On 31 May 1811 Albrecht Ludwig Berblinger, the tailor of Ulm, tried to fly his self-built glider in public. He took off from the 13-meter wall of a bastion on the Danube, the site the town had demanded. He fell into the river. Fishermen pulled him out while the crowd jeered. Afterwards people called him a liar and a fraud. The customers of his tailor’s shop stayed away. He died in 1829 in a hospital, completely impoverished. Today it is thought that the cold water of the Danube creates downdrafts along the walls. In 1934 Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem Ulm 1592, which was taken into many school readers. In the poem a bishop declares after the tailor’s fall: Der Mensch ist kein Vogel, / Es wird nie ein Mensch fliegen. (Man is not a bird. No man will ever fly.)