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, approved for 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.