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.