Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky: The Deaf Schoolteacher Who Mapped Space

In May 1903, a provincial mathematics teacher in the Russian town of Kaluga published a paper calculating that a vehicle would need to reach roughly 8,000 metres a second to enter orbit around the Earth, and proposing liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as the fuel to get it there. The Wright brothers had not yet flown. The man who did the arithmetic had been almost entirely deaf since childhood, had left school at fourteen, and had never held a university post in his life.

A Boy Cut Off From Sound

He was born on 17 September 1857 in Izhevskoye, in what is now Ryazan Oblast, one of a very large family — by one account eighteen children. His father, Makary Edward Erazm Ciołkowski, was a Polish Roman Catholic forester who had moved to Russia; his mother, Maria Ivanovna Yumasheva, was Russian Orthodox with mixed Volga Tatar and Russian ancestry.

Scarlet fever at nine or ten took his hearing. It also took his schooling: deafness barred him from the ordinary elementary classroom, and his mother's death when he was thirteen removed the person most able to compensate. He left formal education at fourteen and read instead, teaching himself mathematics and physics out of books. By his teens he was already turning over in his mind the question of whether a human being could leave the planet.

Three Years in a Moscow Library

Between 1873 and 1876 he was in Moscow, effectively living in its libraries. The librarian at one of them was Nikolai Fyodorov, the strange and formidable prophet of Russian cosmism, whose followers held that humanity's destiny was to conquer death and take possession of the universe. Tsiolkovsky absorbed the idea whole and never let go of it: he came to believe that colonising space would bring "the perfection of the human species, with immortality and a carefree existence." Jules Verne supplied the imagery; Fyodorov supplied the metaphysics; the deaf young man supplied the equations.

At nineteen his father, alarmed at his prospects, brought him home. He passed the teacher's examination, and in 1879 became a mathematics teacher. He was posted to Borovsk, where he married Varvara Sokolova, and in 1892 moved to Kaluga — a small town at a considerable distance from any centre of learning. He stayed there for the rest of his life, and did the work that made his name there.

The Apartment Wind Tunnel

Denied laboratories, he built one in his flat. In 1897 he constructed what is regarded as Russia's first wind tunnel with an open test section, and worked out experimental methods for using it. By 1900, with a grant from the Academy of Sciences, he was systematically measuring drag on spheres, flat plates, cylinders, cones and other shapes. Nikolay Zhukovsky, the man usually called the father of Russian aerodynamics, was influenced by this work.

From 1892 he had also been designing lighter-than-air craft, and proposed the first all-metal dirigible, publishing the scientific case for a metal-sheathed airship in *A Controllable Metallic Balloon* that same year. He built a model. He appealed to the army's aviation staff for support and was refused; the Russian Physico-Chemical Society also declined to fund him. He paid for the work himself. In 1894 his article on "An Airplane or a Birdlike Flying Machine" described a monoplane with features that would not appear in real aircraft for another fifteen to eighteen years. Russia's scientific establishment gave him, in his own bitter summary, neither money nor moral support.

The Formula

He began studying the mechanics of rocket motion in 1896 and recorded the date of his key derivation as 10 May 1897. What he called the formula of aviation is now known everywhere as the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation: it fixes the relationship between the change in a rocket's velocity, the speed at which it expels its exhaust, and the ratio of its starting mass to its final mass. It is the reason spaceflight is hard. It says, in effect, that going faster costs propellant at a punishing exponential rate, and it still governs the design of every launch vehicle flown.

The equation reached print in May 1903, in *Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices*. That paper is the foundation document of the theory of spaceflight. He had already, in 1895, been struck by the newly built Eiffel Tower into imagining a structure reaching to orbit — the first conception of the space elevator. Over a lifetime he produced more than four hundred works, some ninety of them published pieces on space travel, sketching rockets with steering thrusters, airlocks, space stations, and closed-cycle biological systems to keep colonists alive. In 1929, in *Space Rocket Trains*, he set out the case for multistage rockets, the arrangement that actually got humans off the planet.

His most quoted line, from correspondence in 1911, is the sentence the whole space age has been written under: "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever."

Losses

The century treated him roughly. His son Ignaty killed himself in 1902. A flood in 1908 destroyed accumulated papers. His daughter Lyubov was arrested in 1911 for revolutionary activity. With the outbreak of war he set aeronautics aside for a period and turned to writing about poverty. After the October Revolution the Cheka held him briefly in the Lubyanka. The Soviet state then decided he was an asset: he was elected to the Socialist Academy, retired from teaching in 1920 at sixty-three, and was granted a lifetime pension in 1921. From the mid-1920s the money was steady, and the popularisers Yakov Perelman and Nikolai Rynin turned him into a national figure.

Why Konstantin Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on something quite precise, and it is worth stating narrowly because the vaguer version is worthless. Tsiolkovsky derived the correct physics of rocket-powered spaceflight — the mass-ratio equation, the orbital velocity figure, the necessity of liquid propellants, the necessity of staging — from first principles, in isolation, decades before any hardware existed to test a word of it. He did this deaf, self-taught, unsupported by any institution, and living in a provincial town chosen by his employer rather than by him. His 1894 monoplane and his 1895 space elevator show the same capacity: to reason forward from physical law to a machine nobody had yet needed.

The counter-case is real and should not be waved away. He built nothing that flew. Robert Goddard in America and Hermann Oberth in Germany reached comparable conclusions independently and, in Goddard's case, actually launched liquid-fuelled rockets. Much of Tsiolkovsky's output was philosophical rather than scientific — the panpsychism of *The Will of the Universe* (1928), the conviction that humanity would colonise the Milky Way — and belongs to a mystical tradition rather than to physics. Some of it is simply strange. What survives the scepticism is the mathematics, which was right, and which nobody had done before him. His own claim was modest: "All my life I have dreamed that by my work mankind would at least be advanced a little."

What Came After

He died in Kaluga on 19 September 1935, aged seventy-eight, after surgery for stomach cancer, and left his papers to the Soviet state. Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko — the engineers who would build Sputnik, Vostok and the Soviet lunar effort — had read him as young men and set out to make his designs real. Wernher von Braun worked through German translations of his papers, annotating them heavily.

Kaluga now houses the State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics, named for him. A lunar crater carries his name, and a town in Amur Oblast was renamed Tsiolkovsky. He was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame in 1976 and the International Air & Space Hall of Fame in 1989.

Achievements

• Notable work: Tsiolkovsky rocket equation
• Educated at Vyatka men's gymnasium
• Fields of research: astronautics, ballooning and rocket dynamics