'Herr Lilienthal came to grief through deserting his old method
of balancing. In order to control his tipping movements more
rapidly he attached a line from his horizontal rudder to his
head, so that when he moved his head forward it would lift the
rudder and tip the machine up in front, and vice versa. He was
practicing this on some natural hills outside Berlin, and he
apparently got muddled with the two motions, and, in trying to
regain speed after he had, through a lull in the wind, come to
rest in the air, let the machine get too far down in front, came
down head first and was killed.'

Then in another passage Pilcher enunciates what is the true
value of such experiments as Lilienthal--and, subsequently, he
himself--made: 'The object of experimenting with soaring
machines,' he says, 'is to enable one to have practice in
starting and alighting and controlling a machine in the air.
They cannot possibly float horizontally in the air for any
length of time, but to keep going must necessarily lose in
elevation. They are excellent schooling machines, and that is
all they are meant to be, until power, in the shape of an engine
working a screw propeller, or an engine working wings to drive
the machine forward, is added; then a person who is used to
soaring down a hill with a simple soaring machine will be able
to fly with comparative safety. One can best compare them to
bicycles having no cranks, but on which one could learn to
balance by coming down an incline.'

It was in 1895 that Lilienthal passed from experiment with the
monoplane type of glider to the construction of a biplane glider