A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

The Aus­tri­an mil­i­tary engi­neer Con­rad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, con­sid­er­ing that he was work­ing on rock­ets aimed for out­er space back in the mid-six­teenth cen­tu­ry. Need­less to say, he nev­er actu­al­ly man­aged to launch any­thing into the upper atmos­phere. But you have to give him cred­it for get­ting as far as he did with the idea, a con­sid­er­able progress doc­u­ment­ed in his trea­tise “How You Must Make Quite a Nice Rock­et That Can Trav­el Itself into the Heights,” which no doubt sounds bet­ter in the orig­i­nal Ger­man. As Kaushik Pato­wary notes at Amus­ing Plan­et, its 450 pages are “filled with draw­ings and tech­ni­cal data on artillery, bal­lis­tics and detailed descrip­tions of mul­ti­stage rock­ets.”

“Born in 1509 in Dorn­bach, now part of Vien­na, to a Ger­man fam­i­ly from Bavaria,” Haas moved to Tran­syl­va­nia, then part of the Aus­tri­an Empire, ear­ly in his adult­hood. “In 1551, Haas was invit­ed by Stephen Bátho­ry, the grand prince of Tran­syl­va­nia, to Her­mannstadt (now Sibiu, Roma­nia), where he became the com­man­der of the artillery bar­racks and a weapons engi­neer.”

It was in this pro­fes­sion­al capac­i­ty that he began his research into rock­etry, which led him to dis­cov­er the con­cept of “a cylin­dri­cal thrust cham­ber filled with a pow­der pro­pel­lant, with a con­i­cal hole to pro­gres­sive­ly increase the com­bus­tion area and con­se­quent­ly the thrust,” a clear intel­lec­tu­al ances­tor of the mul­ti-stage design “still used in mod­ern rock­ets.”

Haas’ is the ear­li­est sci­en­tif­ic work on rock­ets known to have been under­tak­en in Europe. And until fair­ly recent­ly, it had been for­got­ten: only in 1961 was his man­u­script found in Sibi­u’s pub­lic archives, which moti­vat­ed Roma­nia to claim Haas as the first rock­et sci­en­tist. Though anachro­nis­tic, that des­ig­na­tion does under­score the far-sight­ed­ness of Haas’ world­view. So do the per­son­al words he includ­ed in his chap­ter about the mil­i­tary use of rock­ets. “My advice is for more peace and no war, leav­ing the rifles calm­ly in stor­age, so the bul­let is not fired, the gun­pow­der is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his mon­ey, the arse­nal mas­ter his life,” he wrote. But giv­en what he must have learned while liv­ing in polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble Euro­pean bor­der­lands, he sure­ly under­stood, on some lev­el, that it would be eas­i­er to get to the moon.

via Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 16th-Cen­tu­ry Astron­o­my Book Fea­tured “Ana­log Com­put­ers” to Cal­cu­late the Shape of the Moon, the Posi­tion of the Sun, and More

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

The Great­est Shot in Tele­vi­sion: Sci­ence His­to­ri­an James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

Meet the Mys­te­ri­ous Genius Who Patent­ed the UFO

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.