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brooklynite

(94,728 posts) Tue Jul 21, 2020, 08:11 AM Jul 2020

Nearly 100 years ago, a man tried to blast off to Venus. Now the hunt for his rocket is on.

Washington Post

The day Robert Condit set fire to a hunk of metal filled with 50 gallons of gasoline, it was supposed to be only a test. The hope was that the bullet-nosed contraption that he’d designed and built with the help of two brothers, Harry and Sterling Uhler, would find the propulsion necessary to leave the pockmarked macadam of a city street. It was 1927, a warm August afternoon. The kind of blue-sky day that inspires trouble in bored kids, but these were three grown men, in their 30s, standing on a street in Hampden, a neighborhood just north of downtown Baltimore.

The 24-foot-tall rocket, an amalgamation of angle iron, scrap materials and amateur engineering was meant to eventually blast Condit out of Earth’s atmosphere and to the planet Venus. Charles Lindbergh had managed the width of the Atlantic Ocean in a monoplane earlier that year, and flying great distances was no longer a daydream. Why not aim for the stars?

“If a man like Lindbergh had the courage to lead the way at the risk of his life, we thought, other men should have the courage to follow,” Harry Uhler wrote in a 1969 article for the Baltimore Sun Magazine about their venture. The Uhler brothers had invested their money and eight months of their spare time welding and tinkering inside a two-car garage on Morling Avenue, following plans for a piloted craft that Condit had conceived. Harry and Sterling both worked with their hands for a living. They referred to Condit, who had attended high school at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, as the mathematical wizard. Condit, for his part, afforded himself a wide range of professional titles, claiming to be an engineer, a chemist, a professor and the all-encompassing inventor. Now they were ready to see if what they’d labored to create would catch air. Condit speculated to the Uhlers that the fuel might propel him a quarter of a mile up that day. He had a silk parachute stashed inside the nose to land. If all went well, Condit would later aim for Venus.

A publicity photo from 1928 shows inventor Robert Condit and his rocket. (Courtesy of Urban Goat Films)
Word had leaked that three men were testing a rocket off a sidewalk, and a crowd began to gather, among them the Uhlers’ nonplussed wives. Condit unscrewed the metal nose and climbed inside. He flipped a switch to begin his journey.