Otto Lilienthal
1848-1896
Who
German engineer - the first person to fly repeatedly and with documents. Newspapers worldwide printed photographs of him gliding, and the world believed flight was possible because it had seen him do it.
Why it matters
Between 1891 and 1896 Lilienthal made hundreds of documented glider flights from his self-built hills near Berlin - the first person to do flying that could be repeated, reported and studied rather than merely attempted. He steered by shifting his body weight, bat-like, trusting curved wings he had measured himself; his lift tables became the starting point for everyone who followed. On 9 August 1896 a stall dropped him from some 15 m and broke his neck; he died the next day. The flights made heavier-than-air flight a fact in the public mind; the death, front-page news around the world, made the unsolved problem obvious: not lift - control. The Wright brothers said it plainly: Lilienthal's method was a dead end, and their wing-warping was the answer to it.
Lineage
Stood on Cayley's theory, gave the world proof and data - and, by how he died, the warning. The Wrights began by correcting his tables and ended by solving the problem his death named.