  Herman Potocnik Prominent Istrians |
Herman Potocnik Prominent Istrians |
 erman Potocnik (pseudonym
Hermann Noordung) was born on December
12, 1892 in Pula, then part of Austria, now Croatia.His father Jo¾ef was born in 1841 in the village of Razbor near Slovenj Gradec, now in Slovenia. At the time of Herman's birth he served as a doctor and high navy officer in the Austro-Hungarian navy harbour of Pola, retiring as a general. His mother Minka Kokosinek was born February 7, 1854 in Vitanje, near Maribor. She was a descendant of Czech immigrants, manufacturers of melting-pots for glass and a daughter of a well known wine merchant and a councillor Jo¾ef Koko¹inek from Maribor. |
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rocket engineer born in Pula |
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Herman's father died in 1894 and so his widow moved with her four children to Maribor (at that time also officially named Marburg). Herman had two brothers Adolf and Gustav (who were both navy officers), and a sister Franci. In Maribor, Potocnik attended primary school. Afterwards, he went to the military secondary schools in Fischau and Hranice (Mährisch-Weißkirchen) in Moravia. He had an uncle Heinrich who was a major general and who had probably enabled Potocnik's schooling at Austrian military schools. ] From 1910 to 1913 Herman studied at the technical military academy in Mödling in Lower Austria (Niederösterreich) near Vienna, and graduated as an engineers second lieutenant. His specialization was building of railways and bridges, structures which were later destroyed with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Characterized as both strong-willed and confident, serious and ambitious, he served in a railway corps during the First World War in Galicia, Serbia and Bosnia. In 1915, he was promoted to the rank of a first lieutenant (Oberleutnant) and saw out the end of the war on the Southwestern front. He was assigned to the Soèa (Isonzo) River front in northern Italy and present-day Slovenia, the stage of a major military operations of the war (The Isonzo Front) which took the lives of over 500,000 human lives on both Italian and Austrian sides. There he experienced the breakthrough of the Austrian army to the Piave River in Italy where, in June 1918, the Austro-Hungarian army mounted its final offensive of the war and lost. Herman Potocnik's sole book, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketenmotor (The Problem of Space Travel - The Rocket Motor), was published in 1928 in Berlin, Germany under a pen name, Hermann Noordung. A publisher Richard Carl Schmidt printed the year 1929 as a publishing date, probably from a pure businesslike motives so this date remained. The book has 188 pages and included 100 illustrations done by Potocnik. It was translated into Russian at the beginning of 1935 in Moscow. In 1984 Vojko Kogej found a German reprint of this book from 1938 in Berlin Staatsbibliothek in DDR among more than 6 million fascicles. The Slovene translation came out in 1986 and was published by Slovenska matica. The English version was published in 1995 by NASA. In 1999 Kogej found a Russian edition at the Russian State Library in Moscow. In his book, Potocnik spread a plan for a breakthrough into space and for a residence of mankind in it, conceiving a space station which consisted of up to three modules: the "Wohnrad" (Inhabitable or Habitat Wheel), the power station and the observatory. The modules would be connected by cables. The inhabitable wheel has the form of a giant wheel and rotates to simulate gravity in the living areas. On top of the wheel there would be parabolic mirrors mounted to concentrate the solar radiation for the power supply through a heat engine power station. Potocnik worked out all the necessary equipment for his space station in great detail. A very similar concept of a space station design has been proposed by Werner von Braun in 1953. Potocnik also calculated the geostationary
orbit the space station. He describes how a satellite could be positioned
such to be visible all day long from a very spot on Earth, namely about 36,000
kilometers above the equator. Today satellites in this geostationary orbit play
an important role for telecommunications and weather forecasting.
Potocnik died at the age of 36 in Vienna, Austria on August 27, 1929 and was buried there. An obituary notice about his death was printed in one Maribor daily newspaper, mentioning his ranks (engineers and captain), his illness, and nothing about his work about space. One street in Graz now bears his name. On November 27, 1992, a commemorative stamp was issued by two countries, Austria and Slovenia, that claim Herman Potocnik as their own, and these honor the 100th anniversary of his birth. [See Postage Stamps 1992.] On September 9 and 10, 1999, the First International Memorial Symposium about his life and work was held at the University of Maribor, celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first printing of his famous book. Herman Potocnik is remembered today as a pioneer of astronautics and cosmonautics. The book:
See also: Bibliography:
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This page is compliments of Marisa Ciceran Created: Tuesday, March
25, 2003; Last Updated:
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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Having reached the rank of captain, Potocnik
retired in 1919 because of the tuberculosis which he
had contracted during the war. He then went to study at the
mechanical engineering department of the University of Technology in
Vienna. He graduated in 1925 as an engineer with the title of
"specialist in rocket technology" upon completion
of his engineering and electro-technical studies. The title
was largely the result of his co-operation with the university association
for aeronautic technique which included a rocket science department. Due to
his illness,
he did not take a job or marry. Instead, he stayed with his brother Adolf in Vienna and devoted himself entirely
to the problems of rocket and space technology and to writing a book. Living on the verge of poverty while doing this, his illness progressed quickly. He wrote his book literally on his death bed, living only to see it published and dying the same year.
