Otto Lilienthal
Karl Wilhelm Otto Lilienthal
Birthday	Tuesday, May 23, 1848
Birthplace	Anklam, Province of Pomerania
Died	Monday, August 10, 1896
Nationality	Prussian, German
Occupation	Engineer
Known for	Successful gliding experiments

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Lilienthal, Otto

Born May 23, 1848, in Anklam; died Aug. 9, 1896, in Berlin. German engineer; pioneer in aviation.

Lilienthal completed many flights on gliders that he designed himself. He came to the conclusion that, all other conditions being equal, a wing with a concave profile provides more lift than a flat wing. He proved by experiments that the magnitude of lifting force of wings varies with the change in their angle of attack. For this reason, the correlation diagram between the frontal resistance coefficient and the lift coefficient of an aircraft has been named after Lilienthal—that is, the Lilienthal polar. He offered an explanation of the factors involved in the gliding of birds (”The Flight of Birds as a Basis for Aviation,” 1889). He was killed near the town of Steglitz (near Berlin) during a flight from Mount Rinower. N. E. Zhukovskii valued Lilienthal’s experiments highly.

REFERENCES

Zhukovskii, N. E. “Letatel’nyi apparat Otto Lilientalia.” In Zhukovskii, N. E. Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 9. Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.
Zhukovskii, N. E. “O gibeli vozdukhoplavatelia Otto Lilientalia (Rech’).” Ibid.

References in periodicals archive

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Their interest in aviation was sparked in the mid-1890s by the glider flights of Germany's Otto Lilienthal and became a serious endeavor in 1899.

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Meanwhile, a German engineer, Otto Lilienthal, who was achieving international fame with spectacular flights in hang gliders of his own design, inspired William Randolph Hearst.

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