Rocketing

Two thousand excited Germans sat beside Berlin's famed Avis Speedway one day last week, and listened to a lecture on rockets. The lecturer was Fritz von Opel, motor magnate. Beside him stood a little racing car with two unusual accessories. In its rear it had something that looked like an exaggerated exhaust pipe. This, explained Herr von Opel, was a chamber for the explosion of rockets, the car's only means of locomotion. The other feature was a pair of little wings like an airplane's, except that their pitch was inverted. These, said Herr von Opel, were not to make the car fly, but to prevent it from flying. The car would go so fast he said that it needed air pressure to clamp it to earth.

Skyrockets were familiar things to Herr von Opel's audience. You light the fuse, the powder burns, the gases expand so rapidly that they push the rocket up through the air in a screeching arc. But could an automobile be substituted for the stock of a skyrocket and pushed along the ground by posterior expansion? Herr von Opel would show them.

Climbing into his little car he touched off a rocket. There was a ten-foot spurt of flame, a burst of yellow smoke, a loud report and the car whizzed away down the track. Within two seconds it was going 100 kilometres per hour (62.1 m. p. h.). Then there came fresh bursts of flame, smoke, and noise as Herr von Opel exploded more rockets. At each explosion the car lunged ahead in a fresh spurt. Its speed mounted to 125 m. p. h. When his rockets were all gone, Herr von Opel coasted to a standstill.

Herr von Opel told them more about rocketing. The perfecters of the idea were two German inventors named Valier and Sander. They had rocketed a racing car (without a driver) as high as 430 m. p. h., he said. They thought, of course, that they could revolutionize aerial locomotion. In the Raab-Katzenstein works at Cassel, they were completing a rocket-drive airplane, the Grasimiecke ("Garden Warbler"). Only a moderate 125 m. p. h. would be attempted with this craft. Later airplanes would be built to rocket beyond the highest flights of motored airplanes, first with laboratory animals aboard-and plane-parachutes later with men in air-tight compartments. They calculated a speed of 1,000 kilometres per hour (625 m. p. h.) could be attained and maintained.