The First Countdown

Cafe Society
1

I remember reading a long time ago, perhaps in a biography of Werner Van Braun, that the concept of a countdown before the launching of a rocket came not from rocket science but from a movie. As I remember it, a movie director in the early days of talkies came up with the idea as a way to build suspense before his climax, which was the launching of a rocketship. All of the early rocket scientists saw this movie and thought it was a smashing idea, and thus the countdown was born. I did a little poking around on the web and came up dry. I seemed to remember that Rocketship XM was the movie in question, but IMDB says that one came out in 1950, which makes it too late to be the originator of the countdown.

Has all of that crack I’ve been smoking led to a narco-psychotic delusion? Did the concept of the countdown really originate in the movies? If so, what was the movie and who was the director?

Thanks, in advance, for the use of your brains.

2

The first “count down” was actually a “count-up” in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (They startede at zero and went up tom I think, 10).

The first example of a “count down” I know of is in the Fritz Lang film Die Frau im Mond (“Woman in the Moon”), for which Hermann Oberth was the technical advisor. If you haven’t seen this film, you should. It looks as if the Germans made the first Moon shot in the 1930s and just filmed the result. Impressive as heck. Unfortunately, the film is ruined by some scientific absurdities later on.

This is undoubtedly the film von Braun is referring to.

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Thank you, Cal. You are my Short Duration Personal Savior!