In 1922 the University of Heidelberg rejected Hermann Oberth’s doctoral dissertation on space travel. According to German Wikipedia, the reason was that there was no recognized expert on the subject. Oberth submitted the same manuscript as a diploma thesis in Klausenburg, today Cluj in Romania, and passed the state examination in 1923. In the same year the Munich publisher Oldenbourg printed it. Oberth had to pay the printing costs himself. The book became a success. From 1923 to 1938, with interruptions, he worked as a secondary school teacher in Transylvania.
science
Measuring Before Flying
From 1874 Otto Lilienthal and his brother Gustav made systematic measurements of the lift on flat and curved surfaces. They used a rotating apparatus they had built themselves. In 1889 Otto Lilienthal published his book Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst, Bird Flight as the Basis of Aviation. Today it is regarded as the most important publication on flight technology of the 19th century. After jumps from a springboard in his garden, he began real gliding flights only in the spring of 1891, from a disused sand pit near Derwitz in Brandenburg. On 9 August 1896 he crashed from a height of about 15 meters, and he died the next day.
His grave carries the sentence Opfer müssen gebracht werden, sacrifices must be made. It is often quoted as his last words. But the inscription was added only in 1940, and German Wikipedia considers it unlikely that these were his last words.
The Doctor, the Teacher and the Editor
In June 1841 the physician Julius Robert Mayer sent a paper on the conservation of energy to Johann Christian Poggendorff. Poggendorff edited the Annalen der Physik und Chemie, a major German journal of physics. He ignored the manuscript. It also contained basic errors in physics. A revised version appeared in 1842 in a journal of chemistry. Physicists of the time rejected Mayer’s principle and doubted his competence in questions of physics. A standard German biography calls him ein Außenseiter in der Wissenschaft, an outsider in science. In 1871 the Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal.
Philipp Reis was a schoolteacher in Friedrichsdorf near Frankfurt. In 1860 the same journal refused to print his paper on the telephone. A later article about his invention also found no response, because he had no scientific reputation. In 1864 Reis demonstrated his telephone to the assembly of German natural scientists in Giessen. Now the journal had to take notice of him. This time Reis declined to write an article for it.
The Researchers of Tomorrow
On 19 December 1965 Henri Nannen, the editor-in-chief of the magazine stern, called for the first round of a new competition, Jugend forscht, Youth Researches. His motto was Wir suchen die Forscher von morgen! We are looking for the researchers of tomorrow. Young people up to the age of 21 can take part. Today more than 10,000 participate each year, with more than 5,000 projects. By 2015 more than 236,000 young researchers had taken part. The national winners receive a prize from the Federal President for the most exceptional work and a prize from the Federal Chancellor for the most original work.
The Calendar Without the Pope’s Name
In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced a reformed calendar. The Protestant territories of the Holy Roman Empire refused it, because the reform came from the Pope. They adopted it only in 1700, after a decision of their own assembly, the Corpus Evangelicorum. To avoid the Pope’s name, they called it the Verbesserter Reichskalender, the improved imperial calendar. In the Empire, 18 February 1700 was followed directly by 1 March 1700. The calculation of the date of Easter remained different for more than 70 years.
The Wednesday Society
The Berlin Mittwochsgesellschaft, the Wednesday Society, was officially founded on 19 January 1863. It called itself a freie Gesellschaft zur wissenschaftlichen Unterhaltung, a free society for scholarly conversation. It had 16 members, at most 17, each a leading expert in his field, and it met every second Wednesday. Each member invited the others to his home twice a year and gave a lecture, which the group then discussed. In its last years its members included Ferdinand Sauerbruch, Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Beck. After the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, Beck was shot on 21 July without trial. The society’s last session, the 1,056th, took place on Wednesday 26 July 1944, at the home of Paul Fechter.
A Hundred Authors Against Einstein
In 1931 a pamphlet appeared in Leipzig under the title Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein, A Hundred Authors Against Einstein. The physicist Hans Reichenbach called it an astonishing accumulation of naive errors. Einstein’s reply is often quoted: if he were wrong, a single author would have been enough to refute him. The quotation collection The Ultimate Quotable Einstein gives as its source Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, more than fifty years later.
Luhmann’s Card Index
The sociologist Niklas Luhmann kept a card index from the early 1950s into the 1990s. It grew to about 90,000 slips of paper. He described it as a partner in communication. Meine Produktivität ist im wesentlichen aus dem Zettelkasten-System zu erklären, he said: “My productivity can essentially be explained by the card index system.” Bielefeld University acquired his papers in 2011, and in 2019 the card index went online.
Operation Osoaviakhim
In the early morning of 22 October 1946, Soviet officers, each with an interpreter and an armed soldier, went to the homes of selected German specialists in the Soviet zone of occupation and took them to the Soviet Union. German Wikipedia gives more than 2,500 specialists. Most worked in aviation and rocketry, nuclear research, chemistry and optics. Almost 300 of them were specialists in optics and glass. The operation served to secure the transfer of know-how. Many family members were taken with them. Sources give different totals.
The MP3 Licenses
The MP3 format for compressed music was developed largely at the Fraunhofer Society. From 1998 until April 2017, Fraunhofer and its partner Thomson charged license fees for hardware and software that made or played MP3 files. Fraunhofer ended its licensing program on 23 April 2017.