Word: valier
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Latest and most spectacular of all Opel experiments is the low, winged rocket car. Inventor Valier, Builder Sanders, tried it secretly last April over the Opel tracks in Munich. But in June, young Fritz von Opel, sporting son of a gruff Geheimrat, sent it at a speed of 156 miles per hour over railroad tracks near Hanover. Nine-foot streaks of flame from the exploding rockets trailed its deafening roar. A solitary cat, its only passenger, trembled. Suddenly it skipped the track; the remaining rockets blew up; cat and car burst into a thousand blazing fragments. Spectators cried, "Devil...
Herr von Opel told them more about rocketing. The perfecters of the idea were two German inventors named Valier and Sander. They had rocketed a racing car (without a driver) as high as 430 m. p. h., he said. They thought, of course, that they could revolutionize aerial locomotion. In the Raab-Katzenstein works at Cassel, they were completing a rocket-drive airplane, the Grasimiecke ("Garden Warbler"). Only a moderate 125 m. p. h. would be attempted with this craft. Later airplanes would be built to rocket beyond the highest flights of motored airplanes, first with laboratory animals aboard...
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