a disinterested student of nature. Complete
success was denied to him, but his work informed and stimulated others.
The Wright brothers, when they first took up the problem of flight, had
the advantage of acquaintance with Professor S. P. Langley's
aeronautical researches, but their gliding experiments were shaped and
inspired by what they had read of Lilienthal's achievements.

The other pioneer, who has earned a place beside Lilienthal, is Percy
Pilcher. In 1893, at the age of twenty-seven, he became assistant
lecturer in naval architecture and marine engineering at Glasgow
University. He devoted all his spare time to aeronautics, and in 1895
built his first glider, which he named 'The Bat'. The machine was built,
with the help of his sister, in the sitting-room of their lodging in
Kersland street, Glasgow, and was tested on the banks of the Clyde, near
Cardross. Some defects were revealed by the tests; when these were
remedied, and the glider was towed by a rope, Pilcher rose to a height
of twenty feet, and remained in the air for nearly one minute.
Thereafter he built, in rapid succession, three new gliders, all of
different design, which he called 'The Beetle', 'The Gull', and 'The
Hawk'. The professor of naval architecture at Glasgow, Sir John Biles,
says of him, 'He was one of the few men I have met who had no sense of
fear.... I was deterred from helping him as much as I ought to have done
by a fear of the risks that he ran. He at one time talked to Lord Kelvin
about helping him: Lord Kelvin spoke to me about it, and said that on no
account would he help him, nor should I, as he would certainly break his
neck. This was unfortunately too true a prophecy.' The Hawk was the best
of his gliders; at Eynsford in Kent, on the 19th of June 1897, he made a
perfectly balanced glide of 250 yards across a deep valley, towed only
by a thin fishing line, 'which one could break with one's hands'. After
this, Pilcher began to make plans for fitting an engine to his glider.
Since the first appearance of the Otto engine in 1876, and of the
Daimler engine eight years later, the oil-engine had steadily developed
in lightness and power, but no engine exactly suitable for his purpose
was on the market, so he resolved to build one. An engine of four
horse-power, weighing forty pounds, with a wooden airscrew five feet in
diameter, was, by his calculations, amply sufficient to maintain his
glider in horizontal flight. The light engine h