Page 8 - Demo

Rocket Mail of the WorldSchemers and DreamersBetween 1910 and 1916, the United States Post Office Department sponsored experimental Pioneer Air Mail flights across the country. These demonstration flights were held at numerous locations where a pilot would take off with a bag of mail, circle the airfield, then land, without having traveled very far. On occasion, a mailbag might be flown a few miles away, then tossed out near a Post Office. Most Rocket Mail flights have also been billed as demonstration or experimental flights, and they rarely traveled any great distance. But there are significant differences%u2014Pioneer Air Mail was officially sanctioned by the government, and it was soon followed by real Air Mail. With Rocket Mail, demonstration flights continued for decades, they never led to a permanent mail-delivery service, and they were rarely sponsored by a government entity. From its beginnings, rocketeers have understood that philatelists would be interested in mail flown by rockets. But does Rocket Mail qualify as real mail? Or was it a stunt, designed primarily to sell covers and cards to philatelists? Actually, many of the early rocketeers were philatelists themselves%u2014one of the most notable being Stephen H. Smith of India. Like Reinhold Tiling, Smith was a man of vision who did more than simply send mail into the air using rockets. He also tested different types of rocket fuels and rocket designs, and conducted many practical experiments to understand the potential of rocket power as a means transport. While there were certainly other far-sighted visionaries like Smith and Tiling whose rocket flights had a genuine scientific purpose, there were also a fair number of opportunists who performed no actual experiments, and funded very simple flights exclusively by selling rocket-flown mail to philatelists. In fact, creating postal souvenirs as soon as their rockets left the ground, turned out to be a good way to raise money. For example, with no engineering or scientific background, a Dutchman, Karel Roberti, never even made his own rockets. Instead, he used readily available fireworks from a nearby manufacturer for his launches. His souvenir mail was sold at exorbitant prices by a renowned stamp-dealer, Gerald Thoolen, who in 1935 was branded as a conman by Postcard depicting the rocket Gerhard Zucker demonstrated to Nazi officials in 1933.