Human flight: One man's sacrifice

Photographs, drawings, letters, and patents from flight pioneer Otto Lilienthal can now be viewed online as part of the digitalized collection of the museum named after him in the small northeastern German town of Anklam. Among the objects is the first-ever glider from 1894, which was eventually produced and sold commercially. It was known as a "Normalsegelapparat," or "normal sailing apparatus."

Otto Lilienthal was born in 1848 in Anklam, near the Baltic Sea. As a boy, he and his brother Gustav would experiment with flying objects. It would be many years, however, until they would have success - namely, 1891.

After years of theoretical exercises, Otto Lilienthal became the first human to fly a glider in 1891 - covering the modest distance of 25 meters (82 feet). What seemed like a small step would become a huge leap: Just 70 years later, the first human flew all the way to outer space, albeit with quite a different vehicle.

Otto Lilienthal undertook over 1,000 flights in his career. He constantly made improvements to his glider - and it paid off. His longest flight took him over 80 meters.

Finding a suitable hill was a prerequisite for Lilienthal's flights and proved to be a challenge. In 1894, he decided to solve the problem once and for all and built his own hill at the site of a former brickyard. The hill, located in the Berlin district of Steglitz-Zehlendorf, witnessed numerous flight attempts by the pioneer and still exists today.

Starting in 1894, anyone could purchase a glider like Lilienthal's for the hefty sum of 500 Marks (around $7,000 today). Lilienthal produced the gliders in his factory in Berlin. One of the nine known buyers was Irish physician George Francis Fitzgerald, who purchased his own glider in March 1895.

In addition to his standard glider, Lilienthal also developed two double-decker models. They had a wingspan of 5.5 to 7 meters (18 to 23 feet) and a surface area of 25 square meters (270 square feet).

On August 9, 1896, Lilienthal crashed during a flight from Gollenberg mountain in Havelland in northeastern Germany. He died the following day at the University Clinic in Berlin. The pioneer had jump-started the development of human flight, which was pursued by others in the years after his death. Lilienthal's tombstone reads: "Sacrifices must be made."