Robert W. Wood, an American studying chemistry and physics at the University of Berlin, received a letter from Otto Lilienthal on August 8, 1896. Lilienthal was the German experimenter who had become known as the “Flying Man” after gaining international attention with his glider flights over the previous five years. His letter was an invitation for Wood to join him the following day in the hills north of Berlin, where Wood said the engineer “was in the habit of exercising every Sunday with his flying machine.”
Wood, 28, had watched Lilienthal make several successful flights with his glider the previous Sunday. He had even attempted two glider flights himself, with mixed results. Lilienthal’s glider exercise “produces an impression that can never be forgotten,” Wood wrote. But the American was busy preparing for a trip to Siberia, so he was unable to join his friend this time. As a result, he was “spared the ordeal of witnessing the dreadful accident which caused his death, the news of which reached Berlin the following evening.”
Wood wrote those words from London on October 16, 1896, part of a lengthy description of the flights Lilienthal had made the week before his fatal crash. The story, published later that month in the Boston Evening Transcript newspaper, provides one of the most detailed accounts of Lilienthal and his glider flights, and is a reminder of how the German’s work and the hundreds of test flights he made helped advance the science of aeronautics.
Lilienthal’s life and his death inspired Wilbur and Orville Wright to make history a few years later. “My own active interest in aeronautical problems dates back to the death of Lilienthal in 1896,” Wilbur Wright said, adding Lilienthal had “accomplished so much.”
Otto Lilienthal was born in 1848 in Anklam, a town in what was then Prussia. As a child he became transfixed by the flight
