Some related links that we suggest:

Lilienthal's great contribution was the gliding flight he pioneered became the first step of human flight. The next steps should have been using the wind, soaring flight, and the flapping wing engine. But history went another way. The era of power flight started in 1903 with the Wright Brothers, although there were earlier flights reported (C. Ader, G. Weißkopf/Whitehead, K. Jatho, R. W. Pearse). The connection between Lilienthal and the Wright Brothers was the railway engineer Octave Chanute.

The rebirth of soaring flight started in the Rhön-hills in Germany, long after powered flight in the 1920s.
But only with the invention of the Rogallo-airfoil in the middle of the 20th Century was the hang glider invented for the second time.

The flapping of wings:
Stephan Nitsch has reconstructed and tested most of the Lilienthal-gliders that are exhibited in the museum. The bird flight and flapping of wings remained his topic of interest, as it is for W. Send, P. Bicheron & R. Korobelnik.
 
But there is another, the earliest ancestor of the aeroplane: The kite is not given much consideration.

Most locations of the Lilienthal story are located in Berlin and its environs: the "Engineering works 'Otto Lilienthal'" that realised the first serial production of an aircraft, the 'Aviators Hill' and other places where Lilienthal flew are presented in the museum guide. The Berlin-Tegel airport today is called "Otto Lilienthal."

Lilienthal Monument on the "Aviator Hill", Berlin

Original Gliders of Lilienthal are preserved in the following museums:

• Science Museum London
• Shukowski-Museum Moscow
• National Air and Space Museum Washington
• Technisches Museum Wien
• Parts of a glider and many of the known documents are preserved in the Deutsche Museum Munich
  

Early aviation history on the Web:

Today, thanks to many enthusiasts, the Web is a huge source of aviation history.
Here are two examples that are especially close to our topic:

the "Aviation Pioneers Anthology" of the Monash University (Australia),

Gary Bradshaw's huge aviation history archives "to fly is everything", the Pioneer Aviation History and

the collection "Aviaton Pioneers Links"

Almost any information can be found in the new free encyclopedia "Wikipedia" - and you have the opportunity to add information to it!

There are links to many other sources in our documents.

Moreover aviation is the topic of hundreds of aviation museums.

"MUSEUMS OF THE WORLD"

www.museum.com