Rockets and Rocket Ships.

A short illustrated history of the rocket for young readers by Aleksandr Rodnykh, a popularizer and historian of aeronautics and an early propagandist of Tsiolkovsky’s ideas. The title page reads “2nd edition, expanded.” The book is dedicated to Tsiolkovsky’s labor and “ideas of world significance,” and its opening note (“Instead of a Preface”) says its task is to acquaint the young reader with the history of jet engines. Chapter I explains the rocket and reaction motion.

Chapter II (pp. 7–46) is a history of attempts at jet flight: the legendary Chinese mandarin Wan-Hu and Hero’s steam sphere; nineteenth-century jet-propelled balloons, helicopters, and airplanes (a Geneva design of 1837, an 1860 rocket flying machine, the Butler-Edwards jet aircraft of 1867); Russian proposals by Tretesky, Konstantinov, and General Ivanin; Nikolai Kibalchich’s 1881 powder-rocket flying machine (pp. 16–22), with his sketch; then Verne’s moon-cannon, Betty’s jet airship, Tsiolkovsky’s work (p. 28), Unge’s military rocket, Grafigny’s rocket-model airplane and centrifugal-launcher ideas, Low’s 1913 rocket ascent, Esnault-Pelterie, Goddard, and Oberth, whose liquid-fuel rocket designs are shown (p. 45).

Chapter III (pp. 47–62) turns to applications and the state of the art in 1934: Chinese and Mongol war rockets, Congreve, rocket mail and Opel’s rocket cars, sleds, and railcar (1928), Goddard’s 1929 test flight, Lyon and Tilling’s experiments, Nebel’s planned passenger rocket at Magdeburg, and Tsiolkovsky’s rocket-plane star-ship. The book closes with a passage on the 1924 Moscow society for interplanetary communication and the foreign societies that followed it, and a quoted telegram from Tsiolkovsky’s 1920 story Outside the Earth.

About forty line drawings and halftones. Print run 25,000, approved for printing 22 August 1934. Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels (7th and 10th editions) is also in the collection, as is Tsiolkovsky’s work.