...having liberated himself from what he regarded as the shackles of business, he established the family for the summer in a cottage in York Harbor, Maine, and set to work in earnest. "I spent," said he, "the greater part of my time in working at the bench and in the field." I well remember the attic workshop he fixed up, in which he built his models and from the window of which he sometimes launched them. The neighbors, I am sure, considered him eccentric, if not a little balmy, but this did not disturb him in the least.

His better builidng materials show his practical ingenuity.  The "backbone" of his structure was of light wood (pine, I think), and its wings of about three feet span were fashioned from a pair of umbrella ribs, bent to whatever degree he wished and covered with tightly stretched and varnished silk. For his tail assemblies he found Japanese fans made of bamboo and paper to be very satisfactory.  

He soon abandoned his attempts at automatic stabilization by means of pendulums and narrowed his study to that of shape and size of airfoils and center of gravity. After noting the glide of a model, he would alter some one factor slightly and try again. In this way of trial and error he improved the performance of his gliding model considerably. Indeed of his final model of the summer of 1894 he had this to say:

"Having altered my design after every trial, I can now offer to experimenters the drawing of an instrument which will, I think, be useful to them in begtinning a series of investigations. It involves no new principle, but as the result of experiment it is proportioned in such a way that it will soar instructively. Whatever the merits or the faults of the design may be, its dimensions are given, and anyone may test it." 

This is indeed a modest statement. In restrospect, I have little doubt that if his model were blown up to mansized, and equipped with proper controls, a modern gilder pilot would be able to fly it. Possibly it was of better design than that of the comtemporary apparatus in which Otto Lilienthal lost his life.