Willy Ley

The mid-twentieth-century science popularizer Willy Ley “defies classification,” writes Jared S. Buss at the start of this new biography (p. 1). To some a scientist, to others an engineer, historian, or prophet, he transcended categories in a life that stretched from interwar Germany to Cold War America. Above all, Buss claims, Ley was a “modern romantic” who “embraced wonder, awe, and the mysteries of nature” but also “sought to unmask, conquer, and master nature” (p. 2). This combination, Buss, claims, demonstrates the contradictory nature of a modernity simultaneously disenchanted and enchanted, committed to scientific empiricism but also searching for imagination and spiritualism. Ley, whose works include titles such as The Lungfish and the Unicorn (1941) and Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space (originally published as Rockets in 1944 and went through several editions and title changes through 1968), well represents the category. Rooting Ley's search for enchantment in a childhood obsession with the works of Jules Verne and Berlin's Museum of Natural History, Buss shows how Ley's scientific interests were thwarted by limited financial resources that prevented him from earning the legitimacy of an academic degree. Yet, Ley had a knack for translating complicated ideas into engaging prose, a skill he demonstrated in a book on rocketry that introduced him to members of the German Rocket Society and foreign scholars. Fearing for his life due to these international connections, Ley immigrated to America in 1935 where he attempted to teach the public about the wonders of rocketry—occasionally by designing and exhibiting rockets himself. With the start of the Cold War and space race, Ley joined his friend Wernher von Braun as a key public face of rocketry who brought visions of space exploration to mass audiences. Even as he focused on rocketry, however, Ley continued to write popular works of zoology and, increasingly, on the history of science that found similarly large audiences in the 1950s. The institutionalization of history of science in the 1960s, however, left little room for amateurs such as Ley, whose celebratory interest in personalities and grand narratives separated him from an increasingly critical field. Despite Ley's early Cold War prominence, at his death in 1969 just a few weeks before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the amateur scientist was largely ignored outside of his fellow popularizers

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Empire · Epistemology · German · Legitimacy · Literature · Political science · Politics · Romance · Wonder · Classics · History · History and Developments in Astronomy · Law · Philosophy · Space exploration and regulation · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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