The Brick Moon.
First of four installments published in The Atlantic Monthly, this one running pp. 451–460 of the October 1869 issue (Vol. XXIV, No. 144) as Part I, “Preparation,” presented as “From the Papers of Captain Frederic Ingham.” Ingham recalls how a group of college friends, puzzling over the problem of determining longitude at sea, conceived of launching a two-hundred-foot brick sphere into a fixed orbit four thousand miles up to serve navigators as an always-visible clock in the sky — hurled aloft not by explosion but by the accumulated momentum of two giant flywheels. Seventeen years later, having priced the scheme at $250,000 (the twelve million bricks alone costing $60,000), Ingham and his now-wealthy classmate George Orcutt revive the project and raise $162,000 toward it at a public subscription meeting, aided by the persuasive but unlettered orator Ben Brannan. Widely considered fiction’s first depiction of an artificial satellite reaching orbit.
Considérations Sur Les Résultats D’un Allégement Indéfini Des Moteurs.
Robert Esnault-Pelterie’s first published paper on spaceflight, pp. 218–230 of the Journal de Physique Théorique et Appliquée (5th series, vol. III, March 1913), a monthly issued by the Société française de Physique. The copy retains the issue’s original printed wrapper. A footnote says the paper was first presented to the Society at its session of 15 November 1912. The author says he was led to ask what an “indefinite lightening” of engines, meaning ever less weight per horsepower, might make possible, and notes that novelists have written of travel between worlds but nobody seems to have asked what physical demands it would make. He calls the paper only “a series of reflections supported by calculations.” Section I explains the rocket and notes that Verne’s cannon would crush its passengers. It says propulsion works as well in a vacuum as in air, derives the velocity of a mass-ejecting vehicle as a logarithm of the mass ratio, and says steering needs only a tilted or auxiliary thruster. Section II gives the work needed to lift a body clear of a planet and the 11,280 m/s escape velocity for Earth. It compares the energy in a kilogram of hydrogen-oxygen mixture, which is about a quarter of what is needed, with that of radium, which would supply 194,000 times too much. It also notes that a craft could leave Earth under a thrust less than its weight by flying first as an airplane. Section III works out a Moon round trip in three phases: acceleration at 1.1 g up to the critical velocity, coasting, and a braking turn-over at about 250 km above the surface. It gives a total of about 48 hours 58 minutes and an engine run of only about 28 minutes each way, with the speed at the neutral point as 2,030 m/s. For a 1,000 kg vehicle with 300 kg of fuel it finds an exhaust velocity of 65,300 m/s, a power of 414,000 hp, and a fuel 133 times too weak in energy for hydrogen and oxygen. Section IV puts the transit times to Venus and Mars at 47 and 90 days at about 10 km/s. Section V takes up the human problem: air regenerated as in submarines, a spacecraft with one polished half and one blackened half to control its temperature, and the suggestion that constant thrust equal to 1 g would supply artificial gravity. Section VI prices that option at 4.76 million hp, with peak speeds of 643 and 883 km/s and trips to Venus and Mars of 35 and 49 hours. Section VII closes by saying only the energy locked in molecules and atoms could supply such power, and that 400 kg of radium would just suffice for a Venus round trip.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie
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La Conquête De l’Espace.
French scientific writer. Mostly forgotten, even in France. First edition. The second edition (1925) is also available in this collection.
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Victor Coissac’s La Conquête de l’Espace
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Design Of A Manned Rocket Airplane.
Not a standalone book but the “1 March 1881” special number (Nos. 10–11, April–May 1918) of the history journal Byloye, devoted to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Kibalchich wrote his project for a rocket-powered “aeronautical apparatus” in prison on 23 March 1881, ten days before his execution, and asked in vain to hear the verdict of the experts; instead the gendarmerie sealed it in an envelope sewn into his case file, where it stayed shut for 36 years until the police archive was opened in August 1917. Byloye printed it here for the first time: the editor’s introduction begins on page 113, the design itself on page 115 with its diagram (Chart 1) on page 118, and an assessment by the engineer Nikolai Rynin on page 122, crediting Kibalchich with priority for applying the rocket principle to flight while faulting the absence of calculations. The same issue carries Vera Figner’s memoir of Sofia Perovskaya and newly opened police and ministerial papers on the case. The design is also recounted in the year-end 1925 double number of Vestnik Znaniya, also in this collection.
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Nikolai Kibalchich
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Si Può Già Tentare Un Viaggio Dalla Terra Alla Luna?
First technical work on space travel in Italian, and Gussalli's own report, dated January 1923, on the invention he had been experimenting with since 1909–1912: a “propulsore a doppia reazione” (double-reaction propulsor), in which a turbine wheel built along De Laval lines is spun at high peripheral speed against a high-velocity gas jet to wring extra reactive thrust from it. After laying out the general theory of reaction propulsors and describing the device and its tests, Gussalli closes by weighing whether a trip to the Moon could already be attempted with it, citing the published opinions of Esnault-Pelterie and Goddard, and sketches a two-phase plan — a single prototype vehicle, then a production “train” of them — that he compares in scale to building a fleet of 500 aeroplanes or a dreadnought. Gussalli revisited this same 1912 propulsor, updated, as Part One of his 1941 Propulsori A Reazione Per L'Astronautica, Seconda Comunicazione (Catalog B), before moving on in that later book to an entirely new, solar-powered design.
Der Vorstoß In Den Weltenraum.
Presents Oberth’s ideas to the general public. Founder of the VfR (German Society for Space Travel) which Von Braun and Oberth would join. This revised second edition opens by dismissing the antigravity devices of contemporary space-travel fiction as unscientific, then works through rocket propulsion, the physiological effects of sustained acceleration, and the prospects for interplanetary flight. Valier used the same title for a shorter essay reprinted in the 1926/27 bound volume of the family magazine Deutscher Hausschatz, also in this collection.
La Conquête De l’Espace.
Second revised edition. French scientific writer. Mostly forgotten, even in France. The first edition (1916) is also available in this collection.
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Victor Coissac’s La Conquête de l’Espace
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Die Erreichbarkeit Der Himmelskörper.
This slim monograph by civil engineer Walter Hohmann is the mathematical foundation of modern spaceflight trajectory design. Hohmann, who had worked the problem privately for roughly a decade, credits the public achievements of Goddard, Oberth, and Valier with finally prompting him to publish, and extends his exhaust-velocity assumptions beyond earlier estimates to account for solid and liquid propellants. The book proceeds in five sections — leaving the Earth, returning to Earth, free flight through space, circling other celestial bodies, and landing on them — deriving the rocket mass-ratio equation and tabulating propellant requirements for round trips to Venus, Mars, and the Moon at exhaust velocities from 2 to 5 km/sec. Its best-known result, diagrammed as Abbildung 25, is the two-impulse minimum-energy transfer between circular orbits now universally called the Hohmann transfer orbit, still the baseline method for planning interplanetary and satellite-repositioning maneuvers a century later. A companion idea, illustrated by a sequence of nested “braking ellipses,” proposes shedding a spacecraft's excess velocity on return to Earth through repeated grazing passes through the upper atmosphere rather than a single violent reentry — a conceptual ancestor of the aerobraking techniques used by robotic missions today. This copy carries an accession stamp and a later deaccession stamp of the Institut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften (Institute for the History of the Natural Sciences) at the University of Munich.
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Rocket Societies of the 1920s
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Die Fahrt Ins Weltall.
This second, completely reworked edition — issued by Hachmeister & Thal as Lehrmeister-Bücherei Nr. 924–926 — is jacketed in a dust wrapper depicting a scene from Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond, for which Hermann Oberth (also in this collection) served as scientific consultant. It is inscribed by Ley to N.A. Rynin: "With compliments from the author, Berlin, den 5. Mai 1929," with Rynin's own name written above it in Russian. The collection holds a second, unsigned copy of the same edition in the plain numbered Lehrmeister-Bücherei wrapper, without dust jacket. Ley went on to popularize spaceflight in the United States and later worked with von Braun.
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Rocket Societies of the 1920s
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Das Raketen-Weltraumschiff.
Linke's survey uses the public fascination around Fritz von Opel's rocket-powered automobile as a springboard into the physics of spaceflight, drawing on Walter Hohmann's atmospheric braking-spiral calculations and Guido von Pirquet's cost estimates for a manned moon rocket. A closing chapter dismisses fringe launch schemes — an electromagnetic solenoid gun, a proposed evacuated tunnel gun, and Franz Abdon Ulinski's sun-powered electron rocket — as impractical beside the chemical rocket.
Die Möglichkeit Der Weltraumfahrt.
An anthology assembled by Willy Ley, who explains in his February 1928 preface that he spent nine months soliciting contributions from the leading German-language writers on spaceflight; Max Valier had agreed to take part but had to withdraw, overburdened with other work. The seven contributors it did secure — Hermann Oberth, Franz von Hoefft, Walter Hohmann, Karl Debus, Guido von Pirquet, and Fr. W. Sander, alongside Ley’s own two opening chapters — amounted to a roll call of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt’s core theorists. Karl Debus contributes a long literary-historical survey, “Raumschiffahrtsdichtung und Bewohnbarkeitsphantasien seit der Renaissance bis heute,” tracing space-travel and other-worlds fiction from Dante and Kepler’s Somnium through Cyrano de Bergerac, Athanasius Kircher, Godwin, Huygens, and Voltaire to Poe, Verne, Flammarion, Wells, Lasswitz, and contemporaries such as Bürgel, Hans Dominik, and Max Valier’s own Mars story — with running commentary on the Schiaparelli–Lowell canal debate and the socialist and utopian undercurrents of the genre. Hermann Oberth supplies two chapters: “Grundprobleme der Raumschiffahrt” derives the rocket’s recoil principle and the exhaust-velocity/mass-ratio equation from first principles, with tables of the propellant mass required for a given velocity gain and a discussion of the atmosphere-limited “most favorable” ascent speed; the later “Stationen im Weltraum” takes up the habitable space station — artificial gravity by centrifugal spin, the physiological and psychological effects of weightlessness, and space telescopes freed from atmospheric distortion, a companion piece to Hermann Noordung’s book published the following year (also in this collection). Walter Hohmann’s “Fahrtrouten, Fahrzeiten und Landungsmöglichkeiten” applies the transfer-orbit theory of his 1925 Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (also in this collection) to worked round-trip examples — Earth to Venus, Mars, Mercury, and Jupiter, with fuel-mass and flight-time tables and a proposal to use the Moon as a refueling base to cut the mass that must be lifted from Earth. Two exemplars in the collection.
Raketenfahrt.
The fifth edition of the work first published in 1924 as the brochure Der Vorstoß in den Weltenraum (the second edition, 1925, also in this collection), retitled Raketenfahrt for this printing — whose body pages still carry running headers crediting the earlier “4. Auflage” typesetting. In a preface dated Friedrichsbrunn am Harz, 5 September 1928, Valier explains the repeated delays and the change of title: after his December 1927 contract with Fritz von Opel, work on the revision kept being overtaken by the pace of the rocket-car and rocket-plane trials it was meant to describe, so that, as he put it, we had in fact already entered the age of Raketenfahrt. The resulting new chapters, with technical detail largely supplied by Valier himself, document the unmanned Opel-Rak rail cars built December 1927–August 1928 — Rak 1–2; Rak 3, which reached a record 281 km/h at Kleinburgwedel on 23 June 1928; and Rak 4–5, both destroyed in explosions — then Valier’s own split from Opel and new partnership with the pyrotechnics firm J. F. Eisfeld of Silberhütte, whose resulting Eisfeld-Valier-Rak I is estimated to have topped 300 km/h before derailing on 26 July 1928, ending the test series without injury. A separate technical report reprinted from the Rhön-Rossitten-Gesellschaft covers the first rocket-powered flight of a piloted aircraft, flown by Friedrich Stamer in the glider Ente at the Wasserkuppe on 11 June 1928, a day after an aborted first attempt caught fire in the air. Closing chapters sketch liquid-fuelled successors and a projected Berlin–New York rocket-plane service. The Russian edition (1936) is also available in this collection.
Space Ships.
Book 2 of Rynin’s nine-volume encyclopedia Interplanetary Communication (Mezhplanetnye soobshcheniya). The volume title is Cosmic Ships, subtitled Interplanetary Communication in the Fantasies of Novelists. It was issued by P. P. Soikin, and the bound copy keeps the front wrapper of Soikin’s magazine Priroda i Lyudi (Nature and People) for 1928. In his preface (Leningrad, 17 June 1928) Rynin says that the scientific and technical side, with calculations and designs for space ships, was worked out and ready for print but held back by lack of funds, so this volume deals only with the fiction. A footnote (p. 5) refers back to Book 1, Dreams, Legends and First Fantasies, and in the introduction he lists twelve ideas for leaving the Earth that organize the chapters: from a cannon, from a volcano, by centrifugal throwing machines, by a run on rails, by “minus and plus matter,” by light pressure, by ether vibration, by solar energy, in electric ships, in radio ships, by intra-atomic energy, and in rocket ships. Chapter I (“From a Cannon to the Planets”) opens with a biographical sketch of Jules Verne and sets out his two gun projects, including the flight calculations from From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon (p. 8), then Max Valier’s critique of Verne’s cannon, Faure and Grafigny’s gun, and a centrifugal “lunar bomb” launcher in a circular tunnel. Later chapters cover the “etheronef” of A. Bogdanov (with floor plans, pp. 40–41), the vibration ship of V. Kryzhanovskaya, the electric ship of L. Afanasyev, Ridley’s comet machine, Nikolsky’s ship, and the radium rocket of Maral-Vige, a novel built on Esnault-Pelterie’s ideas. Chapter IX (“The Cosmic Ship,” p. 111 on) treats rocket ships, beginning with Verne’s use of rockets to brake the projectile, then Armfeldt’s winged rocket launched from the sea (1927), Arelsky’s Moon rocket, the Tsiolkovsky-inspired ship of S. Grave, Belyaev’s rocket city, and Yazvitsky’s trip to the Moon and Mars. Final chapters take up the inhabitants and landscapes of other worlds, with Flammarion’s views and James Nevin Miller’s 1928 planetary scenes from Science and Invention (pp. 157–159). Rynin closes by saying that the rocket principle is the one most scientists were then pursuing, and announces a sequel on radiant energy. Profusely illustrated, with about 160 figures and reproductions from Flammarion, Verne editions, and Soviet pulp. Ads at the back list Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels, which is also in the collection. Print run 15,000.
L’ Exploration Par Fusées De La Très Haute Atmosphère.
Delivered as a lecture to the Société Astronomique de France on 8 June 1927 and published the following year, this is Esnault-Pelterie's major early treatment of rocket flight: the mass-ratio equation for cylindrical and conical airframes, the effect of atmospheric drag, trajectories for reaching the Moon and the planets, and the engineering and physiological demands of a crewed interplanetary vehicle, down to anesthetizing the traveler to conserve oxygen during years-long coasting phases. A closing “Note de l’auteur” records that he learned only in January 1928, after finishing his own work, of three 1925 publications he had not known of — Hohmann’s Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (also in this collection), Oberth’s Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, and Valier’s Der Vorstoss in den Weltenraum — and compares his results with Hohmann’s point by point, finding them to agree closely up to a shared exhaust velocity of 10,000 m/sec. Page 94 credits the novelist J.-H. Rosny Aîné with suggesting a name for this new science, which Esnault-Pelterie says he adopted on the spot: “Astronautique” — the word’s first appearance in print, two years ahead of his better-known 1930 book of that title. The same pages announce the Prix REP-Hirsch, the annual astronautics prize he had just founded with banker André Hirsch through the Société Astronomique de France. Two exemplars: one inscribed by Esnault-Pelterie on the front wrapper, with a typed letter laid in, signed by him on his Boulogne-sur-Seine letterhead and dated 16 October 1936, inviting the engineer M. Marconnet to his laboratory; the other inscribed by him on the half-title, with the Société Astronomique de France’s own printed rules and blank engagement form for the Prix REP-Hirsch laid in.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie
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Hans Hardt’s Mondfahrt.
The original of the story later issued in English as By Rocket To The Moon (1931), subtitled Eine abenteuerliche Erzählung (“an adventurous tale”), with eight tone plates by Richard von Grünberg. It is a boys’ adventure novel in the Union Jugendbücher series, built on the rocket research of the day. The imprint page says it was already in its seventh printing in 1928, the year of copyright, and that it “also appears in book form in Danish, Finnish, French, Dutch, Norwegian and Hungarian”. In a foreword dated Tegernsee, summer 1928, Gail asks whether Verne’s Moon voyage is nearly reality. He sketches two routes to it, Oberth’s and the Vienna research society’s signal-rocket line and Max Valier’s rocket-plane line, and says Hans Hardt’s adventures are “no mere utopia” but logical consequences of current research. A list of scientific sources names Oberth, Valier, Walter Hohmann, Edgar Dacqué, and F. Wencker-Wildberg. In the first chapter, “Zwölf Uhr sieben” (“Seven Past Twelve”), a Michigan newspaper reporter, Tommy Bighead, is stopped on a Detroit road by a stranger who asks the time and says he is Hans Hardt, a German. The 33 chapters (pp. 9–198) cover the preparations, the take-off, the weightless flight, the arrival, and the Moon’s ice, craters, and a crashed relic, and an afterword on p. 201 closes the book. The English edition is not a line-for-line copy: it carries Gail’s foreword with an added paragraph on his earlier cosmic novels, and its chapters are numbered and titled differently. The English edition, By Rocket To The Moon, is also in this collection.
Mit Raketenkraft Ins Weltall.
Full title Mit Raketenkraft ins Weltenall: Vom Feuerwagen zum Raumschiff (“With Rocket Power into Outer Space: From Fire-Car to Spaceship”), with a foreword by Max Valier and dedicated to Fritz von Opel. Gail — an electrical engineer and mathematician by training, already known for the science-fiction novels Der Schuß ins All and Der Stein vom Mond — had become, in Valier's account, the popularizer he needed: Valier's own 1918 proposal for a rocket aircraft had been ridiculed, his 1923 partnership with Hermann Oberth ended amicably over Oberth's more purely theoretical ambitions, and from the winter of 1925 he found in Gail a “standard-bearer” whose novels won public sympathy for a step-by-step path from airplane to rocket plane to spaceship. Gail's own introduction recounts being personally invited by Valier and von Opel to witness the first test runs of what he calls the world's first powder-driven rocket vehicle, on the Opel racetrack at Rüsselsheim in April 1928; one of the book's photographic plates, showing the rocket car mid-run trailing smoke, is credited as the author's own photograph. The book then surveys the wider rocket-research scene as of 1928 — Oberth and Walter Hohmann's mathematics, Franz von Hoefft's Gesellschaft für Raumforschung in Vienna (founded 1926), and Johannes Winkler's Verein für Raumschiffahrt in Breslau (founded 1927, publisher of the journal Die Rakete), with portrait plates of Oberth and von Hoefft — and lays out the core difficulty of the space rocket itself: the fuel-mass ratio needed to reach the roughly 11,200-meter-per-second escape velocity, and the enormous energy cost of lifting each kilogram of payload off the Earth. It closes with an illustrated speculative narrative imagining a future crewed rocket's launch and its eventual parachute landing over New York.
Das Problem Der Befahrung Des Weltraums.
By Herman Potočnik, a retired Austro-Hungarian army engineer writing under the pseudonym Hermann Noordung, subtitled Der Raketen-Motor and illustrated with 100 figures, some in color. The first technically detailed engineering proposal for a habitable space station, worked out as a “Raumwarte” (space outpost) divided into three separate, mutually orbiting objects to keep their design purposes and their gravitational drift apart: a rotating, wheel-shaped “Wohnrad” providing artificial gravity by centrifugal force for ordinary living quarters (Abb. 84, 89–90) — a 30-meter wheel making one revolution in about 8 seconds would match Earth-surface gravity at its rim, reached from the weightless hub by a rotating airlock (Abb. 86) and stairways following logarithmic spirals (Abb. 88) — a weightless, pressurized “Observatorium” for telescopic and terrestrial observation, freely orientable since it carries none of the sun-dependent machinery (Abb. 91), and a “Maschinenhaus” housing the station’s main solar-steam power plant, storage batteries, and radio station, fed by a fixed parabolic collecting mirror (Abb. 93). Proposes that the station be stationed over a fixed point on the equator at an altitude of roughly 35,900–36,000 km, so that it remains permanently overhead — an early, remarkably accurate description of what is now called geostationary orbit. Further chapters work out space-suit design (“Der Raumanzug”), a fictionalized rocket journey to and from the station, and the exceptional value such a station would offer for physics experiments in weightlessness and near-absolute-zero cold, for telescopes and Earth photography of unlimited size and resolution (with obvious application to reconnaissance and cartography), and for astronomy free of atmospheric distortion. Also sketches, following Hermann Oberth, an orbital mirror up to 100 km across for redirecting sunlight to Earth for heat, light, and weather control — and, in the same chapter, its dark twin, a concentrated solar beam as a weapon “more terrible than anything yet devised.” Closes by arguing for a stepwise practical path from unmanned rocket flights to piloted rocket planes to the station itself, and beyond it to circling the Moon and neighboring planets. First printing, with the publication year 1929 on the title page.
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Rocket Societies of the 1920s
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Die Rakete Für Fahrt Und Flug.
Scherschevsky, one of Oberth’s associates in Berlin, is thanked in Oberth’s Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (also in this collection) for proofreading that manuscript. Opening with the motto “Per scientiam ad astra!”, the book surveys the rocket problem from ancient legend through contemporary experiment, then compares the competing spacecraft designs of Tsiolkovsky, Walter Hohmann, and Oberth himself — Hohmann’s tower-mounted design is dismissed as impractical, while Oberth’s staged alcohol/hydrogen ship is described in technical detail. It also documents the 1928–29 rocket-glider tests of the Rhön-Rossitten-Gesellschaft (designs by Alexander Lippisch, flown by Friedrich Stamer) and presents Scherschevsky’s own grid-cone parachute design. Its bibliography cites Oberth’s Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen in the same third (1928) edition Oberth reworked into Wege zur Raumschiffahrt, elsewhere in the collection.
Space Rocket Trains.
The first work Tsiolkovsky devoted entirely to the multi-stage “rocket train” concept, and the fullest mathematical exposition of his staging theory, though the underlying idea appears in his own 1911–1912 writings and Robert Goddard had already patented rocket staging in the U.S. (1914). 38 pp., portrait frontispiece, with a biographical sketch of Tsiolkovsky by S. V. Bezsonov. Print run of 2,000 copies per the colophon.
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Across Two Oceans
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Space Rocket Trains
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Wege Zur Raumschiffahrt.
Dedicated “in gratitude” to Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, for whom Oberth served as scientific consultant on the 1929 film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon). This heavily revised third edition of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen debates specific technical objections to Walter Hohmann’s proposed spacecraft cooling methods (Hohmann’s book is also in this collection), and includes four large foldout plates with detailed cutaway diagrams of Oberth’s Modell B rocket design. Alexander B. Scherschevsky, whose own Die Rakete für Fahrt und Flug is also in the collection, is thanked for proofreading the manuscript.
Recherches Théoriques Sur Le Rendement Et Les Conditions De Réalisation Des Systèmes Motopropulseurs A Réaction.
No. 1 in the “Publications scientifiques et techniques” series of the French Air Ministry’s aeronautical research service, written by a mining engineer who taught at the École Supérieure de l’Aéronautique and prefaced by the Academician Émile Jouguet. Roy’s introduction is dated 10 October 1930. It is a purely theoretical comparison, with no tests or hardware, of how efficiently reaction propulsion could drive aircraft compared with the engine-and-propeller system. Part One treats rockets burning powder or ordinary fuel, and “rocket-ejectors” that add an ejector (trompe) to the exhaust; Part Two treats the “reaction propeller,” including a propeller driven only by exhaust jets at its blade tips, which Roy likens to a gas turbine. The results fill numerous tables and graphs. Jouguet’s preface summarizes the conclusion: engine and propeller remain best at the speeds of modern aircraft, but a reaction propeller or rocket could become interesting beyond roughly 700 to 1,200 km/h; he also notes that rockets are the only conceivable propulsion for interplanetary travel. Three annexes treat viscous gas flow, nozzle theory, and ejector theory.
L’Astronautique.
The full-length synthesis that gave the new science its name in book form: this 1930 edition reprints REP’s 1928 preface by General Ferrié alongside a new preface by E. Fichot arguing the book proves astronautics a genuine science rather than reverie, and opens with REP’s own Avertissement and epigraphs from Frantz von Hoefft and Hermann Oberth describing astronautics as a problem of momentum, not energy. An errata leaf and a folding nomogram for the mass-ratio/velocity/time relation of Chapter I close the volume, and an appendix reprints the Prix REP-Hirsch rules also found with this collection’s copies of the 1928 book. Both exemplars here are largely unopened: their folded signatures were never slit along the top and fore edges with a paper-knife, as French books of this era were commonly issued, leaving much of the text block unreadable without cutting it open — a condition collectors prize as evidence a copy went unread when new. See also L’Exploration Par Fusées De La Très Haute Atmosphère (1928), where Esnault-Pelterie first put “Astronautique” into print, and its 1935 supplement, L’Astronautique (Complément). The Russian edition (1950) is also available in this collection.
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Robert Esnault-Pelterie
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![Cover of Lunnyi Perelet [Lunar Flight].](images/catalog-a_gail-lunnyi-perelet.jpg)
Lunnyi Perelet [Lunar Flight].
The Russian translation, by I. Bekker, of Gail’s moon-voyage novel Hans Hardt’s Mondfahrt (1928), made from the seventh German printing. Ya. I. Perelman supplies the preface and scientific editing; he sets the book beside Verne and Wells, argues that Gail’s ship is technically realistic rather than utopian, notes that the novel had reached seven printings and six foreign translations, and sketches Gail (born 1896, an artillery officer in the war, then a student of mathematics and electrical engineering). Thirty-two short chapters, from “Twelve Hours Seven Minutes” to a closing “Conclusion,” follow the preparations, launch, weightlessness, lunar landing and return, with illustrations including a lunar landscape. The German original and the U.S. By Rocket to the Moon are also in this catalog, as is Gail’s popular-science Mit Raketenkraft ins Weltall; Perelman’s own Mezhplanetnye puteshestviya (GIZ, 1929) is cited in the preface.
Weltraumschiffahrt?
A brief popular synthesis of the spaceflight question by a merchant-marine officer rather than a scientist — Biermann identifies himself on the title page as an officer of the Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line. He surveys, in order, why humanity might want to leave Earth, the habitability of the other planets (Mars gets the most attention: its 6,900-kilometer diameter, 687-day year, and the faint traces of water vapor and oxygen — 5 and 16 percent of terrestrial levels — that American astronomers at Mt. Wilson and Mt. Whitney had detected in its atmosphere), the physical hazards of space itself (electrical space charge, Kohlhörster's cosmic radiation, the heat and cold of the void, and gravity), and the basic mechanics of rocket propulsion (the recoil principle, propellants, motor, fuel tank, and center of gravity). Its illustrations, credited on the copyright page, are reproduced from the second edition of Max Valier's Raketenfahrt. Its most substantial chapter, “Die Entwicklung der Reaktionsfahrzeuge,” runs from Hermann Ganswindt's early “Weltenfahrzeug” to what Biermann calls the “vibration rocket,” surveying the German rocket scene as of 1931: Valier's three-stage Model B (a hydrogen rocket riding an alcohol booster atop a solid-fuel first stage, computed to reach 2,000 kilometers), Oberth's proposed crewed rocket the size of a four-story building (illustrated here, borrowed from Valier), Walter Hohmann's 1925 orbital-mechanics treatise and Willy Ley's 1928 anthology (both elsewhere in this collection), the VfR's Johannes Winkler, and Hermann Sander's solid-fuel rockets, by then up to 35 centimeters in caliber. Biermann then works through, and dismisses, several rocket alternatives then in circulation: a Frenchman named Drouet's proposed 150-meter spinning wheel meant to sling a projectile off at 12,000 meters per second (he notes it would fly apart from centrifugal stress long before reaching that speed), the Austrian Ulinski's vortex-ring “jet reaction device,” and the electromagnetic “Solenoidgeschütz,” illustrated here in cutaway, recalling pre-war experiments in which a coil-driven iron core was fired out at high velocity — trials military authorities reportedly abandoned as impractical. He closes, in a chapter titled “Ausblick,” hoping that the first spaceship will one day leave Earth trailing the hopes of all humanity, and quotes several stanzas of verse to that effect.
Gas Compressors.
Full title Szhimatel’ gazov i ego raschet (“The Gas Compressor and Its Calculation”). The cover carries Tsiolkovsky’s own Kaluga address and his name in Latin spellings for foreign correspondents. Pages 1–25 treat a purely mathematical design, not a turbine: an axial compressor made of a long cylinder holding a row of propeller-like blades, with fixed flat partitions between them to stop the air from swirling, driven by a smaller coaxial cylinder with rounded ends. Numbered paragraphs 1–105 derive the compression ratio from the number of blades, with tables for blade-tip speeds of 100 to 353 m/s (the practical limit he gives is 300–400 m/s, set by the strength of the material). Tsiolkovsky finds that efficiency never exceeds 50 percent, that about 12 blades compress air to a density greater than water’s, and that with cooling all gases could be liquefied with few stages (28 blades, about 6 m long, for air at water density). A table on p. 16 shows the price: starting from the −73 °C of the upper atmosphere, compression of 6, 36, 216, and 1,296 times heats the gas to +127, +527, +1,327, and +2,927 °C, so compressions of 200 to 1,000 times are unthinkable without cooling, while the modest pressures of blast-furnace blowers raise the temperature by no more than 87 °C. He defines the “utilization” of the work as the ratio of flow speed to blade speed, which is highest at the first blade and lowest at the last (p. 17). He remarks that each blade, in pushing back the gas, creates something like the artificial gravity of a planetary atmosphere (p. 3). The final pages apply the tables to blast furnaces and to the “stratoplane,” where at an altitude with air 32 times thinner about 25 blades would restore normal density: 10,000 horsepower would need 7.5 m³ of air per second, or 240 m³ of the rarefied air, through a tube more than 1.6 m wide (p. 25). He refers readers to his own “Reaktivnyi aeroplan” (not in this collection) for the engine side (p. 23). There is no rocket theory here, but the booklet belongs to his 1930–31 work on jet-propelled stratosphere aircraft. The second part (pp. 26–36), “Otkliki” (“Responses”), prints extracts from readers’ letters of February–April 1931: a Moscow worker-student who calls him the “first captain of the interplanetary ship” and cites Oberth, Goddard, and Valier; a New York artist who reprinted an interview in the Russian-American press; a Novgorod technical school’s interplanetary circle; a schoolteacher thrilled by a Ukrainian edition of Tsiolkovsky’s On the Moon with Perelman’s preface; and a long exchange with a correspondent on infinity, his Monism of the Universe, and Scientific Ethics, closing with Tsiolkovsky’s reply of 10 April 1931. Printed in 1,000 copies by the Kaluga printing house of Mosoblpoligraf (Raylit No. 436).
Die Rakete Als Weltfriedenstaube.
Advances the idea that long range rockets would be a weapon to render wars impossible. Undated, but assumed 1931 based on currency and historical references in the text: it cites a Kölnische Illustrierte Zeitung issue of 21 February 1931, announces Belz’s next tests for May 1931, and calls General Douhet, who died in February 1930, recently deceased. The title page and copyright page name the Verband der Raketen-Forscher und -Förderer (Leipzig) as issuer, with the Roßberg’sche Buchdruckerei as printer; buying the book carried membership in the society, and a tear-out application form closes the volume. A liquid-propellant rocket is stamped on the cover and printed as the frontispiece. Part One (pp. 13–139) is a future-history told in dialogues and newspaper reports: a disarmed Germany, crushed by reparations, announces a long-range rocket, a world-peace “guardian” broadcast forbids war in Europe, and a warning rocket lands at an old fort near St.-Mihiel, Poincaré’s home town. A map shows the rocket’s reach from Germany at 11,000–12,500 km. Part Two (pp. 141–174), “an appeal to the creative minds of all peoples,” turns to real technology: sounding rockets, a mail rocket from Berlin to New York in half an hour, rocket aircraft in the line of Valier and Wilhelm Belz, Oberth’s Moon ship (17 m long, alcohol and hydrogen, dropping its spent first stage after about a minute), and Earth-orbiting stations. The last chapter lets Belz of Gummersbach, Valier’s longtime collaborator, describe his liquid-fuel motor, with a photograph of his “Rak. 1” and his plan to fly Berlin–New York in an hour; the Raketenflugplatz Berlin under Rudolf Nebel is also mentioned. Draws on Oberth’s Wege zur Raumschiffahrt and cites Esnault-Pelterie, both also in this collection.
The Conquest of Space.
First book in English to explore space travel. Lasser, president of the American Interplanetary Society, dedicates it to Max Valier, “the first to give his life for the conquest of space,” and H. H. Sheldon of New York University, in the introduction, calls it the first book on rockets in English, noting that anyone seeking the subject before it had only a few Russian, German and French titles. In three parts (The Rocket, The Flight Into Space, New Worlds) and seventeen chapters, it moves from space travel in literature and the rocket’s history to rocket problems and the experiments of Goddard, Oberth, Valier and Esnault-Pelterie in Europe, then to a fictional account of the moon ship Terra, built by an international commission in the Swiss Alps. The book closes with a forecast of rocket planes in regular transatlantic service by 1950, and a warning of their use in war. Four plates, among them frames from the film By Rocket to the Moon and a photograph of a rocket being charged with fuel at the Raketenflugplatz, and six figures, including Oberth’s three-step rocket, with an index. The dust jacket quotes Sheldon’s introduction. The British edition (1932) is also available in this collection.
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By Rocket To The Moon.
The U.S. edition of Gail’s Hans Hardt’s Mondfahrt (1928), retitled By Rocket to the Moon: The Story of Hans Hardt’s Miraculous Flight and copyrighted 1931 by Sears. The frontispiece reproduces the German edition’s plate of astronauts on a lunar ridge under the Earth, here printed in orange and black, and there are seven further plates. Gail’s introduction poses Verne’s Moon voyage as a possible reality, and contrasts Oberth’s plan for a signal rocket grown into a space rocket brought home by parachute with Valier’s plan to evolve a rocket plane step by step from the airplane. It adds that the book is meant to win young readers over to the technical problem and to warn them against the word “impossible,” and it cites his earlier novels as the reason he wrote a boys’ story. The tale opens with Tommy Bighead, a Michigan Evening Post reporter, and a stranger, Hans Hardt, who gives him a scoop at seven minutes past twelve. The 33 chapters run to p. 300 and follow Hardt’s ocean hop, the preparations, the take-off, the stowaway, the voyage and its weightlessness, the Moon’s ice and craters, and the return. No translator is named on the title page. The German original is also in this collection.
Raketenflug.
Nebel, co-founder and leader of the Raketenflugplatz Berlin-Reinickendorf, writes as a direct participant rather than a reporter, and illustrates his account with 50 photographs from inside the German rocket movement. After a short history of rockets from Congreve to Oberth, the book turns to first-person narrative: the 1929 partnership with Oberth and Klaus Riedel on the "Mirak" minimum rocket, the UFA film Frau im Mond that helped fund Oberth's early work, a tongue-in-cheek telegram inviting Henry Ford to inspect the new field, and the founding of the Raketenflugplatz itself on 27 September 1930 — the world's first rocket-flight testing ground — documented with a site map and photos of its workshop, launch stand, and grounds, alongside a full Berliner Tageblatt article on the field reprinted in facsimile. A "Vorkämpfer des Raketenfluges" portrait gallery pictures Tsiolkovsky, Ganswind, Tiling, Winkler, Riedel, Oberth, and Nebel himself, and picture sequences trace the motor's evolution from the 7.5 kg-thrust "Spaltdüse" to the 32 kg "Kegeldüse" and document the first liquid-fuel rocket flight on 14 May 1931. Max Valier's death in a 1930 motor explosion is noted as the field's first fatality. The book closes with cutaway diagrams for a parachute-equipped manned rocket and eight proposed applications for rocket propulsion — sounding rockets, mail rockets (Berlin to New York in 25 minutes), rocket-assisted glider launches, and manned long-range flight — remarkably close to how rocketry actually developed.
Irons-Nous Dans La Lune?
Number 5 in the Savoir series of Éditions SPES, with a preface by Abbé Théophile Moreux, director of the Bourges Observatory, who presents it as the first book by a French author to popularize astronautics. Graffigny, a balloonist and science editor of Ouest-Éclair, devotes seven chapters to the Moon’s physical state and habitability, the atmosphere and its exploration (Piccard’s record balloon ascent, sounding balloons, kites), proposed launch systems (Verne’s cannon, a rotating catapult, an underground launching railway), exploratory rockets, and life in space, with drawings by the author. In the rocket chapter he reprints his own 1904 “fusée-aéroplane,” a 320-gram model glider driven by a slow-burning powder charge, tested at Mers (Somme) on 17 September 1904 and reported in the Revue Scientifique, with a best flight of 1,100 m in 84 seconds. He then surveys the field from Eyraud’s 1864 novel through Goddard (the Guggenheim-backed high-altitude project), Tsiolkovsky, Esnault-Pelterie, Oberth, Valier’s rocket car and aircraft trials with Opel and Zander, Nebel’s test rockets near Berlin (Fig. 18), and Mas and Drouet’s steering rocket. He works out a Moon shot using 9 km/s exhaust and Hohmann’s spiral descent (Fig. 20), and closes by weighing the physiological effects of weightlessness and the food, air, and heat needs of a three-man crew. Esnault-Pelterie’s L’Astronautique, Oberth’s Wege zur Raumschiffahrt, and Hohmann’s monograph are also in this collection.
Das Weltraum-Recht.
The first book on the legal aspects of spaceflight to present space law as an independent area of law. Subtitled Ein Problem der Raumfahrt, it is the work of Dr. jur. Vladimír Mandl, a lawyer in Pilsen, and is dedicated to his father. Mandl coins the term Weltraumrecht (p. 3), preferring it to “Raumrecht” and to the French “droit éthéré,” and argues that it will become a discipline of its own, separate from air and maritime law. Part One, “The Present” (pp. 1–19), asks what existing law would say about a rocket launch and finds that no statute fits. A craft counts as a spaceship by its evident purpose, not by what it can do; in a multistage rocket only the core is the spaceship, and the spent stages are treated like ballast (p. 5). He weighs property rights over the airspace above a landowner’s plot, liability without fault (a rocket motor being a machine, with Fritz von Opel’s rocket cars as the example), explosives and fire regulations, and the 1919 Paris air convention, and concludes that air law cannot simply be applied by analogy. Part Two, “The Future” (pp. 20–48), sketches the law a real space programme would need: government licensing of launch sites and flight dates, a state commissioner at takeoff, compulsory liability insurance, public funding, longer patent terms, a “space council” and a “cosmic weather service,” and rules for a crew missing for years. It also holds that state sovereignty ends where the air ends, leaving outer space free to all (pp. 31–33); that claims by occupation or “spheres of interest” are unworkable; that a spaceship takes its owner’s nationality; and that space would be of little use as a battlefield (p. 34). The closing chapters turn to economic and cultural effects and speculate that emigrants beyond Earth would form stateless communities, forcing a rethinking of the very concept of state and law. Along the way Mandl cites the Breslau Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Vienna Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Höhenforschung, the journal Die Rakete, Goddard’s propellant estimates, Hohmann’s powder tower, von Pirquet’s Moon-rocket cost of 3.5 million marks (from Ley’s Die Möglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt), Valier’s Raketenfahrt, and Oberth; works by Ley, Valier, Oberth, and Hohmann are also in this collection. Printed by the Mannheimer Vereinsdruckerei; 48 pages of text.
Interplanetary Travels.
The seventh edition, “newly reworked and expanded,” of Perelman’s popular account of rocket flight and starflight; the first edition appeared in 1915. The subtitle reads Fundamentals of Rocket Flight and Starflight. In his preface Perelman notes that a jet-propulsion research group had been formed in 1931 under the Air Technology Bureau of Osoaviakhim and that a state institute of rocket flight was under discussion, and he says the book now draws on first-hand sources and his correspondence with rocket workers abroad. It also reprints Tsiolkovsky’s preface to the sixth edition, in which Tsiolkovsky recalls how his 1903 paper went unnoticed and credits Perelman’s 1915 book as the first serious yet accessible work on interplanetary flight. Twenty chapters (pp. 7–120) move from gravitation and the cannon-to-the-Moon idea (theory and practice, pp. 25–38) through the gunpowder rocket and its history, Kibalchich’s flying-machine project (p. 55), the energy and mechanics of rocket flight, stellar navigation, Tsiolkovsky’s projects, an artificial Moon and extraterrestrial station, experiments with new rockets, life aboard a spaceship, and the dangers of starflight. Twelve appendices (pp. 121–173) cover rocket dynamics, initial velocities and flight times, a rocket across the ocean, a rocket to the Moon, interplanetary signaling, a reading list, and a chronology of rocketry through 1931. Illustrated with line drawings, including portraits of Verne and Kibalchich. Chapters VI and VII test Verne’s cannon-projectile as engineering, and a footnote cites a Russian edition of Verne’s two Moon novels edited and annotated by Perelman and published in 1928 by Zemlya i Fabrika; the 1934 Verne edition in this collection is a later one. The tenth edition (1935) is also in the collection. Print run 15,000, signed for printing 15 May 1932.
Grundriß Einer Geschichte Der Rakete.
A chronological outline of the rocket idea, assembled by Ley during roughly six years of research into subjects ranging from Archytas’s reaction-propelled wooden dove (360 B.C.) and the self-propelled, gunpowder-driven “burning egg” of the Arab military writer Hassan al-Rammah, through Congreve’s war rockets, Kibalchich’s 1881 design for a reaction-propelled flying machine, sketched in prison the night before his execution for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II (see this collection’s feature on Kibalchich), and on to Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, Esnault-Pelterie, Hohmann, the 1927 founding of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, and Max Valier’s fatal 1930 rocket-car test, closing with the Verein’s first liquid-fuel Repulsor flight of 23 May 1931. Ley notes in his preface that an English-language preprint, without illustrations, had already appeared in the American Interplanetary Society’s journal Astronautics; the hard times of the day (“die Ungunst der Zeiten”) kept the larger work he had drafted from publication, so this 16-page outline was issued as a stopgap reference instead.
Adventure Above The Clouds.
A juvenile history of high-altitude flight, not rockets: most of the book covers balloon ascents (Coxwell and Glaisher's record climb, the fatal Tissandier flight, Piccard's stratosphere balloon) and early aeroplane altitude records. Its final chapter, “Towards the Stars,” is devoted entirely to rockets, explaining the rocket principle with a gun-and-bullet analogy before surveying the era's experimenters: Max Valier and Fritz von Opel's rocket-car and rocket-sled runs on the Avus Speedway and Lake Starnberg, ending in Valier's fatal 1930 test explosion, and Robert Goddard's 1929 parachute-equipped instrument rocket, later backed by a Guggenheim grant. It closes at the German VfR's Raketenflugplatz, where Johannes Winkler and Reinhold Tilling sent rockets to 1,000 and 6,000 feet respectively.
Männer Der Rakete.
A collection of autobiographical sketches (“Selbstdarstellungen”) by ten pioneers of rocketry and spaceflight theory — Hanns-Wolf von Dickhuth-Harrach, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Robert H. Goddard, Franz von Hoefft, Hermann Oberth, Guido von Pirquet, N.A. Rynin, Friedrich Schmiedl, Johannes Winkler, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — each writing in their own words about their life and work, illustrated with 11 portraits and 44 figures. The volume closes with three survey chapters on the era's rocket societies: Willy Ley on the German Verein für Raumschiffahrt's test flights at the Raketenflugplatz Berlin (including Rudolf Nebel's Mirak and Repulsor rockets), C.P. Mason on the American Interplanetary Society, and Rynin again on the Soviet GIRD, followed by editor Werner Brügel's closing word.
The Future Of Reactive Engines.
The colophon records this printing as sent to typesetting 14 April 1933 and signed for press 2 July 1933, a run of 10,000 copies, with no reference to an earlier edition — so this appears to be a first edition rather than a reprint. It's a popular survey rather than a technical work: a history of the rocket from the Chinese fire-arrow through Congreve's war rockets to 1930s rocket cars, a dramatized account of Nikolai Kibalchich awaiting execution in a tsarist prison cell in 1881, anxiously asking his lawyer whether specialists had yet reviewed the rocket-powered flying machine he had designed there (he was executed without ever learning its fate), a biographical sketch of Tsiolkovsky's years as a schoolteacher in Kaluga, summaries of Esnault-Pelterie's and Oberth's spaceflight calculations, and an account of Max Valier's Opel-Sander rocket car and railcar trials of 1928. It closes with a short science-fiction epilogue imagining a time traveler's visit to a future communist society that has spread through the solar system. No original research here, but a solidly illustrated period popularization.
Rocket To The Moon.
Juvenile literature: the title page calls this the third, expanded edition, and the colophon marks it “for children of middle age” with a print run of 20,000, signed to press on 9 March 1933. It is narrated as conversations between a boy and his older brother. They start with how the distance to the Moon was measured, comparing it to the height of a street lamp, and with how long a pedestrian, train or airplane would take to cover it. They move on to the Moon’s surface, the stratosphere balloons and sealed gondolas that carried people into the upper atmosphere, and the powder rocket, with a warning that children should never make one. The book then presents Kibalchich’s 1881 powder-rocket flying machine (page 50), Tsiolkovsky, and the inventors abroad, Goddard and Oberth. It closes with rocket mail and rocket airplanes across the Atlantic, and an imagined trip to the Moon, from the weightless voyage to walking on a lunar crater rim and the return. A footnote on page 60 sends readers to Perelman’s earlier biography, Tsiolkovsky, His Life and Scientific Works, for more on Tsiolkovsky’s life. Line drawings and halftones throughout, including a lunar photograph and period engravings.
Raketenflugtechnik.
Sänger’s first book, written while he was an assistant at the Technische Versuchsanstalt of the Technische Hochschule Wien, sets out to move rocket flight from speculative fantasy onto rigorous engineering footing and remains the founding treatise of winged, rocket-powered high-speed atmospheric flight. It projects an aircraft capable of ranges to about 5,000 km, altitudes near 50 km, and speeds up to 4,000 m/sec — some twenty times the speed and five times the altitude of contemporary propeller aircraft — and anticipates uses in intercontinental transport, scientific research, and, as Sänger himself notes, as a weapon of extraordinary power, foreshadowing the antipodal bomber concept he developed with Irene Bredt during the Second World War. Its literature review situates the work alongside Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Hohmann, and Oberth; Hohmann’s Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (1925) and Oberth’s Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (1929), both also published by Oldenbourg, are elsewhere in the collection. Dedicated to the author’s wife, Maria Sänger. Two different editions in Russian (1936 and 1947) also available in this collection.
Conquest Of The Air.
Rynin’s autobiographical essay, pages 379-391 of the literary almanac God Shestnadtsatyi: Almanakh Vtoroi [Year Sixteen: Second Almanac], edited by Maxim Gorky and others, in a section where scientists and engineers describe their own work. Rynin recalls a boyhood in Moscow and Simbirsk, his training as a railway engineer, and his turn to aviation in 1907 as an organizer of the All-Russian Aero Club. He describes seeing the first airplane flight in Russia in 1909, his own balloon and airship licenses, flights in Sikorsky’s Ilya Muromets and a Zeppelin, and the founding of an air-transport faculty in 1920. He then explains how Tsiolkovsky’s 1903 article, along with Lorin, Goddard, Oberth, Hohmann, Valier and Esnault-Pelterie, led him to the flight-speed problem and to a library of some 1,500 titles on rockets and interplanetary travel, the source of his nine-volume work on the subject, and he mentions his part in founding GIRD in 1932. It does not mention Kibalchich, whose design Rynin had critiqued in 1918 (also in this collection). The essay is not illustrated, though the almanac prints paintings elsewhere.
To The Stars By Rocket.
The collection holds both the first printing and the revised second edition, distinguishable by their colophons and contents. The unmarked, earlier copy (36 illustrations, 1 ruble) was submitted for typesetting 21 December 1933 and signed for printing 25 February 1934; it opens with a chapter on high-altitude flight and closes with an account of the Soviet stratosphere balloon's ascent to 19,000 meters. The copy marked “2-е издание, дополненное” (2nd edition, expanded; 37 illustrations, 75 kopecks) was submitted 1 June 1934 and signed for printing 16 July 1934; it adds a new opening chapter on the atmosphere's two tiers and swaps the stratosphere-balloon chapter for one on Konstantin Tsiolkovsky as the “founder of space-faring,” with an updated reading list. Both editions include a chapter on Nikolai Kibalchich, the Narodnaya Volya revolutionary executed in 1881 for his role in assassinating Alexander II, who sketched a gunpowder-propelled flying machine while awaiting execution and asked, unsuccessfully, to have it reviewed by scientists.
From The Earth To The Moon.
A Russian edition of both of Verne’s Moon novels, From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Around the Moon (1870), as a two-part novel in Mark Vovchok’s translation. The title page credits Perelman with the scientific editing, the notes in the text, a biographical sketch of Verne, and an afterword. The sketch (p. 5) surveys Verne’s life and lists his novels by region, and Perelman says he found Verne scientifically scrupulous while editing the astronomical novels; the book’s corrections of outdated data appear in the text or notes. The afterword, “On Trips to the Moon” (pp. 449 ff.), has four sections: Verne’s predecessors (Poe, Dumas, Wells, and Lasswitz among them); whether a cannon could shoot a projectile to the Moon (it can, theoretically, at about 11 km/s); why Verne’s plan fails for living passengers (the shock of a gun launch would be some 64,000 times normal weight); and modern projects of interplanetary flight. The last section turns to the rocket, citing Tsiolkovsky’s rocket equation, liquid-fuel rockets, Oberth’s launching apparatus, Goddard’s remark that a Moon rocket is possible within the present generation, and four stages ahead: a high-altitude research rocket, mail rockets, piloted transoceanic rockets, and a lunar flyby. Its arithmetic follows Chapters VI and VII of Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels, which it cites in a footnote. Perelman had also edited an earlier Russian Verne edition (1928); both editions of Interplanetary Travels are in this collection. Print run 50,000, signed for printing 19 December 1934.
Neuere Ergebnisse Der Raketenflugtechnik FLUG.
The first Wissenschaftliches Sonderheft (scientific special issue) of the Vienna aviation monthly Flug, dated December 1934, devoted entirely to a 23-page paper by Eugen Sänger that updates his book Raketenflugtechnik (1933), also in this collection. Part 1, on internal ballistics, defines the effective exhaust velocity of a rocket motor, derives its theoretical limit (about 4,570 m/s for gas oil and oxygen) and discusses the losses from dissociation of the combustion gases. It then reports Sänger’s Vienna test-stand experiments on some fourteen small liquid-fuel motors burning gas oil and liquid oxygen, with thrusts up to 30 kg, photographed on the stand. These measured exhaust velocities above 3,000 m/s, and he expected to pass 5,000 m/s with better propellants. Part 2, on external ballistics, works out the air forces on a winged rocket aircraft and calculates its climb through the subsonic and supersonic ranges, a long supersonic glide back down, and the resulting range and speed. His figures reach about 5,000 km in under an hour and a half, and he sketches a transport aircraft able to cross the world. Part 3 considers rocket aircraft for active air defence, comparing the limits of propeller fighters with a one-man rocket interceptor and a rocket bomber that glides to its target, and ends with a warning that a war fought with such weapons leaves only losers. The issue cites Esnault-Pelterie, Cranz, Hohmann and Busemann, and its back page advertises the standard German spaceflight books of the day by Oberth, Valier, Hohmann and Sänger himself.
Rockets and Rocket Ships.
A short illustrated history of the rocket for young readers by Aleksandr Rodnykh, a popularizer and historian of aeronautics and an early propagandist of Tsiolkovsky’s ideas. The title page reads “2nd edition, expanded.” The book is dedicated to Tsiolkovsky’s labor and “ideas of world significance,” and its opening note (“Instead of a Preface”) says its task is to acquaint the young reader with the history of jet engines. Chapter I explains the rocket and reaction motion. Chapter II (pp. 7–46) is a history of attempts at jet flight: the legendary Chinese mandarin Wan-Hu and Hero’s steam sphere; nineteenth-century jet-propelled balloons, helicopters, and airplanes (a Geneva design of 1837, an 1860 rocket flying machine, the Butler-Edwards jet aircraft of 1867); Russian proposals by Tretesky, Konstantinov, and General Ivanin; Nikolai Kibalchich’s 1881 powder-rocket flying machine (pp. 16–22), with his sketch; then Verne’s moon-cannon, Betty’s jet airship, Tsiolkovsky’s work (p. 28), Unge’s military rocket, Grafigny’s rocket-model airplane and centrifugal-launcher ideas, Low’s 1913 rocket ascent, Esnault-Pelterie, Goddard, and Oberth, whose liquid-fuel rocket designs are shown (p. 45). Chapter III (pp. 47–62) turns to applications and the state of the art in 1934: Chinese and Mongol war rockets, Congreve, rocket mail and Opel’s rocket cars, sleds, and railcar (1928), Goddard’s 1929 test flight, Lyon and Tilling’s experiments, Nebel’s planned passenger rocket at Magdeburg, and Tsiolkovsky’s rocket-plane star-ship. The book closes with a passage on the 1924 Moscow society for interplanetary communication and the foreign societies that followed it, and a quoted telegram from Tsiolkovsky’s 1920 story Outside the Earth. About forty line drawings and halftones. Print run 25,000, signed for printing 22 August 1934. Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels (7th and 10th editions) is also in the collection, as is Tsiolkovsky’s work.
L’Astronautique (Complément).
Inscribed by Esnault-Pelterie on the cover. Delivered as a communication to the Société des Ingénieurs Civils de France on 25 May 1934 and published the following year, this offprint brings his 1930 book L’Astronautique (also in this collection) up to date rather than replacing it, reworking the chapters that had become outdated and adding a historical survey of developments from 1930–34: the founding of the American Interplanetary Society and David Lasser’s The Conquest of Space (also in this collection), the fatal explosion of Reinhold Tiling’s stratospheric rocket in Germany in 1933, Ary Sternfeld’s Initiation à la Cosmonautique, and the founding of the British Interplanetary Society in 1934. A section on N. A. Rynin’s nine-volume Leningrad encyclopedia of interplanetary travel describes having a colleague translate its tables of contents, since Esnault-Pelterie could not read Russian himself. The reworked trajectory chapter credits a 1934 paper by Sternfeld with a counterintuitive finding — that beyond a certain orbit ratio, a spacecraft can save propellant by overshooting its destination out toward infinity before returning, rather than transferring directly — a maneuver now called the bi-elliptic transfer, though Esnault-Pelterie himself doubted it had much practical use. The book closes with appended tables and a large folding nomogram for computing chemical dissociation equilibria in combustion gases.
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Jet Propulsion.
Collection of essays by Russian pioneers on the dynamics of rockets. Only 3,000 published copies. Reaktivnoe dvizhenie is “Collection No. 1” of the Reactive Group of the Military-Scientific Committee of Osoaviakhim, the Soviet civil-defense and aviation society, edited by A. A. Butler, A. A. Verner, P. S. Dubensky, I. A. Merkulov, M. K. Tikhonravov, and A. G. Kostikov. The editors’ foreword, dated 5 February 1935, traces the problem from Kibalchich in 1881 through Tsiolkovsky, notes that Goddard and Esnault-Pelterie were working for foreign military ministries, and promises later issues on heat engineering, materials, fuels, and construction. The ten articles, with starting pages, are: V. A. Davydov, “Paths of aviation development and jet propulsion” (5); L. S. Dushkin, “Fundamentals of the general theory of jet propulsion” (20); Prof. V. P. Vetchinkin, “Vertical motion of rockets” (37); M. K. Tikhonravov, “Stability of a rocket in flight” (53); I. A. Merkulov, “Construction of trajectories of jet vehicles with an initial velocity” (64); F. Frankl, “Vortex motion and flow around bodies in plane-parallel supersonic flow” (82); Vetchinkin again, “Some problems in the dynamics of the jet aircraft” (95); E. S. Shchetinkov, “Application of oxygen jet engines to aircraft” (131); and two articles by V. I. Dudakov on calculating the takeoff run of an aircraft with starting rockets (141) and on braking its landing run with rockets (149). Dushkin concludes that spaceflight is not yet technically feasible because of the mass ratio, suggesting staged rockets or far higher exhaust velocities as ways out, and sees the stratosphere as the near-term field for jet engines (p. 36). Printed 3,000 copies, signed to press 16 July 1935.
How To Build Rocket Ships.
A non-technical pamphlet from the novelty retailer Johnson Smith & Co., mixing speculative essays on rocket transportation, rocket warfare (illustrated with “Rockets fall on New York City”), and interstellar travel with practical plans for building small gunpowder- and sodium-propelled rockets to power toy cars, airplanes, and boats. Internal advertising for the company's catalog confirms this exemplar was printed in or after 1936 — it touts Johnson Smith's recent move from Racine, Wisconsin to Detroit, Michigan “as of January 1, 1936” — despite the 1935 copyright date on the title page.
Interplanetary Travels.
The tenth edition of Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels, issued only three years after the seventh and, as Perelman says in his preface, nearly three times the size of the first edition (1915). He explains that new developments could not simply be added to the old text; chapters were rewritten, and he made changes even though the ninth edition was only a year old. The book keeps its popular form, with material for better-prepared readers moved to the appendices. It opens with the author’s preface and Tsiolkovsky’s preface to the sixth edition, then runs twenty-one chapters (to p. 191): the dream of space travel; universal gravitation; whether one can shelter from or weaken gravity; defying gravity on waves of light; the cannon to the Moon (theory and practice); the rocket to the stars; the construction and history of the gunpowder rocket; Kibalchich’s flying machine; the energy source and mechanics of the rocket; stellar navigation; Tsiolkovsky’s projects; an artificial Moon and extraterrestrial station; experiments with new rockets; two unrealizable projects; life aboard a spaceship; and the dangers of starflight. Thirteen appendices (pp. 192–269) include rocket dynamics, a rocket across the ocean, a rocket to the Moon, a new appendix on the stratosphere, interplanetary signaling, a bibliography of rocket flight and starflight, and a chronology of events that runs to 1935. Illustrated; cover and title page by G. B. Ibakh. A list of Perelman’s other books at the back includes To The Stars By Rocket and Rocket To The Moon, both in this collection. Print run 50,000, signed for printing 11 November 1935. The seventh edition (1932) and the 1934 Verne edition edited by Perelman are also in the collection.
Stratosphere And Rocket Flight (Astronautics).
The first British book on space travel by a science writer, and one of few books in English before WWII with Lasser (1931), Monk (1933), and Cleator (1936) all also available in this collection. This first edition sold out within a few months, prompting a revised and enlarged second edition later the same year, also in this collection. Philp also surveyed the field two years later in “Where Is Rocketry Today?”, Popular Aviation, October 1937, also in this collection.
Stratosphere And Rocket Flight (Astronautics).
This revised and enlarged second edition, issued only months after the first (also in this collection) sold out, rewrites the Historical Survey chapter to credit Tsiolkovsky (1903), Esnault-Pelterie (1907), Goddard (1912), and Oberth (1923) as the field’s founding theorists, and adds a bibliography of books on rockets and astronautics, including Philp’s own. In his preface Philp thanks G. Edward Pendray, President of the American Rocket Society, and Willy Ley (also in this collection), for their criticisms of the first edition.
La Navigation Interplanétaire.
Reproduces two lectures Ananoff gave at the observatory of the Société Astronomique de France on 1 and 8 April 1935, first printed in the journal L’Astronomie that summer. In his preface André Hirsch, co-founder with Robert Esnault-Pelterie (REP) of the international astronautics prize, recommends it as the clearest popular introduction to the subject and as a companion to REP’s L’Astronautique (also in this collection). It runs from Lucian, Cyrano and Verne through “unrealizable projects” (Verne’s cannon, Mas and Drouet’s giant sling, de Graffigny’s circular tunnel) to escape velocities, fuels, and the rocket designs of Goddard, Oberth, Hohmann, Hoefft and Tsiolkovsky, then interplanetary trajectories, weightlessness, artificial gravity and Noordung’s space station. A closing survey of astronautical societies cites Gussalli’s 1923 book, Lasser and Philp, all also in this collection. A footnote on page 15 notes Tsiolkovsky’s death as the pamphlet went to press. Eighteen figures, several drawn by Ananoff himself, and a closing bibliography.
Rocket Airmail Stamps A Specialized Catalogue.
Dedicated to Friedrich Schmiedl, "the first man in the World to successfully fly Mail by Rockets," the booklet opens with a plain-language explainer of rocket propulsion before surveying the field's pioneers — Goddard, Oberth, Pendray, Willy Ley, Esnault-Pelterie, Gerhard Zucker, and the fatally injured Max Valier — and closes with a reproduced 14 December 1934 General Post Office letter granting semi-official status to the Isle of Wight mail-rocket experiment, ahead of the full stamp-and-cover listing. Two exemplars, one with the original mailing envelope Kessler used to send a copy to fellow collector J. L. Wollheim.
My Biography Is Only Beginning.
Written in 1934, documenting Kamanin’s fame from that year’s Chelyuskin ice-rescue expedition, which made him one of the first Heroes of the Soviet Union. Decades later he would chair the committee that selected Yuri Gagarin as the first man in space, but that role lay well in his future when this book was written. Includes a fold-out map tracing his flight detachment’s route to Camp Schmidt. The volume also carries a second, shorter work by G. Kish, “Kamanin and Amakasu,” a fictionalized account pitting Kamanin against a Japanese officer, in the anti-Japanese, anti-fascist register typical of mid-1930s Soviet Far East writing. His 1972 memoir, Pilots and Cosmonauts, is also in the collection (Catalog E), along with a 1959-printed envelope he signed and dated by hand in 1973.
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The Technology Of Rocket Flight.
A faithful Russian translation of Sänger's Raketenflugtechnik (1933), also in this collection, prepared under the editorship of the Kharkiv aerodynamicist Academician G. F. Proskura, who notes in his preface that Russian technical literature had nothing comparable for engineers working on rocket flight. The book's rigorous aerodynamic and thermodynamic treatment of the rocket-powered airplane — supersonic wing and nozzle theory, wave drag, climb and descent trajectories — estimates a stratospheric rocket plane's practical limits at roughly 4,000 m/sec maximum speed and a 35-50 km ceiling, laying the technical groundwork Sänger would later build on for his wartime antipodal-bomber concept. This copy carries the accession stamp of the technical library of Factory No. 19, the major Soviet aero-engine plant in Perm. A later (1947) Russian edition by a different editor is also available in this collection.
Exploring The Stratosphere.
Gerald Heard — the broadcaster and popular-science writer whose The Source of Civilization is cited on the jacket — surveys the stratosphere in four short sections: what it is and where it begins; the balloon ascents that first reached it, from Professor Piccard's pioneering flights to the Soviet stratosphere balloon and the U.S. Explorer II gondola of Captains Stevens and Anderson, including the sighting of stratosphere-level storms and the death of the French Farman monoplane's pilot, M. Cognot, after a crash from 32,000 feet; its practical uses in weather forecasting, faster and safer high-altitude flight, and broadcasting; and finally what stratosphere research means for cosmic-ray physics. The most forward-looking chapter, “Training Ground for Rocket Flight,” argues that the aeroplane is fundamentally a “self-propelling kite” that must have air to grip and so has a hard ceiling, while the rocket needs no medium at all and would work better in a vacuum than in the stratosphere's thin air — illustrating the principle with the recoil of a stone and the physics of dynamite blasting, and noting that a rocket-driven car and a rocket-propelled aeroplane had already flown in Germany. Heard works through the problem of decelerating safely on the way back down, citing the record-breaking delayed parachute jump of John Tranum as real-world evidence for how much sudden deceleration the human body can survive. Three of the book's photographic plates are devoted to Robert H. Goddard: his moon-rocket, its launching tower, and a photograph of Goddard holding a model rocket, captioned as backed by the Guggenheim Foundation and Colonel Lindbergh.
Rockets Through Space.
The first full-length English-language book on astronautics, published the same year Cleator founded the British Interplanetary Society (October 1933), which he still served as President when this book appeared — the rear dust-jacket flap notes that his preparation for it included four visits to the German rocket experimenters. Carries an Introduction by Professor A. M. Low and a frontispiece portrait of G. Edward Pendray, President of the American Rocket Society, of which Cleator was an Honorary Member; the title page also lists him as British Delegate of the E.V. Fortschrittliche Verkehrstechnik and a Complimentary Member of the Cleveland Rocket Society. A chapter on the evolution of the rocket motor traces the German Rocket Society (Verein für Raumschiffahrt), founded at Breslau in 1927 by Max Valier and Johannes Winkler, whose members came to include Hermann Oberth, Walter Hohmann, and Willy Ley, later the Society’s Vice-President; Valier’s death on 17 May 1930, testing a rocket-propelled car built for Fritz von Opel, is recorded as the young science’s first fatality. Cleator also credits the Austrian engineer Friedrich Schmiedl, rather than the commonly cited Ing. Tiling, with establishing the world’s first officially recognized rocket postal service, flown between Schöckel and Radegund near Graz in 1931. First edition.
Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development.
Goddard’s own report to the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation on the rocket development he directed at Roswell, New Mexico, from July 1930 to July 1932 and September 1934 to September 1935 — the first public account of his historic first liquid-fuel rocket flight, launched at Auburn, Massachusetts on March 16, 1926 and reported to the Smithsonian that May 5 (Plate 1), together with the July 17, 1929 flight that carried a barometer and camera, both retrieved intact, and was mistaken by a witness for a burning airplane (Plate 2). Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh’s interest in the work brought it to Daniel Guggenheim's attention, whose foundation funded the Roswell program under an advisory committee chaired by Dr. John C. Merriam and including Dr. C. G. Abbot and Dr. Robert A. Millikan. Documents the shop and the 60- and 20-foot launching towers erected at Roswell in September 1930 (Plates 3–4), the December 30, 1930 flight of an 11-foot, 33.5-pound rocket to 2,000 feet, and the first flight with gyroscopically controlled stabilizing vanes, on April 19, 1932. After a hiatus for laboratory work at Clark University, flights resumed in 1934–35 with steadily improving automatic stabilization: a March 28, 1935 flight reached 4,800 feet and 550 mph, and Plates 10–11 reproduce timed sequences of 16mm film frames from the October 14 and May 31, 1935 flights, which rose 4,000 and 7,500 feet respectively. Illustrated with 11 plates. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Volume 95, No. 3 (Publication 3381), published March 16, 1936. Also in the collection: Goddard’s own account of his first liquid-fuel rocket flight, reprinted in Scientific American (August–September 1936), together with G. Edward Pendray’s 1938 profile of Goddard from the same magazine.
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Flight Into Universal Space.
Translated by S. A. Shorygin under the general editorship of Prof. V. P. Vetchinkin, based primarily on the 1925 second German edition (also in this collection) but expanded with material from Valier’s later work and new sections on N. I. Kibalchich and F. A. Tsander compiled by the editors. A 1934 editorial afterword attributes Valier’s fatal accident partly to the financial strain of working under commercial patrons like Opel, and expresses confidence that Soviet organizations such as Osoaviakhim could pursue rocketry on a purely scientific footing. HC, no DJ as issued.
Zero To Eighty.
Full title Zero to Eighty: Being My Lifetime Doings, Reflections, and Inventions, Also My Journey Around the Moon, published as the invented memoir of “Akkad Pseudoman” — a pseudonym of the Princeton physicist Edwin F. Northrup, who explains in his preface that the narrative, though “pure fiction,” exists to carry a serious technical proposal into general circulation. The book imagines a scientist born in 1920 looking back from the year 2000 on a life whose central achievement is humanity’s first flight around the moon and back; all of the supporting science, in Northrup’s words, has been “worked out in considerable detail” and kept “free from the fanciful,” segregated into a Technical Supplement so the narrative can be read on its own. That supplement centers on Northrup’s polyphase electric gun: a kilometer-long tube wound along its length with solenoid coils, energized in sequence by three-phase alternating current so that a travelling wave of magnetic force sweeps down the bore, inducing currents in a conductive projectile and accelerating it — without mechanical contact — toward escape velocity. Worked equations derive the thrust, the ampere-turns per centimeter, and the current needed from the projectile’s mass and target speed, and define “slip” as the lag between the projectile’s velocity and the travelling wave’s synchronous speed. A further section, “Power Shifting Device,” describes switching relays that energize only a short, moving stretch of the gun’s roughly fifty-seven metric tons of copper coil at a time — about fifteen meters of it — cutting the resistive power loss by two orders of magnitude. Northrup illustrates the same principle at a survivable scale with an “Electric Line-Throwing Gun,” a two-meter coil gun with a ten-meter pusher cylinder able to cast a life-line 500 meters using a twenty-five-kilowatt generator, and closes the supplement by working out the orbital mechanics of a lunar “load-ship,” computing the circular-orbit velocity needed to satellite the moon at a chosen radius. Published simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain and printed at the Princeton University Press.
Tsiolkovsky Life And Technical Ideas.
A popular biography written within two years of Tsiolkovsky’s death on 19 September 1935, drawing on his autobiographical notes, his unpublished memoir “My Life,” and about a hundred letters he and Perelman exchanged between 1913 and 1935. Perelman’s preface says he treats only two of Tsiolkovsky’s inventive “complexes” in detail, the airship and the rocket. Drawings are by M. M. Dneprovsky and portraits by V. P. Lyubimov, both Kaluga artists. After the chapters on childhood, self-education, and the all-metal airship, the 44-page rocket section (pp. 113-156) begins by crediting Tsiolkovsky with the first scientific theory of the rocket and noting that Kibalchich’s 1881 flying machine had already used the rocket principle. It covers the mechanics of rocket flight, the “starship” with its liquid-oxygen and petroleum or benzine fuel and a nozzle some 10 meters long, interplanetary travel, and a launch from a sloping track with an “Earth rocket” carrying the “cosmic rocket” inside it. Pages 148-152 reproduce Tsiolkovsky’s last rocket idea, sent to Perelman on 15 December 1934 with the note “Secret. I wanted to please you”: a squadron of 512 rockets transferring propellant between themselves in flight and dropping the emptied ones, reaching 11,100 m/s after nine transfers, with a table and a 16-rocket diagram. An editor’s note doubts the transfer would be practical. A footnote on page 146 points to his 1929 Space Rocket Trains (also in this collection) for the older staging concept. The closing “Other Ideas and Inventions” chapter lists about twenty topics, among them the stratoplane with an air compressor, a “gas compressor,” and a steam-gas engine, the subject of his Gas Compressors (1931, also in this collection). Print run 30,000, signed to press 9 April 1937 and printed at the ONTI printing house in Leningrad.
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Propulsione A Reazione.
Signed. The first issue (primo fascicolo) of a planned periodical series from the Centro di Studi di Propulsione a Reazione, a Turin study group founded in April 1939 to record Italian and foreign work on jet propulsion. A short note by the director, Claudio Belmondo, explains the aim. The issue has two parts. “Cenni storici” (pp. 9–16), by the directors, is a brief history of the rocket: Hero’s aeolipile, Greek fire and the Byzantine and Venetian use of it, the recipes in the liber ignium of Marcus Graecus, Frézier’s stabilizing fins (1707), the Indian rocket corps at Seringapatam (1799), Congreve’s rockets of 1804–1818, Russian and Prussian military rockets, rockets on aircraft in the First World War, and the experiments of Birkeland and Goddard. It closes by saying astronautics rests its hopes on the rocket, though the goal is still far off. The second and longer part (pp. 17 ff.) is a memorial to Giorgio Cicogna (Venice, 19 March 1899 – Turin, 3 August 1932), compiled by Adele Morozzo della Rocca, with a note on the editorial sources. Cicogna, from an old Venetian family, left the naval academy as a midshipman in the last two years of the First World War and commanded a MAS boat. He devised an acoustic hydrophone for locating submerged submarines and a course-signalling apparatus that won a prize from the National Research Council. He then turned to the jet engine, writing in 1932 of a “nearly definitive” motor and of reaching the ultra-stratosphere. He died during a test of his motor, struck by a fragment of it. The memorial also covers his literary work: the story collection I ciechi e le stelle (1931), a volume of verse, Canti per i nostri giorni (1931), both published in Milan by L’Eroica, and his unfinished synthesis of knowledge, Summa (Biosofia). Printed in Turin by Fratelli Pozzo, 4 July 1939. Unusual in being a memorial to a pioneer of Italian rocketry, produced by a short-lived private research center.
The Papers of Robert H. Goddard: Including the Reports to the Smithsonian Institution and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation (1898–1945). 3 volumes.
The complete surviving record of Goddard’s working life, assembled at the initiative of his widow Esther with a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation — the same foundation that funded his rocket experiments from 1930 onward. The project ran from 1958 to publication in 1970: notebooks, correspondence, patent files, and the annual reports Goddard submitted to the Smithsonian Institution and the Guggenheims, few of which had previously seen print. Volume One covers 1898–1924, Volume Two 1925–1937 (the Roswell years), and Volume Three 1938–1945; xl + 1708 pages, illustrated throughout with photographs and diagrams from Goddard’s own files. Issued at $150 for the set. The slipcase carries a gold medallion on the front reproducing Goddard’s posthumous Congressional Gold Medal of 1959, and on the back a second medallion with his own words — “The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow” — and “First Rocket March 16, 1926,” the date of his first liquid-fuel launch at Auburn, Massachusetts. A number, “23625,” is gilt-stamped at the base of the slipcase; likely a bindery or stock-control mark rather than a limited-edition number.