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.