German pioneer of aviation who became known as the Glider King. He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful gliding flights. Lilienthal was the most significant aeronautical pioneer in the years between the advancements of the Englishman George Cayley and the American Wright brothers.
Trained as a mechanical engineer, Lilienthal established his own machine shop and flight factory following service in the Franco-German War. Lilienthal began to conduct studies of the forces operating on wings in a stream of air in the late 1870s. The results of that research appeared in 1889 in a book entitled “Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst” (“Bird Flight as the Basis of Aviation”) and in an important series of articles that provided a foundation for the final effort to achieve mechanical flight.
Having explored the physical principles governing winged flight, Lilienthal began to design and build gliders on the basis of the information he had gathered. Between 1891 and 1896, he completed some 2,000 flights in at least 16 distinct glider types. His career as a builder and pilot of gliders coincided with the development of high-speed and stroboscopic photography. Images of Lilienthal flying through the air aboard his standard glider appeared around the globe in newspapers and the great illustrated magazines of the period. Those pictures convinced millions of readers in Europe and the United States that the age of flight was at hand.
While his lifelong pursuit was flight, Lilienthal was also an inventor and devised a small engine that worked on a system of tubular boilers. His engine was much safer than the other small engines of the time. This invention gave him the financial freedom to focus on aviation.
There are 25 known Lilienthal patents.
Lilienthal broke his back in a glider crash on Aug. 9, 1896, and died in a Berlin hospital the next day.
Lilienthal’s research was well known to the Wright brothers, and they credited him as a major inspiration for their decision to pursue manned flight.

Link to Wikipedia biography