stake 8.sta.002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. http://louissheehan.bravejournal.com His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy.

Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.” Was he some sort of scientific pioneer, to be compared with Galileo, whose milder encounter with the Roman Inquisition — indeed, with the same inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine — followed not long afterward? Like Galileo, Bruno rejected the earth-centered cosmology and Aristotelian physics endorsed by the church. In the 19th century, historians of science saw him as an early proponent of atomic theory and the infinite universe. Or was Bruno an occultist dreamer, more magician than mathematician, as the renowned historian Frances Yates influentially argued in the 1960s? Either way, Bruno suffered for speaking his mind, though he also had a lot of bad luck, some of which he brought upon himself.

His story begins in Nola, a small city to the east of Naples. Bruno referred to himself as “il Nolano,” and Rowland echoes this, calling him “the Nolan” and frequently speaking of the “Nolan philosophy.” (This moniker may be harmless in America today, but it has awkward connotations for those who remember the Nolans of the 1970s and 1980s European pop scene, and their biggest hit, “I’m in the Mood for Dancing.”) The son of a well-connected professional soldier, Bruno entered the Neapolitan convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 14 and was quickly noticed for two things. First, there was his prodigious memory: as a 20-year-old he was sent to perform his feats of recall before the pope. The ancient art of enhanced memorization was what he was best known for in his own time, and teaching it to others was his most marketable skill. Mnemonic feats were not only a practically useful party trick, but were often held to enable a practitioner to arrive at a systematic understanding of the world. Second, there was his religious unorthodoxy. As a boy, he removed all pictures from his convent cell, keeping only a crucifix, and he scoffed at a fellow novice for reading a devotional poem about the Virgin.

Although he was ordained a priest in 1572 and licensed to teach theology three years later, he was soon under investigation by the local head of the Dominicans for his irregular and outspoken views. By 1576 he had fled to Genoa and abandoned his clerical garb, teaching astronomy and Latin in a nearby town. The next 15 years were spent wandering through Europe on a hunt for patrons and professorships. First came Venice, then Padua, then Lyons, then a copy-editing job in Calvinist Geneva, where he was jailed and excommunicated for publishing an attack on a local philosopher. After two years of lecturing in Toulouse on Aristotle and astronomy, he had some success in Paris teaching the art of memory, with Henry III as royal patron. It was in Paris that he published a long philosophical drama, “The Candlemaker,” which Rowland implausibly suggests can be staged successfully, despite its five-hour running time. Its title page names the author as “Bruno the Nolan, the Academic of no Academy; nicknamed the exasperated.”

In 1583 Bruno joined the household of the French ambassador in London, where he published his major philosophical works, all dialogues, in which he espoused an infinite universe teeming with life. The timing was bad for such unorthodox cosmology. A century earlier, a German cardinal and mathematician, Nicholas of Cusa, made similar suggestions; but back then the church was not yet threatened by Protestant heresy and took a more relaxed attitude to strange views. A century later, a book by a writer of the early French Enlightenment, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle,popularized the same idea. (Though technically banned by the church, Fontenelle’s “Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds” was a literary sensation.) Bruno was both too late and too early to paint a universe in which man and his planet were not the center of a cozy domain.

In 1591 Bruno returned to Italy, where the real trouble began. A Venetian grandee, Giovanni Mocenigo, invited Bruno to teach him the art of memory, and Bruno moved into the family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal. After seven or eight months, relations between the two men began to cool (there are also suggestions that relations between Bruno and Mocenigo’s wife heated up), and the Venetian denounced him. Among the many unacceptable things Mocenigo claimed to have heard Bruno say, listed in a letter to the Inquisition in May 1592, were that Christ was a wretch and a magician, that the world is eternal but divine punishment is not, that bread does not turn into flesh in the Eucharist, that the Virgin cannot have given birth and that all friars are asses.

Bruno made a few unwise admissions to his Inquisitors, but denied most of the accusations. One informant was not enough for a conviction — a second witness was needed — and Bruno was willing to repent in order to gain release. The matter could have ended there, but the Roman Inquisition asked for Bruno’s extradition, and Venice, after months of negotiations, complied. The Romans interviewed many of Bruno’s old cellmates from Venice, and found one — an unstable Capuchin friar, himself later burned at the stake — who falsely believed that Bruno had denounced him and decided to return the favor.

Even with this second witness, it took the Roman Inquisition nearly seven years to bring the case to its sorry conclusion, and it managed to do so only when the Jesuit cardinal Robert Bellarmine took charge. Rowland quotes Bellarmine as once saying that “I hardly ever read a book without wanting to give it a good censoring.”Bruno’s fate was sealed when he unsuccessfully attempted to appeal over the heads of the Inquisition to the pope himself. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com

Though it can be hard to follow the story line in Rowland’s early chapters, where the background to Bruno’s later work is jumbled in with biographical fact, her telling of his end is gripping. As an intellectual biography, however, the book has too little examination of his ideas. Although Rowland would like us to see Bruno as a martyr to science, his work comes across more as theologically inspired science fiction. He was a poetic speculator, not an empirical or systematic investigator. Thus it is still not clear what the great master of memory should be remembered for. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.

rub 0000190.1 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Before Jonathan Kuniholm, a marine re­­serv­­ist, was shipped off to the war in Iraq, he and three friends formed a research and development firm they called Tackle Design. The four men had worked together in an industrial engineering class at North Carolina State University (N.C.S.U.), and, filled with youthful enthusiasm, they hoped their fledgling company could survive on jobs that were interesting and beneficial rather than simply moneymaking. They worked with inventors—making prototypes for a plastic lock to keep shoestrings tied and a fishing lure with an embedded LED—as well as with medical engineers from their alma mater, who were developing tools for minimally invasive robotic surgery.

Then, before business had a chance to get off the ground, Kuniholm was deployed. A few months later, on New Year’s Day 2005, he and about 35 other marines were ambushed near the Hadithah Dam along the Euphrates River northwest of Baghdad. His platoon had been looking for insurgents who had fired at a Swift boat patrolling around the dam a few hours earlier. As the marines closed in on the suspected hotspot, an IED—improvised explosive device—hidden in a can of olive oil exploded. Shrapnel ripped through the platoon, and Kuniholm was blasted off his feet. Moments later, when he came to his senses, he discovered his M16 rifle had been blown in half and his right arm was nearly severed just below the elbow. Caught in a raging firefight, Kuniholm pulled himself out of harm’s way. His fellow marines called for air evacuation, and soon surgeons at a hospital near Baghdad were amputating his ravaged arm.

After returning to North Carolina, Kuniholm underwent multiple surgeries at the Duke University Medical Center. Then, following his convalescence, he visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where doctors outfitted him with two kinds of artificial replacement for his hand and lower arm. One was a conventional split-hook device, essentially two hooks aligned with each other, which the user can spread apart or close up via a harness and cable system activated by the shoulder or arm. The second was a more advanced “myoelectric” prosthesis, which picks up nerve signals produced by the slightest muscle tension and translates the signals into movement. Flexing the upper arm muscle causes the pincers of a prosthetic “hand” to grip; relaxing the muscles causes the pincers to release.

The two prostheses from Walter Reed were state-of-the-art, the latest in prosthetic design. But back in North Carolina, Kuniholm and his partners at Tackle Design were shocked at the lack of innovation in arm and hand prostheses. They were sure they could do better. And that is how the small North Carolina design firm got into the prosthetics business. More, Kuniholm and his partners have created a clearinghouse for prosthetic designs, an online consortium they call the Open Prosthetics Project (OPP), whose goal is to nurture useful ideas for innovations and then freely give the designs away. The idea is to benefit not only people such as Kuniholm, who already have the resources that come from living in a first-world economy, but also amputees all over the world. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

Innovation Stagnation
Ironically, one of the reasons a group such as the OPP can get on the public radar at all is the high human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because of tremendous advances in emergency medicine, as well as the use of such armor as Kevlar vests, the fighting has resulted in a far lower fatality rate among injured soldiers than it has in past wars. That’s the good news. The bad news is that many veterans whose wounds would have killed them in the past come home today with grievous injuries.

Still, in absolute terms, the number of upper-limb amputees is small, and the prosthetics market is hard to crack. As Kuniholm and his partners did their research about the prosthetics industry, it became evident that the main reason for the lack of innovation was a lack of financial incentive. According to the Amputee Coalition of America, 1.7 million Americans have lost a limb because of illness or trauma, but relatively few of them need a replacement arm or hand. The typical amputee is older than 50 and has lost a leg or a foot to diabetes or some other disease. Upper-extremity amputees—those who have lost an arm or a hand—number about 100,000 people, or some 6 percent of the total. Fewer still are wounded veterans. As of the end of 2007, about 700 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are amputees, and of those about 150 have lost a hand or an arm (or, in some cases, both arms).

Such a relatively small market, and the resulting narrow profit margins, makes it unprofitable for most companies to invest in research and development of upper-arm prostheses. “Prosthetics is one of many underserved markets in which innovation has stagnated because the traditional incentives are lacking,” Kuniholm says. “The people who make innovations in this field are usually passionate users tinkering around in their garage.”

What Kuniholm has in mind is what Eric von Hippel calls a lead user—a person who is out in front of most other people and even other companies with respect to an important market trend. A lead user also expects to reap great profits or benefits from the trend. According to von Hippel, a professor and head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, lead users also tend to be active innovators. Kuniholm is betting that by incorporating the insights of lead users into a new product, the product has a good chance to win in the marketplace because it anticipates consumer needs.

But patenting and securing a manufacturer are costly and convoluted processes, so most amputees who try to improve prosthetic designs never see their ideas get past the workshop. “All that information and innovation mostly just disappear into the ether,” Kuniholm adds.

The Web site www.openprosthetics.org, which is part of an organization called the Shared Design Alliance, invites prosthesis users, engineers and anyone else with an interest to join a discussion entitled “Pimp My Arm.” (The name is a takeoff on the MTV show Pimp My Ride, which features auto mechanics who fix up and customize old clunkers.) Participants can contribute time, hunches and imagination about how to improve the devices. All the ideas are “open source”—that is, nothing is proprietary, and any idea is understood to be freely shared.

A Simple Solution
Kuniholm’s chief personal contribution to the OPP is the ongoing development and improvement of the Trautman hook. Introduced in 1925, the device is classified as a “voluntary opening” prosthesis, meaning its pincers are held closed with internal rubber bands. If the user wants to open the hook, he moves or shrugs his shoulder, which engages a harness and cable system. If that sounds relatively crude and basic, it is. Like most other hooks on the market, the Trautman design has changed very little since it was first introduced. “Many prosthetics manufacturers are subject to the same one-size-fits-most economics as mass-market consumer goods,” Kuniholm says. But in prosthetics, he adds, “each person’s needs and capabilities are unique.”

Although hooks may not be aesthetically pleasing and are decidedly low tech, they are generally more functional and durable and certainly less expensive than myoelectric devices (hooks cost between $600 and $2,200, on average, whereas myoelectric hands start around $6,000). Moreover, the Trautman hook is unique in having a so-called back lock: like the ice tongs once used for carrying blocks of ice, which convert the weight of the block into the force that grips both its sides, the pincers of the hook lock or squeeze harder on an object as the user pulls back on the hook with greater force. Another advantage is that the pincers of the Trautman hook have serrated teeth that interlock, making its grip even stronger. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

“There are many options for prosthetic devices, but none with this one’s capabilities,” says Agnes A. Curran, an upper-extremity specialist and clinical director of the Orthotic and Prosthetic Group of America. “Throughout my travels I meet patients all over the country who are longtime Trautman hook users, and these guys won’t even look at a modern device. They keep them held together with welds, baling wire and duct tape.”

Because of its unique features and rugged design, the Trautman hook developed a passionate following, particularly among farmers and ranchers in the Midwest. But the manufacturer, the Paul Trautman Company, went out of business in the 1990s, and within a short time after the company’s demise, only a limited number were still available on the aftermarket. When Kenneth M. Heide, a prosthetist in Fargo, N.D., who has many patients loyal to the Trautman hook, heard about the OPP, he saw it as the perfect opportunity to get the unique device back on the market. With the blessing of the Trautman company, Heide loaned the OPP two old Trautman devices borrowed from his patients and two new devices from Steven Stolberg, an instructor at Century College in White Bear, Minn., who used them in his class. Tackle Design reverse-engineered them, creating a digital model in a computer-aided design (CAD) program that could serve as a starting point for making improvements.

For the first batch, Kuniholm and his partners kept it simple. All they did was make some small changes to strengthen the used hooks where they had broken and then been welded back together. They e-mailed the specifications of one of the hooks to Anvil Prototype & Design in Charlotte, N.C., which put the digital designs through a process called rapid prototyping. Anvil transformed the digital information into the specifications for a “3-D printer” to build an early-stage concept model out of thousands of thin layers of powder and binder materials, adding or “printing” them one layer at a time. Rapid prototyping makes it possible to refine the design quickly. Rapid Tool in Boulder, Colo., then made four test models out of a bronze-infused stainless steel powder that was also added layer by layer, heated and fused. Tackle Design donated the new and improved hooks to patients for a test run.

Testing, Testing
One of the test patients was L. Gus Davis, the 57-year-old president of a water treatment company in St. Peter, Minn., who lost his right arm in a 1972 motorcycle accident. Although Davis had once considered getting a myoelectric arm, he thought it could never withstand his lifestyle. “I still ride motorcycles, I run a chain saw and I split wood by hand,” Davis says. “I’m pretty hard on [prosthetic devices], and I don’t think the myoelectric could stand up to it. But the Trautman hook is slick and tough. I would definitely be a potential customer.”

With feedback from his test patients, Kuniholm is fine-tuning the design of the next round of prototypes. He says the simplicity of the original hook—three metal parts and two screws—makes it a promising candidate for further customization and improvement. It could be made of a lighter alloy, for instance, and it could probably be modified to have a stronger grip. But the main glitch has already been fixed. For the hook to open and close properly, one of the screws had to be loosened, and with time that enlarged the hole and allowed the screw to wiggle free. To remedy the problem, many longtime users drilled out the screw holes, welded metal into them and tapped in new threads for the screws. Eventually, though, repeated repairs put a lot of wear and tear on the hook. Two students at N.C.S.U., Andy Richards and Richard Shoge, modified the design to correct the problem.

Eagerly awaiting the next test batch is Curran. Many of her patients were veterans of World War II, and most of them, elderly and accustomed to what they had, made little demand for prosthetic innovation. But recently she has started to see a growing number of younger patients, particularly soldiers returning from Iraq. “I would love to see what the younger guys think of this device and let them compare it with the more modern ones,” she says.

In addition to helping people here in the U.S., a cheap and simple device such as the Trautman hook would be invaluable in developing countries, where war, poor health care and manual labor are common. In such areas the population of upper-limb amputees is growing at an alarming rate, and a prosthesis can be crucial for returning to gainful employment. Yet a severe lack of funds prevents most amputees from receiving a simple, cheap and durable prosthesis. “We have to think outside the U.S.,” Curran says. “We need to look at places like Saudi Arabia, India, China, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh and elsewhere in the world where, unfortunately, some of the amputations are punitive.”

It’s the Economy, Stupid
The key to getting the hooks into the hands of the people who need them is finding a distributor that is willing to market the hooks internationally. But that has proved to be more easily said than done.

“When I was going around to different companies asking if they’d be willing to help out, they all asked the same question,” Curran says. “‘How many will I sell in a year?’ If there’s not a lot of potential profit, they’re just not that interested.” And with plenty of options already available, what point is there in trying to come up with another device, particularly in a market so fraught with financial obstacles?

To Kuniholm, that is the counsel of despair. You might just as well say that everything that needs to be invented already has been. To be sure, there are plenty of prosthetic devices available that do different things well. “But,” he notes, “there’s still nothing on the market that’s an acceptable substitute for a hand.”

William J. Hanson, president of Liberating Technologies, Inc. (LTI), in Holliston, Mass., a manufacturer and distributor of upper-limb prosthetic components, explains that his company distributed the first titanium split hooks in the U.S. Like most prosthetics companies, though, LTI shifted its focus away from hooks and on to more modern mechanical and myoelectric devices. “Now just a handful of well-established companies supply most of the market with body-powered hook devices,” Hanson says.

Hosmer Dorrance Corporation is one of those companies. Based in Campbell, Calif., Hosmer is one of the leading manufacturers of upper- and lower-extremity prostheses. Karl Hovland, the company’s president, recalls that over the years many inquires have come in about the Trautman hook. It has always remained on the back burner, he adds, because it never promised a big enough return to make the investment: “We would certainly consider it, but the numbers have to add up.” Making such an investment even more risky is that Medicare recently consolidated its reimbursement billing system for “orthotic and prosthetic” services. The result has been smaller reimbursements for several kinds of functional hooks. “There’s just no incentive if the reimbursement is less than what we have to charge for them,” Hovland says. “We want to do everything we can for the patient, but we are a business for profit.”

And therein lies the rub. Kuniholm’s vision of “substituting public good for profits” keeps running up against bottom-line roadblocks. Nevertheless, Kuniholm, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at Duke University, continues to search for manufacturing, marketing and distribution channels for the Trautman hook. He hopes to find a company that will donate e-commerce and payment and order management services—or better yet, a company already developing prosthetic devices that is willing to take on the OPP designs.

“The reality,” he notes, “is that there’s no traditional economic incentive to do work and make improvements on prosthetics. That doesn’t mean that nobody cares, but most people don’t have the money or know-how to magnify whatever efforts or improvements they make. I think we can generate far more societal benefit if we give away information than if we commercialized and sold the ideas. Our goal is to create a way to share these efforts and improvements with anyone who needs them.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

italian Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Eighth Army plans for 21 November were for 70 Division to break out from Tobruk and cut the German lines of communication and supply to the troops on the border to the southeast. At the same time 7th Armoured would advance from Sidi Rezegh to link with them and roll up the Axis positions around Tobruk. Meanwhile, XIII Corps' New Zealand Division would take advantage of the receding threat from 21st and 15th Panzer and advance 30 miles (48 km) northeast to the Sidi Azeiz area, overlooking the Axis defenses at Bardia. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us

The strength of 70th Division's attack surprised their opponents, Rommel having underestimated the garrison's size and particularly its armoured strength. Fighting was intense as the 2nd Battalion, Black Watch advanced to capture a series of prepared strongpoints. By mid afternoon they had advanced some 3.5 miles (5.6 km) towards Ed Duda on the main supply road when they paused as it became clear that 7th Armoured would not link up.^[7] A German account of the action of the 70th Division is given by Generalmajor Alfred Toppe of the German Wehrmacht:

A strong attack supported by fifty infantry tanks, was made from the southeast section of the fortress of Tobruk. The enemy broke through the encirclement front, penetrated across the main highway and and destroyed a good part of the Bologna Division. A counterattack by elements of 21st Panzer Division succeeded in restoring the situation.^[8]

In summing up the experience of the 2nd Battalion the Black Watch in the attack, the Official History of New Zealand in the Second World War wrote that "The superlative élan of the Black Watch in the attack had been equalled by the remarkable persistence of the defence in the face of formidable tank-and-infantry pressure."^[9]

7th Armoured had planned its attack northward to Tobruk to start at 08.30 on 21 November. However, at 07.45 patrols reported the arrival from the southeast of a mass of enemy armour, some 200 tanks in all. 7th Armoured Brigade, together with a battery of field artillery turned to meet this threat leaving the four companies of infantry and the artillery of the Support Group to carry through the attack to the north in anticipation of being reinforced by 5th South African Infantry Brigade which had been detached from the South African Division at Bir el Gubi facing the Ariete Division and was heading north to join them.^[10]

Without armoured support the northward attack by the Support Group failed and by the end of the day, 7th Armoured Brigade had lost all but 28 of its 160 tanks and were relying by that time mainly on the artillery of the Support Group to hold the enemy at arm's length. The South African brigade meanwhile were dug in southeast of Bir el Haiad but had the German armour between them and Sidi Rezegh. However, by the evening of 21 November 4th Armoured Brigade was 8 miles (13 km) south east of Sidi Rezegh and 22nd Armoured Brigade were in contact with the German armour at Bir el Haiad, some 12 miles (19 km) southwest of Sidi Rezegh.^[11]

[edit] 7th Armoured Division defeated at Sidi Rezegh

Overnight Rommel once again split his forces with 21st Panzer taking up a defensive position alongside the Afrika Division between Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk and 15th Panzer moving 15 miles (24 km) west to Gasr el Arid to prepare for a battle of manoeuvre which General Cruewell believed would favour the Afrika Korps. This presented a clear opportunity for a breakthrough to Tobruk with the whole of 7th Armoured Division concentrated and facing only the weakened 21st Panzer. However, XXX Corps commander Norrie, aware that 7th Armoured division was down to 200 tanks decided on caution. Instead, in the early afternoon Rommel attacked Sidi Rezegh with 21st Panzer and captured the airfield. Fighting was desperate and gallant: for his actions during these two days of fighting Brigadier Jock Campbell, commanding 7th Support Group was awarded the Victoria Cross. However, 21st Panzer, despite being considerably weaker in armour, proved superior in its combined arms tactics, pushing 7th Armoured Division back with a further 50 tanks lost (mainly from 22nd Brigade).^[12]

The fighting at Sidi Rezegh had continued through 22 November, with South African Division's 5th Brigade by that time engaged to the south of the airfield. An attempt to recapture it failed and the Axis counter-offensive began to gain momentum. 7th Armoured Brigade had been withdrawn with all but four of their 150 tanks out of commission or destroyed.^[13] In four days the Eighth Army had lost 530 tanks against Axis losses of about 100. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us

In the meantime the Italian forces had succeeded in repulsing a strong thrust from Tobruk aimed at penetrating into the area of Sidi Rezegh, as a German narrative recorded:^[15]

"After a sudden artillery concentration the garrison of Fortress Tobruk, supported by sixty tanks, made an attack on the direction of Bel Hamid at noon, intending at long last unite with the main offense group. The Italian siege front around the fortress tried to offer a defense in the confusion but was forced to relinquish numerous strong points in the encirclement front about Bir Bu Assaten to superior enemy forces. The Italian "Pavia" Division was committed for a counterattack and managed to seal off the enemy breakthrough."

Oberth Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire 211223

Hermann Julius Oberth (June 25, 1894 – December 28, 1989) was an Austro-Hungarian-born, German (Transylvanian Saxon) physicist, and, along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert Goddard, one of the founding fathers of rocketry and astronautics. The three were never active collaborators: instead, their parallel achievements occurred independently of one another.

Contents [hide] 1 Early life 2 Rocketry and space flight 3 Later life 4 Legacy 5 See also 6 Books 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Early life

Oberth was born to a Saxon family in the Transylvanian city of Schäßburg (Romanian Sighişoara, Romania). By his own account and that of many others, around the age of 11 Oberth became fascinated with the field in which he was to make his mark through the writings of Jules Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, re-reading them to the point of memorization. Influenced by Verne's books and ideas, Oberth constructed his first model rocket as a school student of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the multistage rocket, but lacked, at the time, the resources to pursue his idea on any but a theoretical level.

In 1912, Oberth undertook the study of medicine in Munich but at the outbreak of World War I he was drafted in an Imperial German infantry battalion and sent to the Eastern Front; in 1915 he was moved to a medical unit in a hospital in Sighişoara.^[1] Here he initially conducted a series of experiments concerning weightlessness and later resumed his rocket designs. By 1917, he showed what his studies were about and what would become a shooting missile with liquid propellant to Hermann von Stein, the Prussian Minister of War.^[2]

On July 6, 1918 he married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children, among them a son who died at the front during World War II, and a daughter who also died during the war, when a liquid oxygen plant exploded in a workplace accident in August 1944. In 1919 he moved once again to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later in Göttingen.^[1]

In 1922, his doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". He had the 92-page work privately published as the controversial Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("By Rocket into Planetary Space"); in 1929, Oberth would expand this to a 429-page work entitled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt ("Ways to Spaceflight"). Oberth commented later that he made the deliberate choice not to write another doctoral dissertation: "I refrained from writing another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of doctor."^[3] He criticized the German system of education, saying "Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward things are barely discernible."^[3] Hermann Oberth was finally awarded with the title of doctor in physics with the same paper, by professor Augustin Maior, at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca (Romania), on May 23, 1923. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

He became a member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR - "Spaceflight Society"), an amateur rocket group that had taken great inspiration from his book and acted as something of a mentor to the enthusiasts that made it up. For several years before his final departure from Romania in 1938, Oberth taught physics and mathematics at the Stephan Ludwig Roth High School in Mediaş.^[1]

[edit] Rocketry and space flight

The statue of Hermann Oberth in front of Sibiu city hall

In 1928 and 1929 Oberth worked in Berlin as a scientific consultant on the first film ever to have scenes set in space, Frau im Mond ("The Woman in the Moon"), directed at Universum Film AG by Fritz Lang. The film was of enormous value in popularizing the idea of rocket science. Oberth's main task was to build and launch a rocket as a publicity event prior to the film's premiere. On June 5, 1929, Oberth won the first REP-Hirsch Prize of the French Astronomical Society for his Encouragement of Astronautics in his book Wege zur Raumschiffahrt (Ways to Spaceflight) that expanded Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen to a full-length book. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In autumn 1929, Oberth launched his first liquid fuel rocket, named Kegeldüse. He was helped in this experiment by his students at the Technical University of Berlin, one of whom was Wernher von Braun, who would later head the wartime project to develop the rocket officially called the A4, but far better known today as the V-2 rocket.

In 1938 the Oberth family left Sibiu for good, to settle first in Nazi Germany. Oberth himself moved on first to the Technische Hochschule in Vienna, then the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. Oberth arrived at Peenemünde in 1941 to work on the V-2 and circa September 1943, was awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz I Klasse mit Schwertern (War Merit Cross 1st Class, with Swords) for his "outstanding, courageous behavior … during the attack" of Peenemünde by Operation Hydra.^[5] Oberth later worked on solid-propellant anti-aircraft rockets at the WASAG complex near Wittenberg. At the end of the war the Oberth family moved to Feucht, near Nuremberg. Oberth left for Switzerland in 1948, where he worked as an independent consultant and a writer.

In 1950 he went on to Italy, where he completed the work he had begun at WASAG for the Italian Navy. In 1953 he returned to Feucht to publish his book Menschen im Weltraum (Man in Space), in which he described his ideas for a space-based reflecting telescope, a space station, an electric spaceship, and space suits.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Oberth offered his opinions regarding unidentified flying objects; he was a supporter of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. For example, in an article in The American Weekly, October 24, 1954, he stated: "It is my thesis that flying saucers are real and that they are space ships from another solar system. I think that they possibly are manned by intelligent observers who are members of a race that may have been investigating our earth for centuries..." ^[6]

Oberth eventually came to work for his ex-student von Braun, developing space rockets in Huntsville, Alabama in the United States (see also List of German rocket scientists in the United States). Among other things, Oberth was involved in writing a study, The Development of Space Technology in the Next Ten Years. In 1958 Hermann was back in Feucht, where he published his ideas on a lunar exploration vehicle, a "lunar catapult", and on "muffled" helicopters and airplanes. In 1960, in the United States again, he went to work for Convair as a technical consultant on the Atlas rocket. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

[edit] Later life

Hermann Oberth retired in 1962 at the age of 68. From 1965 to 1967 he was a member of the far right National Democratic Party. In July 1969, he returned to the US to witness the launch of the Saturn V rocket that carried the Apollo 11 crew on the first landing mission to the Moon.^[7]

The 1973 energy crisis inspired Oberth to look at alternative energy sources, including a plan for a wind power station that could utilize the jet stream. However, his main interest in retirement was to turn to more abstract philosophical questions. Most notable among his several books from this period is Primer For Those Who Would Govern.

Oberth died in Nuremberg, on December 28, 1989.^{[2] [8]}

[edit] Legacy

Oberth is memorialized by the Hermann Oberth Space Travel Museum in Feucht, and by the Hermann Oberth Society, which brings together scientists, researchers and astronauts from East and West in order to carry on his work in rocketry and space exploration.

Also, a crater on the Moon was named after him (see Oberth (crater)).

The Oberth effect is named after him.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock featured an Oberth-class starship in his honor: this class was subsequently used in various episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa features Hermann Oberth as the "teacher" of the films protagonist, Edward Elric. Oberth is also mentioned in the last episode of Fullmetal Alchemist. In that episode Edward has heard of a great scientist, named Oberth, with curious theories. The last moments of the series are Edward on a train to meet Oberth; determined to study rocketry with him.

In Hideo Kojima's space adventure game, Policenauts, there is an extravehicular mobility suit called the Oberth.

Technorati Profile

Technorati Profile

Pocket
Mufon

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET

http://louis-j-sheehan.com