Lilienthal's Birdwatching @museum.de

For years, Lilienthal had observed the flight of birds: of seagulls, herons and storks in his home town of Anklam, then of swallows, pigeons and sparrows in Berlin. At times, he even had a few juvenile storks teetering around the garden of his suburban villa in Berlin.

Lilienthal had grasped that what allows birds to soar is not their physical strength, but the shape of their wings. Since the age of 18, he’d been carrying out experiments and calculations to discover the secret behind the flight of birds – often with the help of his brother. After more than two decades, he’d finally succeeded:

In October 1888, he went public and gave his first lecture:

"Flying is a mechanical process which nature demonstrates to us every day. But while this problem appears to have been solved by nature in such a perfect fashion, we humans have been trying in vain since the earliest days of our history to imitate the flight of birds."

In vain? That was something Lilienthal was determined to change! A year later, in 1889, he published his ground-breaking theoretical work "The Flight of Birds as the Basis of Aviation". It was the first scientific work on aerodynamics, the laws of which Lilienthal explores:

"The most important finding of those years was the discovery that curved wings provide greater lift than flat ones."

Otto and Gustav Lilienthal were thus not only pioneers of human flight, but also of an entire scientific discipline: aerodynamics. The book was translated into multiple languages and our current knowledge of air resistance and flow behaviour is still based on Lilienthal's observations and experimental series.

"The Flight of Birds as the Basis of Aviation" is Lilienthal's main work, the essence of his research. But beyond that, it’s also a beautiful book. All the drawings, and even the frontispiece of a stork family calmly circling, were Otto Lilienthal’s own work.

So much for the theory. And before the end of 1889, the year of publication, Lilienthal started on his practical flight experiments.

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Zitat 1: Seifert / Waßermann: Otto Lilienthal, Leben und Werk. Eine Biographie Hamburg: Urban 1992, S. 47

Zitat 2: Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst, Berlin: 1889