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.