GREAT AVIATION QUOTES
Otto Lilienthal


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There are 10 quotes matching Otto Lilienthal in the collection:


We returned home, after this experiment (September, 1874), with the conviction that sailing flight was not the exclusive prerogative of birds.

Otto Lilienthal

Birdflight As the Basis of Aviation: A Contribution Towards a System of Aviation, 1889.

Actual practice in individual flight presents the best prospects for developing our capacity until it leads to perfected free flight.

Otto Lilienthal

1895, for the first (German) edition of the Pocket-Book of Aeronautics. Published in English (translator W. Mansergh Varley) in the 1907 handbook:

Pocket-Book of Aeronautics

Every bird is an acrobat. Whoever would master the air must learn to imitate the bird’s dexterity. We must fly and fall, and fly and fall, until we can fly without falling.

Otto Lilienthal

Circa 1896. Quoted by Herbert N. Casson, At Last We Can Fly, in The American Magazine, volume 63, 1906.

It will be no easy matter to construct a useful wing for man, built upon the lines of the natural wing and endowed with all the dynamically economical properties of the latter; and it will be even a more difficult task to master the wind, that erratic force which so often destroys our handiwork, with those material wings which nature has not made part of our own body. But we must admit the possibility that continued investigation and experience will bring us ever nearer to that solemn moment, when the first man will rise from earth by means of wings, if only for a few seconds, and mark that historical moment which heralds the inauguration of a new era in our civilization.

Otto Lilienthal

Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation (Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst), 1889.

I, too, have made it a lifelong task of mine to add a cultural element to my work, which should result in uniting countries and reconciling their people. Our experience of today’s civilisation suffers from the fact that it only happens on the surface of the earth. We have invented barricades between our countries, custom regulations and constraints and complicated traffic laws and these are only possible because we are not in control of the ‘kingdom of the air’, and not as ‘free as a bird’.

Otto Lilienthal

Letter to Moritz von Egidy, c. January 1894.

No one can realize how substantial the air is, until he feels its supporting power beneath him. It inspires confidence at once.

Otto Lilienthal

The Flying Man, McClure’s Magazine, September 1894.

The Flying Man

One can get a proper insight into the practice of flying only by actual flying experiments … The manner in which we have to meet the irregularities of the wind, when soaring in the air, can only be learnt by being in the air itself … The only way which leads us to a quick development in human flight is a systematic and energetic practice in actual flying experiments.

Otto Lilienthal

Flying As A Sport, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, April 1896.

Flying as a Sport

Sacrifices must be made.

Otto Lilienthal

One of the main sources of inspiration for the Wright brothers. Widely cited in books and elsewhere as being said after a glider crash that took his life the next day, 10 August 1896. The original German is, “Opfer mussen gebracht werden”, and that is certainly what’s on his gravestone:

Lilienthal grave
But the full history is more complex. He did suffer a glider crash on Sunday 9 August 1896. His mechanic and assistant Paul Beylich ran to him in the wreckage, where Otto reportedly said, “What happened? … I’ll relax a bit, and we’ll continue.” But he was paralyzed from the waist down, and soon transported to a clinic in Berlin, where he died the next day. An 11 August 1896 story in the New York Journal newspaper quotes his last words as:

“Mine is the true inventor’s death. I am satisfied to die in the interest of science.”

But that account appears nowhere else and has no attribution. A letter to the journal Nature a few weeks later, describing Otto’s death by his friends Alard du Bois-Reymond and Carl Runge makes no mention of any last words.

Lilienthal did say the sacrifices phrase several times during his life. So how did it get attributed to the day before he died? It was much later, in a 1930 book The Lilienthals by his daughter Anna and brother Gustav, that the now famous words are first cited in this context. And the phrase wasn’t placed over his grave until 1940.

To invent an airplane is nothing. To build one is something. To fly is everything.

Ferdinand Ferber

1898. Widely misattributed to Otto Lilienthal, to whom it was dedicated. Published in L’Aviation; Ses Debuts son Developpement [Aviation, its debut and devopment], 1908.

What can I tell you about this first step that encounters nothing solid?

Russell Hawkes

In a hugely influential article on the then-nascent sport of hang gliding, Happy Birthday, Otto Lilienthal!, National Geographic magazine, February 1972.

California hang gliders were made then of bamboo and cloth, but the essence was already there. “I began to understand what this sport is all about: To fly without awareness of the means of flight … Is this one more rash of the endemic madness that periodically breaks out in California? Or the birth of a genuine national leisure-time mania, like drag racing and surfing?”

A lot of pilots were inspired by this article, and the first step line is still repeated by pilots who fly with wings, but no wheels.

Nothing solid .


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