[ExI] Tsiolkovsky

[David Lubkin]

Does anyone have any idea how Tsiolkovsky's famous line in a 1911
letter ("A planet is the cradle of mind, but one cannot live in a cradle
forever.") got from Russian to Western sf writers and space enthusiasts?
Goddard might have read it but I can't see him quoting it. Arthur Clarke
wrote that Tsiolkovsky wasn't widely known outside the USSR until the
Thirties. Perhaps through Hermann Oberth or Willy Ley?

The earliest quotations I have in my library are from 1968 but surely he
was quoted long before that. The best-known early pro-space groups
were all founded circa the Thirties — Verein für Raumschiffahrt (1927),
American Interplanetary Society (1930), and the British Interplanetary
Society (1933).


-- David.