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.
Published in the Journal de Physique Théorique et Appliquée, 5e série, tome III (Mars 1913). Presents the theoretical bases of self- propulsion, dismisses the notion that propulsion requires air, and develops the equations of rocket flight.
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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.
First published volume (out of 9) of Rynin’s encyclopedia of spaceflight.
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.
Eight inserted plates with illustrations. Juvenile literature, rather realistic in its description of spaceflight. The Russian edition (1930, rebound) with a preface by Iakov Perelman is also available 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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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.
Describes turbines for aviation.
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.
The Conquest of Space.
First book in English to explore space travel. The British edition (1932) is also available in this collection.
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Across Two Oceans
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By Rocket To The Moon.
U.S. edition. Juvenile literature, realistic in its description of a first flight into space.
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?
Speculation about a trip to the Moon.
Das Weltraum-Recht.
First edition at author’s expense. The first book on the legal aspects of spaceflight to present space law as an independent area of law.
Interplanetary Travels.
The seventh edition of Perelman’s book (1915) discussing interplanetary travel; the tenth edition (1935) is also available in this collection. Perelman would annotate and preface a Russian edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1934) also available in this collection.
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.
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 wrote this autobiographical article after rediscovering the pioneering rocket proposal of Nikolai Kibalchich (1918) also available in this collection. Pages 379-391 in Almanakh Vtoroi /God Pestnadnatsii / [Second Almanac/ Sixteenth Year]. Not illustrated.
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.
Scientific edition, illustrated, with notes in the text, biographical sketch about Jules Verne, and afterword by Iakov Perelman describing how various writers imagine traveling to the moon, including Tsiolkovsky and Oberth.
Neuere Ergebnisse Der Raketenflugtechnik FLUG.
Special report on results of rocket flights. Published in a special issue of Flug magazine.
Rockets and Rocket Ships.
Popularizer and historian of aeronautics. One of the first propagandists of the ideas of Tsiolkovsky. This is the second edition.
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.
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.
A very popular science writer in the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century who wrote extensively on spaceflight and promoted the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
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.
Summary of Tsiolkovsky’s ideas on rocketry.
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Propulsione A Reazione.
Signed. Rocketry in Italy with focus on Giorgio Cicogna, who died while developing a rocket motor and invented the Hydrophone. Highly unusual.
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.