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Sleds, Wheels and Rails, Oh My! | This Week In Space History
Valier Envisions Rocket Travel for All
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part story
by michael shinabery
The New York Times headline on July 28, 1928 trumpeted Max Valier’s latest achievement: “New Rocket Auto Hits 131-Mile Pace.” According to the story, Valier had “quadrupled” his vehicle’s power over previous tests, and then placed the rocket car “on railroad tracks near Steige, in the Harz Valley.” The test ended when the car crashed.
“The 1920s were a heyday for rocketeers, who were attaching rockets to just about anything,” the website io9.com said. “Austrian space travel promoter Max Valier was pretty much the champ at this, creating everything from rocket-powered sleds and boats to rocket-propelled railroad cars and the first rocket airplane.”
Hermann Oberth’s 1923 book, “The Rocket into Interplanetary Space,” inspired Valier, just as it had Wernher von Braun and Willy Ley. After devouring the book, Valier “was immediately compelled to write a letter to Oberth,” said “Max Valier – A Pioneer of Space Travel” (NASA, 1976). The two began corresponding and, in 1924, the biography stated, “with Oberth’s assistance, Valier wrote a popularized discussion of rocketry and outer space, ‘Advance Into Space.’ ”
“Valier was inspired to write a new version of the book that would explain Oberth’s concept in terms that an average layman could understand,” a video on the website rocket.aero explained. According to the site, by 1930 it had gone through six printings.
Some ridiculed him as a “sensationalist,” calling him a dreamer with a “bald thick skull,” “Max Valier – A Pioneer of Space Travel” said. However, they couldn’t deny his passion. The book quoted a contemporary who recalled: “He arrived like a rocket, full of plans and enthusiasm, flung his old bicycle into a corner of the passage of the house and stormed into the atelier (workshop). ‘I need a new form of an aircraft, a racing car, a rocket, a naviplane’ he shouted and drew a few sketch drafts from his pocket.’ ”
In 1927, Valier helped found the VfR, or German Society for Space Travel. A year later, more than 500 members were on the roster, including co-founder Ley, von Braun, and Oberth. On Dec. 8, 1927, said “Max Valier – A Pioneer of Space Travel,” Valier and Opel signed a contract “to which Valier offered the Opel company his project of rocket propulsion.” Valier soon began to actively test rocket-powered vehicles.
“His first rocket automobile, constructed in 1928 in collaboration with Fritz von Opel, the automobile manufacture (stet), made 120 miles an hour in tests but was later destroyed,” said the June 1930 Bulletin of the American Interplanetary Society. “He then began tests of a rocket airplane with a transatlantic flight in view, but disagreements with Herr von Opel caused them to part company. Herr Valier continued his experiments on the plane, which he predicted would be able to fly from Berlin to New York in two hours.”
In 1929, Valier built a solid-fuel rocket sled; his biography in the International Space Hall of Fame, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, said the vehicle “reached a speed of 250 miles per hour.” An Associated Press blurb in the Feb. 11, 1929 New York Times – headlined Valier “Claims 235-Mile Speed; German Tests Rocket Propulsion With Sled on Frozen Lake” – said the vehicle was “equipped with eighteen rockets” that were “fired in five series at intervals of one and a half seconds.” The test took place “on frozen Starnberger Lake.”
“Max Valier – A Pioneer of Space Travel” quoted Valier referring to an Oct. 3, 1929 sled run that stated “all four wheels flew off the vehicle as a result of the spokes having broken.” He modified the design to travel on a “system of runners” that eliminated “rotating parts.”
An AP story The NY Times published on Dec. 23, 1929, reported Valier was now experimenting with liquid fuel, which would give the driver “complete control” of the vehicle. Less than a month later, said rocketcityspacepioneers.com, Valier “led the development of a new liquid-fuel engine that had its first successful testing firing on January 25.” Subsequently, “on April 19, 1930, he completed the first successful drive of … the first rocket car powered by liquid propulsion.”
On May 17, in Berlin, a chemical reaction in the combustion chamber of a liquid-fuel experiment exploded on a test stand. “Max Valier – A Pioneer of Space Travel,” described the incident as “the fault of a risk – still unknown at that time – inherent in the new propellant.” The blast killed Valier. The book lauded him for dying “for the great idea to which he had dedicated his life.”
Three months before he was killed, Valier put that “great idea” before the public via the pulp magazine Air Wonder Stories, which published his article, “Berlin to New York in One Hour.” Hugo Gernsback, in the July 1931 Wonder Stories, wrote that while the rocket car’s creator was gone, “it is to be hoped that the example of Valier’s enthusiasm and energy animates those who are carrying on where he left off.”
Paul Heylandt, who also backed Valier financially, did continue the dream. He and Valier, working together, had already “constructed an automobile which was believed to embody the practical solution of rocket propulsion,” the AIS Bulletin stated. “Exactly a month before his death (Valier) exhibited this car at Tempelhof Airfield in tests which were attended with complete success.” The May 4, 1931 New York Times reported the vehicle achieved “a speed of more than eighty miles an hour for fourteen minutes.” The vehicle, according to the reporter, “emitt(ed) a fearsome-looking tail of flame.”
The Bulletin explained that Heylandt “combined” liquid fuel with “with pure liquid hydrogen,” to power a “ ‘hip flask’ motor developed by Dr. Heylandt and used in Herr Valier’s rocket automobile. Although it weighs only seven pounds, the motor is said by its inventor to develop from 40 to 50 horsepower.”
Heylandt, born on Feb. 6, 1884 in Germany, was a businessman whose “corporations were a large supplier of liquid oxygen in Germany … the fuel source in many rockets,” said v2.x-factorial.com. “His life’s work was the commercial development of liquefied gases.” He owned a United States patent, filed on July 17, 1929 and patented on July 5, 1932, titled “Method of Conserving Liquefied Gases; which, the filing stated, would conserve such “gases while in storage or transport, particularly liquefied gases of low boiling point.”
After Valier’s death, Heylandt’s “next step,” the Bulletin said, was “to build a rocket motor into an ordinary airplane. The plan is to have the plane take off in the ordinary manner and switch on the rocket motor after a sufficiently high altitude is reached. Later a plane will be constructed with only a rocket motor and an attempt will be made to hop across the English Channel.”
Historic film of Valier’s car, rail, sled, and airplane rocket launches:
Courtesy of NMMSH Archives. – Click to Enlarge.
Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and Humanities Scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. E-mail him at michael.shinabery @ state.nm.us.
Source: http://moonandback.com/2014/02/18/sleds-wheels-and-rails-oh-my-this-week-in-space-history/
