Background
Willy Ley was born on October 2, 1906 in Berlin, Germany. He was the son of Julius Otto Ley, a wine merchant, and Frida May, whose family was prominent in the hierarchy of the German Lutheran church.
(An informal history of astronomy from Babylon to the Spac...)
An informal history of astronomy from Babylon to the Space Age.
https://www.amazon.com/Watchers-skies-informal-history-astronomy/dp/B0006AX042?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0006AX042
(The Conquest of Space is a 1949 speculative science book ...)
The Conquest of Space is a 1949 speculative science book illustrated by Chesley Bonestell and written by Willy Ley. The book contains a portfolio of paintings by Bonestell depicting the possible future exploration of the solar system with explanatory text by Ley.
https://www.amazon.com/Conquest-Space-Greatest-Adventure-Scientific/dp/0670237361?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0670237361
(Full title: The Lungfish, the Dodo, & and Unicorn, an Exc...)
Full title: The Lungfish, the Dodo, & and Unicorn, an Excursion into Romantic Zoology. By Willy Ley, Viking Press, 1948 (Sept), revised edition. 361 pages. No DJ. Description; orange boards with gold titles to the spine only, top edge stained yellow, unicorn blind embossed on front board, 38 illustrations by Olga Ley and others uncredited.
https://www.amazon.com/Lungfish-Unicorn-Excursion-Romantic-Zoology/dp/B0007DO3CQ?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007DO3CQ
Willy Ley was born on October 2, 1906 in Berlin, Germany. He was the son of Julius Otto Ley, a wine merchant, and Frida May, whose family was prominent in the hierarchy of the German Lutheran church.
Ley attended public schools in Berlin and, in high school, developed a lifelong interest in science and its history. Intermittently between 1920 and 1926, he satisfied this interest by attending the University of Berlin and the University of Konigsberg, specializing in paleontology, astronomy, zoology, and physics.
The inflation that followed World War I in Germany and the impact of Hermann Oberth's work on space travel combined to prompt Ley to abandon his plans for a career in geology and embark instead on investigations into space travel. He submitted articles on scientific subjects regularly to German magazines and, in 1926, published his first book, Die Fahrt ins Weltall ("Trip to Space"), which dealt with rocket ships. In 1927 he became a founding member of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Travel), which came to include Reinhold Tiling, the inventor of the winged rocket, and Wernher von Braun, who headed the project that created the German V-2 rocket and who later assisted in American rocket programs.
Ley was vice-president of the Society for Space Travel from 1928 until the society's dissolution by the Nazis in 1933. During this period Ley collaborated with the motion-picture director Fritz Lang on several science-fiction films, including Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1928), edited Die Moglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt (The Possibility of Interplanetary Travel, 1928), and published a biography of the sixteenth-century naturalist Konrad Gesner, Konrad Gesner: Leben und Werk (1929), and an outline history of rockets, Grundriss einer Geschichte der Rakete (1932).
In 1935, suspecting that he was in trouble with the Gestapo, Ley left Germany for England. On February 21, at the invitation of the American Interplanetary Society, which had put up his entry bond, he arrived in New York City and for the next six months lived with G. Edward Pendray, who headed the newly renamed American Rocket Society. Finding America uninterested in rocket theory, Ley began writing articles on zoology and other subjects for Coronet, Natural History, Frontiers, Zoo, Fauna, and Esquire. In May 1940 he joined the New York newspaper PM as a science editor and was encouraged to publish his first book in English, Bombs and Bombing: What Every Civilian Should Know (1941). Also in 1941 he published The Days of Creation and his first American popular success, The Lungfish and the Unicorn. The latter became a Scientific Book Club selection and subsequently underwent revision and reprintings as The Lungfish, the Dodo, and the Unicorn (1948). Well researched and written in a readable journalistic style, the book blends accounts and drawings of mythological and extinct animals with "living fossils" based on sound zoological principles.
Shells and Shooting followed in 1942, and in May 1944, Ley issued Rockets: The Future of Travel Beyond the Stratosphere, dealing with Russian and German developments. It underwent revision and reprinting as Rockets and Space Travel (1948), Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel (1951), and Rockets, Missiles, and Men in Space (1968). In March 1944, Ley became an American citizen, and later that year he left PM for the Burke Aircraft Corporation in Atlanta, Georgia. When Burke Aircraft reorganized into the Washington Institute of Technology at College Park, Maryland, Ley remained director of engineering. The assault of the first V-2 rockets on London in November 1944 had created a demand for Ley's knowledge by arms manufacturers as well as the reading public.
In 1945 the American Museum of Natural History issued Ley's Inside the Atom, to satisfy an interest in atoms generated by the first atomic bombs. By the end of 1947, Ley had left the Washington Institute of Technology to become a consultant to the office of technical services of the United States Department of Commerce. Believing that the average reader should understand the ideas, achievements, and future of space science, Ley published The Conquest of Space (1949). In the early 1950's, Ley also began public lectures on space travel at New York's Hayden Planetarium, and from 1950 to 1955 he served as technical adviser on the television program "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. " Later he served the same role for two Walt Disney programs, "Man in Space" (1955) and "Man and the Moon" (1956). From 1959 to 1961 he was a part-time professor of science at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey.
Ley also embarked on a new series of science books, Dragons in Amber: Further Adventures of a Romantic Naturalist (1951), Engineers' Dreams (1954), Salamanders and Other Wonders (1955), Satellites, Rockets, and Outer Space (1958), and Exotic Zoology (1959). He collaborated with Wernher von Braun and others on Conquest of the Moon (1953); with von Braun on The Exploration of Mars (1956) and Start in dem Weltraum (Takeoff into Outer Space, 1958); and with others on such projects as Across the Space Frontier (1952), Mystery of Other Worlds, Revealed (1953), and The Complete Book of Satellites and Outer Space (1957). During the 1950's, Ley completed the Adventures in Space series for children: Man-Made Satellites (1957), Space Pilots (1958), Space Stations (1958), and Space Travel (1958). In the next decade, he wrote Rockets (1960), Planets (1961), Watchers of the Skies (1963), Ballistics (1964), Beyond the Solar System (1964), Missiles, Moonprobes, and Megaparsecs (1964), Our Work in Space (1964), Ranger to the Moon (1965), Fire (1966), and Mariner IV to Mars (1966). These were followed by The Borders of Mathematics (1967), For Your Information: On Earth and in the Sky (1967), Dawn of Zoology (1968), The Discovery of the Elements (1968), Inside the Orbit of the Earth (1968), The Meteorite Craters (1968), Another Look at Atlantis, and Fifteen Other Essays (1969), Events in Space (1969), Visitors from Afar: The Comets (1969), and The Drifting of the Continents (1969). Gas Giants: The Largest Planets (1970) and Worlds of the Past (1971) appeared after his death in New York City.
(The Conquest of Space is a 1949 speculative science book ...)
(Full title: The Lungfish, the Dodo, & and Unicorn, an Exc...)
(An informal history of astronomy from Babylon to the Spac...)
(History; Science; Zoology)
(the valley of the Jordan)
Ley's aim was to stimulate the imagination by presenting mysteries and oddities whose explanations provided possibilities and sound approaches. He believed that scientific knowledge would ultimately be used for good, that ignorance was the real villain.
While working on PM, Ley met a Russian-born ballet dancer, Olga Feldman, who wrote the newspaper's column on physical fitness. On December 24, 1941, they were married; they had two children.