The Countdown

Everyone recognizes the countdown. Even if you don't speak the language being used, you know from the deliberate and measured cadence that something important is going to happen shortly. But did you know that the countdown wasn't invented by a rocketeer?

In the 1929 German movie Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon), film director Fritz Lang* needed a way to increase the drama of a scene leading up to the takeoff of the rocket ship. He came up with the idea of having one of the main characters counting down the last minute before the launch as the tension built.

It was prescient, as the countdown became a valuable tool when real rocketry became a complex and precisely timed exercise.

When asked in an interview if he got the idea from the rocket club VfR**, Lang answered that the they did nothing special when launching a rocket; someone walked up, lit the fuse and then ran like hell.

*Lang also directed the silent classic Metropolis in 1926.

** The VfR - Verein fur Raumschiffarhrt (Society for Space Travel) was a popular German rocketry club whose members included a young Wernher Von Braun, physicist Hermann Oberth, and science author Willy Ley. The group attracted the interest of the German military and with their support and encouragement developed much of the basic technology that eventually culminated in the V2.

Source: Spaceship Handbook, by Jack Hagerty.

Posted by Ted at January 6, 2004 06:57 AM | TrackBack