Willy Ley, the Science Writers, and the Popular Enchantment of Science
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UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE WILLY LEY, THE SCIENCE WRITERS, AND THE POPULAR REENCHANTMENT OF SCIENCE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By JARED S. BUSS Norman, Oklahoma 2014 WILLY LEY, THE SCIENCE WRITERS, AND THE POPULAR REENCHANTMENT OF SCIENCE A DISSERTATION APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE BY ___________________________ Dr. Hunter Heyck, Chair ___________________________ Dr. Katherine Pandora ___________________________ Dr. Joann Palmeri ___________________________ Dr. Stephen Weldon ___________________________ Dr. Benjamin Alpers © Copyright by JARED S. BUSS 2014 All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgements Many helpful scholars have guided this dissertation. Hunter Heyck has provided advice and encouragement as the project matured from a collection of primary sources into a biography. Katherine Pandora’s scholarship and perspectives have also contributed to this work in remarkable ways. Additionally, Michael Neufeld has spent many years providing guidance, advice, and sources. I would also like to thank committee members Joann Palmeri, Benjamin Alpers, and Stephen Weldon for their helpful comments and reactions. This project owes a special thanks to Sandra and Xenia Ley. As the daughters of Willy Ley, they shared memories and reflections. In particular, I wish to thank Sandra for many long telephone interviews. Her personal stories and memories helped to reassure me that I understood her father and his personality. Although this biography focuses on Ley’s professional and public activities, I hope that this biography accurately reflects his personality. I would also like to thank other authors, researchers, and archivists. William H. Patterson provided much assistance in navigating the Heinlein Archives and interpreting key documents. Archivist Anne Coleman of the University of Alabama-Huntsville provided an inventory of Ley’s personal library, which was sold to the university after Ley’s death. The staff of the National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy center assisted in the exploration of the Willy Ley Collection, which was the primary research site. This research was also made possible with the assistance of the HSS/NASA Fellowship in the History of Space Science. Lastly, I owe a special thanks to my wife Loraine for her support, advice, and patience. iv Table of Contents Introduction / 1 Chapter 1: Youthful Horizons / 32 Chapter 2: From the Earth to the Moon, via Berlin / 60 Chapter 3: Diminishing Horizons and the Death of a “Science” / 112 Chapter 4: The Adventures of a Romantic Naturalist / 154 Chapter 5: The PM Years and the Science Writers at War / 206 Chapter 6: An Engineer’s Postwar Dreams / 250 Chapter 7: The Tom Corbett Years / 296 Chapter 8: The Sputnik Challenge / 358 Chapter 9: The Scholarly Twilight / 408 Conclusions: The First Citizen of the Moon / 465 Bibliography / 485 v Abstract This dissertation explores the life and career of Willy Ley, a science writer and popularizer of spaceflight technology in Germany and the United States during the twentieth century. By following his various “campaigns” to popularize a future of interplanetary travel and promote a vision of science that was inclusive and open, this dissertation highlights the cultural influence of an intermediary and “outsider,” who operated as a media-savvy scientific celebrity. A focus on Ley as an important figure in the history of technology helps to correct an imbalance in existing historiography, which traditionally sheds light on engineers, astronauts, and politicians. It demonstrates that the history of spaceflight is a history of media, popular representations, and artifacts. Additionally, it situates the history of spaceflight within broader avenues of science popularization, which could include efforts to celebrate the future of technology, as well as the past accomplishments of scientists and engineers. An analysis of Ley’s books, tactics, and perspectives will demonstrate that histories of popular science should include key efforts to popularize the history of science. These efforts will help to reveal the open, cosmopolitan, and socially engaged roots of an academic discipline, particularly in the publishing world of New York City during the Second World War and early Cold War. A focus on Ley will help to contextualize the maturation of the history of science, by relocating our perspectives from a narrow view of disciplinary formation to a broader appreciation of the circulation of texts, ideas, and representations. A biography of Ley serves as a case study that will invite further revisions to many traditional narratives. vi Introduction This dissertation explores the life and work of a man who defies classification. He was a “scientist” who rarely practiced science. He was a “rocket engineer” who rarely designed. He was a “prophet” who predicted the future, yet simultaneously acted as a “historian of science” looking to the past. He was a “modernist” who celebrated the “conquest” of nature, grand engineering redesigns, and the future. Yet, he was also a “romantic” who searched for wholeness, expressed deference in the presence of awe and wonder, and voiced nostalgia for a time when science was more open to all. He was an “outsider” who was also an “insider.” He was both an “amateur” and an “expert.” On an occupational level, it is most accurate to describe him as a “science writer,” because the term encompassed every book and article that he wrote during his lifetime. One could use this term interchangeably with “science educator,” so long as the realms of education are recognized as broad, popular, and media-savvy. Yet, if there is one label that Willy Ley embraced, it was that of a “romantic naturalist.” One might also use the labels of “modern romantic” or “romantic modernist” to describe Willy Ley. He was a naturalist who embraced wonder, awe, and the mysteries of nature. Simultaneously, his romance with nature included a drive to unmask, conquer, reorder, and master. A scholar might adopt gendered terms here. Ley stood enchanted by the beauty and wonder of Nature, just as he sought to possess and objectify her treasures. One could argue that he was a man of contradictions. For example, he trusted eyewitness accounts of the “abominable snowman,” while he dismissed eyewitness accounts of “UFOs.” He celebrated the great unknowns of nature, while he relentlessly debunked the myths and legends surrounding great unknowns. He possessed an 1 unflinching imagination, restrained by a skeptical mind. He celebrated great leaps into the unknowns of science, yet warred against the pitfalls of such intuitive leaps. He democratized science, while he cherished the utility of expertise. He embraced mass media, while he campaigned against certain best-selling books and other “propaganda.” This dissertation highlights the ways in which Ley’s perspectives illustrate the complexities of a “modern form of enchantment.”1 As scholar Michael Saler and others have argued, we can recognize the variety of cultural practices that did not simply rebel against a “disenchanted” modernity. Instead, we can appreciate how certain genres of writing sought to “complement it—to secure the marvels that a disenchanted modernity seemed to undermine, while remaining true to the tenets intellectuals ascribed to modernity at the time, such as rationality and secularism.”2 Certain writers voiced “a solution to the crisis of modern disenchantment.”3 They tapped into the “widely felt need of the period for forms of wonder and spirituality that accorded with reason and science…”4 Their works offered transcendental meaning, wonder, awe, and reverence for the great unknowns. Yet, simultaneously, they could promote empiricism, skepticism, and the explicability of nature. Saler makes these points to highlight the popularity of “virtual worlds” that offered safe places for imaginative and playful, yet still restrained enchantment. Yet, his broader points about scholarly revisions are important. Science has often been seen as the central component of “disenchantment,” as scientific thinkers waged wars against 1 Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2 Saler, 7. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 2 superstition, mystical thinking, revelation, and magic.5 A naturalistic, mechanistic, or secular worldview stripped away the mysteries to reveal a universe destined for conquest and control. Reason and empiricism triumphed over intuition and revelation. In the famous perspective of Max Weber, modern life offered an “iron cage,” barren and soulless. Wonder and surprise became the relics of a medieval past. These anachronisms could also be seen as “living fossils,” now gasping for air in vulgar, popular realms. As Saler noted, “Wonders and marvels were relegated by elites to the ghettos of popular culture… and the new mass culture.”6 In traditional accounts, magic was ultimately destined to fade in the face of a “narrow, instrumental rationality and a hollow, expanding secularism…”7 In recent years, scholars have interrogated and undermined this conception of modernity, both in its original “binary” distinctions and its “dialectical” reformations by social critics.8 Instead of offering a narrative of triumph, progress, or disenchantment, several scholars now recognize that modernity is best understood by the “fruitful tensions between seemingly irreconcilable forces and ideas.”9