Rockets Through Space.

The first full-length English-language book on astronautics, published the same year Cleator founded the British Interplanetary Society (October 1933), which he still served as President when this book appeared — the rear dust-jacket flap notes that his preparation for it included four visits to the German rocket experimenters. Carries an Introduction by Professor A. M. Low and a frontispiece portrait of G. Edward Pendray, President of the American Rocket Society, of which Cleator was an Honorary Member; the title page also lists him as British Delegate of the E.V. Fortschrittliche Verkehrstechnik and a Complimentary Member of the Cleveland Rocket Society.

A chapter on the evolution of the rocket motor traces the German Rocket Society (Verein für Raumschiffahrt), founded at Breslau in 1927 by Max Valier and Johannes Winkler, whose members came to include Hermann Oberth, Walter Hohmann, and Willy Ley, later the Society’s Vice-President; Valier’s death on 17 May 1930, testing a rocket-propelled car built for Fritz von Opel, is recorded as the young science’s first fatality.

Cleator also credits the Austrian engineer Friedrich Schmiedl, rather than the commonly cited Ing. Tiling, with establishing the world’s first officially recognized rocket postal service, flown between Schöckel and Radegund near Graz in 1931. First edition.