Engineers’ Dreams - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 155

Engineers' Dreams
On numerous occasions after writing or lecturing about large engineering projects, I have been
asked if I know of a particular topic published in the 1950s. Few of the questioners can remember
the topic's exact title or the name of its author, but all have a vivid recollection that the topic de-
scribed grand schemes of engineers, ideas such as a tunnel between England and France, a dam
across the Strait of Gibraltar, and widespread use of solar and tidal power. The topic I believe all
my questioners have in mind is one by Willy Ley, published in 1954. Coming across it can be as
exciting an experience for the first-time reader today as it was for those who remember discovering
the topic as young men and women five decades ago. Both the topic and its author, and the contem-
porary influences on them, deserve to be remembered.
Willy Ley was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1906. He attended public schools and developed a
broad interest in things scientific and technical. During the poor economic times of the 1920s, Ley
attended on and off the universities of Berlin and Königsberg, where he took courses in paleonto-
logy, astronomy, and physics. He had planned a career in geology, but in 1926 he encountered an
early topic on space travel, one written by Hermann Oberth, who himself had been drawn to the
subject by reading Jules Verne novels.
Oberth was born in Transylvania in 1894, when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
After his studies as a medical student at the University of Munich were interrupted by World War
I, he became increasingly interested in other matters and, in time, submitted a doctoral dissertation
on a rocket of his own devising to the University of Heidelberg. His thesis was rejected by the uni-
versity, however, as it was subsequently by several topic publishers. In 1923, Oberth, who is now
considered one of the founders of spaceflight, did publish Rocket into Interplanetary Space, com-
plete with equations and technical analysis. Among his other endeavors, Oberth soon convinced
the film director Fritz Lang to back what would be a failed attempt to launch a rocket to publicize
the movie Woman in the Moon. After a peripatetic career, which included work with Wernher von
Braun at Peenemünde as well as at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, an aging Oberth
began to disconcert his admirers by speculating about unidentified flying objects and supporting
parapsychology.
After reading Oberth's 1923 topic on rocketry, Willy Ley abandoned his own formal education
to follow a growing popular preoccupation in Germany: thinking about travel beyond the strato-
sphere. Ley's first topic, Trip into Space, a popularized version of Oberth's work, was published in
Germany in 1926. Isaac Asimov wrote that Ley's topic “met with wide acclaim and for over forty
years afterward he remained the most successful popular writer on rocketry in the world.”
In 1927, Ley became one of the founders of the German Society for Space Travel, serving as vice
president from 1928 until 1933, when the society was dissolved by the Nazis, who did not want in-
formation on rocketry widely disseminated. Ley's linguistic skills enabled him to correspond with
others about rocketry throughout Europe and America, and his society became a clearinghouse for