bird flight to designing the first aircraft.