Last week we provided some coverage of the fact that the Armstrong Air & Space Museum was displaying an Amazing Stories (Frank R. Paul) cover in its foyer, our request that they update their notices (updating the trademark ownership information of the name Amazing Stories) and about how cool we thought it was that a museum dedicated to the first person to walk on the Lunar surface (Neil Armstrong, in case you happened to have missed all of the 50th Anniversary of the First Moon Landing coverage) displayed and recognized science fiction’s contribution to the popularization of space flight.
We came to the conclusion that this was why the museum chose to display an SF’s magazine’s cover because curators at the Ohio History Connection (which apparently over-sees the Armstrong Air & Space Museum) told us so.
They’re pretty keen on their native son’s museum – Armstrong and his museum are getting a bit of attention these days (they have every right to be) – enough so to have sent us along some additional thinking on the subject of the intersection of Science Fiction and actual, real (yes, they did land on the Moon!) spaceflight.
Greg Brown, who heads up public programming for the museum, sent the following to Eric Feingold, who is the curator at the Ohio History Connection, who was kind enough to forward it to us and grant permission to post it:
Regarding the magazine cover, in our entry way as visitors begin their journey we show them two groups of people: the dreamers and the inventors or creators of space flight. The dreamers, those that shared their visions of exploring other worlds before it was possible to do so, excited the public. HG Wells and Jules Verne were just two such dreamers whose books and short stories spurred many people to think about the notion of space flight prior to the turn of the 20th Century. Pulp magazines like Amazing Stories fanned the flames of curiosity in the early 20th Century. So Amazing Stories and other media were instrumental in spreading the exciting possibilities of space travel in print to many fascinated people, especially in Europe and America.
Well, we here did kind of know that already but, it sure is nice to get acknowledgement from the professionals, especially now that we’re a month less-a-day away from the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Saturn 5 that would send Apollo 11 to the Moon!
This story began with Steven H Silver’s visit to the Armstrong Air & Space Museum in Wapakoneta, OH. You can read his coverare here.
The cover in question –
