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Aviation History
1937
1937 - 1420.PDF
-534 FLIGHT. MAY 27, 1937. SOMETIMES I wonder whether it will continue all through my life, this battle with the annual rocket hoax. It appears frequently in the ocean of printed paper that is issued every day in every country of the globe, and it is apparently no easier to kill than the notorious sea serpent. It is well known that the modern interest in rockets and their possibilities began just after the world war, when Pro fessor Robert H. Goddard, in America, and Professor Hermann Oberth, in Germany, published their first treatises. I was in Germany then, and shortly after the publication of Oberth's book (which was printed for the first time in 1923) the first hoax was perpetrated. Someone sold us the idea that Pro fessor Goddard had actually reached altitudes of a hundred miles with his rockets. Of course, it was not true. It did not even become true in the meantime, the four kilometres reached by one of the " repulsors" of the German Rocket Society is still the limit. We started the German Rocket Society (Verein fur Raum- schiffahrt) in 1927. In the beginning it was simply a society of interested scientists and laymen who discussed rocket problems in meetings, papers and by correspondence. Experi mental work was not begun earlier than 1929. Meanwhile, similar societies had been founded in Austria, Soviet Russia, and in France. In short, there was much activity but no rocket had yet been shot. It was only theoretical and a bit of preliminary experimental work. Avalanche of Letters It was in the midst of this period that I received a clipping from a rather important newspaper printed in the Middle West in America which reported that our rocket number so-and-so had reached an altitude of 27,134 feet—not one inch more or less ! The photograph enabled us to recognise the rocket as one of our wooden models for testing air resistance. But I received approximately one pound of foreign mail every day asking why this unknown German inventor had made his great 70-kilometre rocket shot in secrecy and refused to sell his patents. This great man did not exist, his rocket did not exist, his patents were unknown to any patent office in the world. And I hated the mail ! I also heard at this time that the Russian Government had secretly built a rocket that had reached an altitude of about 50 miles. This news appeared simultaneously in German, French, Swiss and American newspapers. I wrote to Professor Rynin, the chief of the Russian Rocket Society GIRD. His reply came with the next mail: " I wish it were true, but it is not. I also do not have the laboratory with one hundred and twenty assistants reported in your papers." The worst of these stories was that they were even men tioned in popular books, where they last until to-day. But Goddard's military rocket air torpedoes, invented in Berlin by a friend of Shershevsky's, and all the "secret" Russian and German rockets, were stories that could be killed one way or another. It was only necessary that somebody " be longing to the art" (to use the patent attorney's language) should approach the man credited with the achievement. But the most famous of all rocket hoaxes that is to me still (to use a rather descriptive American slang expression) "a pain in the neck" is the one about the alleged rocket flight made by one brother Fischer in a rocket built by the other brother Fischer from the Island of Riigen in the Baltic. I said that inventors of these stories slowly became more careful. This applies here ; when it started, existing rocketeers were credited with experiments they had not made. That was easy. But now not only the experiment, but also the experi- ROCKETEERING Or the Hunting of a Canard By WILLY LEY menter, were invented. The only really existing thing was the Island of Riigen—if I had not been there several times I would doubt that, too. As far as I succeeded in discovering, the story started in a well-known London Sunday paper in 1934. Here are some extracts from that monumental flight of fancy:— '' A sensational secret demonstration of the practicability of the rocket principle applied to flight was made here last Sunday when Herr Otto Fischer was shot six miles into the air within a 24-foot steel rocket and returned to earth safe and sound, though shaken. '' The pilot who risked his life in this experiment is brother of the designer and constructor of the rocket, Herr Bruno Fischer. . . . The demonstration was made under cover of absolute secrecy, under the auspices of the Reichs- wehr, the German War Ministry. . . . "On Sunday morning, at 6 o'clock, Otto Fischer shook hands with his brother and the small group of Reichswehr officials present to witness the experiment, and crawled into the rocket through the small steel door. '' Bruno Fischer and the three officials then retired to a small hollow in the ground about two hundred yards away and Fischer closed the switch that sent the rocket -on its journey. There was a blinding flash and a deafening ex plosion, and the slim torpedo-shaped body was gone from the steel framework in which it had rested. "A few minutes later it came into sight again, floating nose upwards from a large parachute that had automatically been released when it had begun to descend. As it drifted nearer, the steel fins on the outside of the body could be seen moving as its pilot manipulated the rocket so that it would land on the island. A few seconds later it came to rest on the sands a few yards away, and Fischer crawled through the door of the rocket white and shaken, but smiling triumphantly. The journey through space had lasted 10 minutes and 26 seconds. " ' It was a tremendous sensation,' he said to the men who had rushed forward to congratulate him, ' When the rocket left the ground I was conscious of a deafening roar and an unbearable weight seemed to be crushing me against the floor of the rocket. Then I lost consciousness for a moment, due to the tremendous acceleration which drained the blood from my head. When I came to my senses and looked at the altimeter before my face it flickered at 32,000 feet and then began to drop rapidly. I had completed my climb and was descending. . . To "those skilled in the art" the thing was an 18-carat hoax at first glance. All Over Again But the mail began pouring in again. The American Rocket Society, the Cleveland Rocket Society, the Austrian Rocket Society, the British Interplanetary Society, yes, and GIRD in Moscow and GIRD in Leningrad, too, asked urgently for information. That's what scientific societies have honorary members in other countries for. I replied first mildly, then firmly, and finally furiously that only the Island of, Riigen really existed and that it was a beautiful island. The English began to blame their Sunday paper. Its editor replied that he was very sorry but he could not give additional information because the "shot was undertaken under conditions of the strictest secrecy and the news was only accidentally obtained from a thoroughly reliable source." People wrote that Ernest Loebell, the president of the Cleve land Rocket Society, had traced the facts and found the story true. When I asked him about it he replied that he "had never bothered tracing so silly a story." Thus the fight went on for about two years. I cannot remember how many persons were interrogated. All of them should have been concerned in one way or another with the rocket shot, but most of them learned these "very interesting facts" for the first time through the questioning. Decidedly it could not come from the two certified German flights by rocket by the pilot Friedrich Stahmer in 1928 from the Wasser- kuppe (the famous glider camp in the Rhon mountains) and by Fritz von Opel near Frankfurt-on-the-Main in 1929. In
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