s back to the death
of Lilienthal in 1896. The brief notice of his death which appeared in
the telegraphic news at that time aroused a passive interest which had
existed from my childhood, and led me to take down from the shelves of
our home library a book on "Animal Mechanism," by Prof. Marey, which I
had already read several times. From this I was led to read more modern
works, and as my brother soon became equally interested with myself, we
soon passed from the reading to the thinking, and finally to the working
stage. It seemed to us that the main reason why the problem had remained
so long unsolved was that no one had been able to obtain any adequate
practice. We figured that Lilienthal in five years of time had spent
only about five hours in actual gliding through the air. The wonder was
not that he had done so little, but that he had accomplished so much. It
would not be considered at all safe for a bicycle rider to attempt to
ride through a crowded city street after only five hours' practice,
spread out in bits of ten seconds each over a period of five years; yet
Lilienthal with this brief practice was remarkably successful in meeting
the fluctuations and eddies of wind gusts. We thought that if some
method could be found by which it would be possible to practice by the
hour instead of by the second there would be hope of advancing the
solution of a very difficult problem. It seemed feasible to do this by
building a machine which would be sustained at a speed of 18 miles per
hour, and then finding a locality where winds of this velocity were
common. With these conditions a rope attached to the machine to keep it
from floating backward would answer very nearly the same purpose as a
propeller driven by a motor, and it would be possible to practice by the
hour, and without any serious danger, as it would not be necessary to
rise far from the ground, and the machine would not have any forward
motion at all. We found, according to the accepted tables of air
pressures on curved surfaces, that a machine spreading 200 square feet
of wing surface would be sufficient for our purpose, and that places
could easily be found along the Atlantic coast where winds of 16 to 25
miles were not at all uncommon. When the winds were low it was our plan
to glide from the tops of sand hills, and when they were sufficiently
strong to use a rope for our motor and fly over one spot. Our next work
was to draw up the plan for a suitable machin