The man who may truly be said to have given the airplane its first real start in life, was a German named Otto Lilienthal. His figure is a very picturesque one in the long story of the conquest of the air. Lilienthal was a very busy engineer, but from boyhood he had had a consuming interest in the problems of flight, and as he traveled about Germany on his business undertakings he cast about in his mind incessantly for some plan of wings which would support the human body and carry it up into the air. He finally began a very systematic study of the wings of birds with the result that he made some unusual and important discoveries. While the men who had preceded him had attempted only flat wings in their plans for flying machines, Lilienthal decided that the wings should be arched, like those of a bird, heavier in front, with an abrupt downward dip to the front edge, and then sloping away gradually to the rear where their weight was comparatively slight. When still quite a young man he began building kites with planes curved in this manner. To his surprise and joy he found that they rose very rapidly when set to the breeze. They even seemed to move forward slightly in the air, as though they had a tendency to fly. Like a bird resting on a current of air with wings motionless, these little toy wings were carried along gracefully on the breeze. Lilienthal was jubilant. A man equipped with wings like these, he said to himself, would have no difficulty at all in flying. Lilienthal was not a rich man and it was many years before his opportunity to test his ideas with a real flying machine came. When by hard toil at his profession he had accumulated a comfortable fortune, he turned at last to his beloved study. He had often watched the baby birds in their efforts to fly, and he knew it would be a long time before he attained any skill with wings, but he was absolutely confident that with much practise and perseverance he could actually learn to fly like the birds. So he constructed for himself a pair of bird wings, arched exactly like those which he had studied. They were arranged with a circular strip of wood between them for his body. Here he hung, with his arms outstretched on each side, so that he could operate the wings.