Hermann Oberth - Early Life

Early Life

Oberth was born to a Transylvanian Saxon family in Sibiu (German: Hermannstadt, Hungarian: Nagyszeben), Austria-Hungary (today Romania). By his own account and that of many others, around the age of 11 years old, Oberth became fascinated with the field in which he was to make his mark through reading the writings of Jules Verne, especially From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, re-reading them to the point of memorization. Influenced by Verne's books and ideas, Oberth constructed his first model rocket as a school student at the age of 14. In his youthful experiments, he arrived independently at the concept of the multistage rocket, but he lacked then the resources to pursue his idea on any but a pencil-and-paper level.

In 1912, Oberth began the study of medicine in Munich, Germany, but at the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the Imperial German Army, assigned to an infantry battalion, and sent to the Eastern Front against Russia. In 1915, Oberth was moved into a medical unit at a hospital in Sighisoara, Transylvania, in Austria-Hungary (today Romania). There he found the spare time to conduct a series of experiments concerning weightlessness, and later resumed his rocketry designs. By 1917, he showed how far his studies had reached by firing a rocket with liquid propellant in a demonstration to ], the Prussian Minister of War.

On July 6, 1918, Oberth married Mathilde Hummel, with whom he had four children. Among these were a son who died as a soldier in World War II, and a daughter who also died during the war when there was an accidental explosion at a liquid oxygen plant where she was in August 1944. In 1919, Oberth once again moved to Germany, this time to study physics, initially in Munich and later in Göttingen.

In 1922, Oberth's proposed doctoral dissertation on rocket science was rejected as "utopian". He next had his 92-page work published privately in June 1923 as the somewhat controversial book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("By Rocket into Planetary Space"). By 1929, Oberth had expanded this work to a 429-page book titled Wege zur Raumschiffahrt ("Ways to Spaceflight"). Oberth commented later that he made the deliberate choice not to write another doctoral dissertation. He wrote, "I refrained from writing another one, thinking to myself: Never mind, I will prove that I am able to become a greater scientist than some of you, even without the title of Doctor." Oberth criticized the German system of education, saying "Our educational system is like an automobile which has strong rear lights, brightly illuminating the past. But looking forward, things are barely discernible." Hermann Oberth was finally awarded his doctorate in physics with the same rocketry paper that he had written before, by the University, Cluj, Romania, under professor Augustin Maior, on May 23, 1923.

Oberth became a member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR) - the "Spaceflight Society" – an amateur rocketry group that had taken great inspiration from his book, and Oberth acted as something of a mentor to the enthusiasts who joined the Society. Oberth lacked the opportunities to work or to teach at the college or university level, as did many well-educated experts in the physical sciences and engineering in the time period of the 1920s through the 1930s – with the situation becoming much worse during the worldwide Great Depression that started in 1929. Therefore, from 1924 through 1938, Oberth supported himself and his family by teaching physics and mathematics at the Stephan Ludwig Roth High School in Mediaş, Romania.