Today, Werner von Braun leaves the V-2 behind. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Our space program owes so
much to Werner von Braun. Yet we've always been a
little suspicious of this once-builder of German
rockets. Remember Dr. Strangelove!
In 1966, von Braun helped put things in
perspective. He wrote a fine History of Rocketry.
He told the 2500 year history of rockets and our
attempts to reach space. The earliest rocket- like
device on record was a steam-driven Egyptian model
bird. It flew on the end of a string in the 4th
The West didn't pursue the idea, but the Chinese
did. By 1300 they'd long since had a technology of
military rocketry. Then Europe began thinking about
tactical rockets. It took over 300 years but the
West finally had war rockets in the late 1700s.
One experiment wasn't military at all. Nor was it a
true rocket. Like the Egyptian bird, it was jet
propelled. A Dutch scientist, 'sGravesande, used a
steam jet to drive a model car.
The English got into rocketry in the 1790s. William
Congreve built a series of explosive rockets. They
weighed up to a hundred pounds and flew as far as
three miles. The red glare of Congreve's rockets
falling on Ft. McHenry has destroyed untrained
tenors at ball games ever since.
Soon, new and better guns overshadowed rockets. By
1920, rocketry had faded from war. Then we took a
new interest in long range rockets. That interest
wasn't fueled by war, but by hope of reaching
space. And it fed on the new success of human
First the Russian, Tsiolkovsky, theorized. Then the
American, Goddard, experimented. Finally, the
German, Herman Oberth, wrote immensely popular
books on rockets into space.
Armies read all that and brought it back to earth.
All through the '30's, American, English, French,
and German armies worked on a new breed of military
It was the young moon-struck von Braun who finally
put long range war rockets in the air. 1500 V-2's
reached England. They killed 2500 people. By then
the Gestapo had once jailed von Braun for showing
too much interest in the rocket's non-military
And the most effective WW-II rocket? It wasn't the
V-2 at all. It was the American Bazooka. It was our
hand-held anti- tank rocket launcher.
In 1945, von Braun got away with truck-loads of
documents and he surrendered to the Americans. He
was still only 33.
First he helped us build even more terrible rockets
-- ones we never used. But, in the end, he helped
us reach the moon and reach space. He did, at last,
lead us far beyond the horrors of war -- to planets
yet untouched by V-2s and ICBMs.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds