Tsiolkovsky.

Biography of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky by the engineer B. N. Vorobev (Vorob’ev), issue 5 of the Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh lyudei (Lives of Remarkable People) series published by the Komsomol’s Molodaya Gvardiya, in a printing of 50,000 copies. It carries a preface by Academician A. E. Fersman and a frontispiece portrait and a facsimile of Tsiolkovsky’s handwriting. Vorobev says in his own foreword that the book is a shortened version of research he carried out in 1937–1939, based on Tsiolkovsky’s manuscripts in the Civil Air Fleet archive, his correspondence, and help from his widow and daughters.

Thirteen chapters follow Tsiolkovsky from his childhood in Izhevskoe, his deafness and self-education, through his years as a teacher in Borovsk and Kaluga, to his dirigible, his early wind tunnel, the cosmic rocket and his death in 1935, set against the history of ballooning and aviation in Russia and abroad, with chapters on David Schwarz and on the years after the Revolution. The appendices list Tsiolkovsky’s published works, the sources used and earlier writings about him.

It references and reproduces Kibalchich’s diagram for a rocket (1918) also available in this collection. Tsiolkovsky’s rocket design is also surveyed in the year-end 1925 double number of Vestnik Znaniya, also in this collection. Tikhonravov’s introduction to the 1947 Works On Rocket Technology (Catalog C) credits Vorobev with discovering, among Tsiolkovsky’s papers, the 1883 manuscript “Free Space.”