IN APRIL 1930, Pendray (Ed), his wife, Leatrice (Lee), and 10 others—almost all science and science-fiction writers—gathered in a basement Manhattan speakeasy to discuss interplanetary travel over Italian food and Prohibition liquor. The Pendrays’ apartment was on the third floor of the Chelsea brownstone, so when closing time came, they moved upstairs, bringing with them a gallon of red wine. Perched on the “cubist” furniture the Pendrays had built out of packing crates, the group debated how to generate the technology that might one day carry humans to the moon and beyond. The conversation grew increasingly serious, and by the next morning the Pendrays and their guests had founded the American Interplanetary Society, or AIS.

The Pendrays, like their fellow AIS founders, were first and foremost writers. After growing up on homesteads in separate parts of rural Wyoming, Ed and Lee had met at the University of Wyoming. Lee remembered her time in Laramie as a struggle to complete coursework while working her way through school waiting tables, babysitting and doing housework, and selling fudge and handmade shirt collars. But, in the summer session of 1922, she met Ed Pendray. He was the first to graduate and move to New York. In September 1925 he telegrammed Lee:

Lee graduated in 1927 and married Ed, quickly achieving her dream of becoming a writer in New York—first with noted women’s magazine The Delineator and then as a columnist for United Feature Syndicate.

Ed, meanwhile, found a niche in science writing and by 1930 became the Herald Tribune’s science editor. He had read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells as a child; regular exposure to cutting-edge research reignited his fascination with science’s possibilities. As historian Tom Crouch notes in Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers, Robert Goddard’s advances in liquid-fueled rocketry, in particular, bolstered Pendray’s belief that space travel was possible. Pendray and the other AIS members thought that by increasing public interest and creating a scientific journal focused on rocketry they could inspire more engineers and scientists to develop the technology needed to make spaceflight a reality.

Pendray went from scientist to scientist to drum up interest. During one memorable visit to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor of NASA), as he later told an audience at Boston University, the head of the agency tried to tamp down Pendray’s enthusiasm for rockets by showing the young writer that it was mathematically impossible to fly faster than the speed of sound.

In the spring of 1931, having faced repeated rejection from U.S. engineers and scientists, the Pendrays traveled to Europe. Their visit to Germany was especially inspiring. They were hosted by Willy Ley, cofounder of the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (popularly known as the German Rocket Society), and met a 19-year-old space enthusiast named Wernher von Braun. They saw the society’s rockets and witnessed a test-run of an operational liquid-fuel engine.

“They were crude . . . but they worked!” Pendray later recalled. “Until that moment I have never quite been able to visualize how a spaceship would fly.” As Crouch recounts, the couple spent the night sketching plans with their new colleagues on a beer hall tablecloth.

The Pendrays returned to the United States brimming with ideas for AIS’s first experimental rocket. They and fellow member Hugh Franklin Pierce designed and constructed the rocket, largely following the German designs. The construction took place in the Pendrays’ kitchen and in a machine shop Pierce built in his apartment building’s basement. Pierce did most of the metalwork, transforming a cocktail shaker into the jacket of the water-cooled motor and a small saucepan into the rocket’s nose, which would open “like flower petals,” as Lee described it, releasing the parachute she had constructed to carry the nose safely back to earth.

But where could this first flight take place? Not Manhattan. According to Crouch, an AIS member’s uncle lent them use of a farm in Lambertville, New Jersey, where members of the AIS Experimental Committee spent several weekends digging trenches, building a 14-foot launch tower, and preparing for launch. Finally, in November 1931, they were ready. The rocket, named AIS 1, had a successful motor test with 60 pounds of thrust but was catastrophically dropped before it could be launched.

Bernard Smith, a 22-year-old handyman, saw an advertisement for AIS 1’s postmortem meeting and soon found himself both a houseguest of the Pendrays at their new home in suburban Westchester and deeply involved in the construction of AIS 2. Pendray presented the 7-foot-tall rocket at the February 1932 AIS meeting, which by this time had outgrown the Pendrays’ living quarters and was hosted instead at the American Museum of Natural History. “The small rocket we show tonight,” Pendray told the assembled crowd, “is a start in the direction of interplanetary flight.”

On May 14, 1933, AIS 2 launched from the beach in Great Kills, Staten Island, where its hard-won ascent was caught on film by newsreel crews. According to historian Frank Winter in Prelude to the Space Age, the rocket rose 76 meters in two seconds before plummeting into the New York Bay after its oxygen tank burst. Two boys who had been watching the launch from a rowboat rescued and returned the rocket.

Despite being busily employed—both as a science editor and PR man for the Milk Research Council (where his office doubled as the AIS’s office), and then, in 1936, with Westinghouse—Pendray’s life revolved around rockets. He co-designed the society’s rockets, coordinated their construction, and publicized their progress. As Winter notes, together, he and Lee continued to host rocket launches in their backyard and society members in their home, including Willy Ley, now a refugee, the German Rocket Society having been disbanded and co-opted by the German army, with von Braun joining the Nazis.   

The AIS’s name, however, would not last. As dreams of lunar outposts gave way to visions of commercial and military rockets, in 1934 the group became the American Rocket Society (ARS). Already, in 1931, then-AIS president David Lasser presented an article titled “The Rocket and the Next War,” explaining how rockets could make war a practice of “destruction from a distance.”

“Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Washington, could be reduced by an enemy fleet resting in safety in the Atlantic,” Lasser wrote. “Whether the man of the future, looking back to 1931 will wish that the rocket had never been invented, no one knows.”

In the Pendrays’ old apartment above the speakeasy, the ARS’s founders had dreamed of creating an interplanetary future for humankind. But by the end of the 1930s, rockets were shifting from fanciful pastimes to objects of top-secret military research. In 1941 the ARS conducted its last experiment. In the build-up to the world’s fair,  Crouch notes, Pendray had already stepped back from experimentation, but he remained a key figure in the organization for at least another decade, guiding the society’s transition into a national organization.

In 1942, Reaction Motors, a company founded by ARS members, won its first government contract. Five years later, Chuck Yeager flew a Bell X-1 powered by a Reaction Motors engine across the sound barrier, a feat the head of NACA had once told Pendray was mathematically impossible.

Concurrently, von Braun and other former German Rocket Society members were developing the Vengeance Weapon 2 (V-2) rockets that would kill thousands of civilians in the final years of World War II and set the blueprints for the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) built by the United States and Soviet Union to transport both nuclear weapons and space explorers.

Would rockets carry humanity to new heights? Or would they simply hasten our collective destruction? This would be decided, in part, by the next generation of scientists, policymakers, and citizens.

WHEN PENDRAY WAS YOUNG only 10% of U.S. children from ages 14 to 17 attended high school; by 1940 that number had reached 70%. Pendray recognized this growth in secondary education as a public-relations opportunity and grew increasingly preoccupied with science education as a tool for creating a scientifically literate—and, ideally, scientifically creative—populace.

“The future belongs to science and its applications,” Pendray told an audience in 1945. But in schools before World War II, Pendray said, “science was frequently taught by people ill-prepared for the job, from textbooks years out of date.”

A year later, he told an audience of Pittsburgh advertisers that “of the 25,000 high schools in the country, fewer than 1,000 have full-time high school science teachers,” and “more than half of the high schools do not teach any science worthy of the name.”

What exactly Pendray meant by “science worthy of the name” must be left somewhat to the imagination. As a rocket enthusiast, he might have been referring in part to the relative decline in enrollment for secondary physics classes. The proportion of high schoolers taking physics had dropped from 19% in 1900 to 6% in 1934, in favor of survey courses with titles like “General Science.”

Pendray’s own contributions to science education can be dated to at least 1934, when he joined the American Institute of the City of New York. Once a society of inventors that promoted new technologies and lobbied for tariffs to protect the industries that produced them, by the 1930s the American Institute had become a major force in science education, hosting science and engineering fairs, congresses, clubs, and laboratories for youth. Many of its influential members were associated with Columbia University’s Teachers College, the intellectual home of John Dewey, the well-known proponent of hands-on learning and scientific education. “The future of democracy is allied with spread of the scientific attitude,” wrote Dewey.

Together with the School Nature League and the American Museum of Natural History, the American Institute began hosting its annual Children’s Fair in 1928. Soon renamed the Children’s Science Fair, the events were busy and loud. Over the course of a week, tens of thousands of visitors circulated among hundreds of projects crowded into the museum’s Hall of Education. Guests encountered phosphorescent fish replicas, photomicrographic cameras, model airplanes, and wind tunnels. Buzzers buzzed, electricity crackled, and electronic bells tolled. Live animals were particularly popular. A 1932 New York Times article describes tropical fish, hens, roosters, a squirrel, and a baby alligator. The next year the paper reported that the inhabitants of a white rat exhibit were “in disgrace” after managing to bite three children in only their first two days on display.

“In back yards, vacant lots, and in the homes are thousands of illustrations of children’s experiments and their inventiveness; of their wish to grow plants and animals and their success in doing so; of their everlasting curiosity in doing things with the natural phenomena about them,” wrote influential botanist Otis Caldwell, cofounder of the National Science Teachers Association, in the 1932 pamphlet What the Children’s Science Fair Means. The fair brought these activities out into the open and allowed people of all ages to appreciate and learn from them. For children who needed guidance and inspiration to transform their backyard experiments into “true science,” the fair organizers sponsored clubs where students could learn from teachers and peers and offered prizes for motivation.  

In 1935 Pendray served as a judge at the fair; in 1936 he delivered a Christmas lecture titled “Rocketing through Space” that was broadcast around the country by NBC.

“Somewhere within the sound of my voice this afternoon there is probably a young man—or a young woman—endowed with imagination, gifted mechanically, imbued with courage and determination,” he told his audience. “This new field of engineering is now ready for its Wilbur and Orville Wright.”

Pendray leveraged his new position at Westinghouse to help find these future standard-bearers. In 1937 he convinced the company to award a series of grants to fund the American Institute’s educational projects; he then won funding to recreate the Children’s Science Fair inside the Westinghouse pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair.

During the fair’s 1939 season, 825 boys and girls presented 40 projects and staffed active laboratories in Westinghouse’s Junior Science Hall. Club members worked in three- to four-hour shifts; one student would conduct an experiment while a second narrated the action for the audience. Every Saturday, students could be found staining potato cells for inspection under microscope, igniting compounds and identifying them by the color of the flames, producing cosmetics and lotions, explaining the components of motors, and growing colonies of paramecia, beetles, eelworms, and various plants. Some veered off script; in at least one case an enterprising student cooked up a delightfully stinky batch of hydrogen sulfide gas.

Around this time, Pendray got to know Watson Davis, director of the news company Science Service, who shared Pendray’s desire to see the American Institute’s Science and Engineering Clubs expanded nationally.

“Watson and I agreed that science was too important for the nation and the coming generation to be neglected in the high schools,” wrote Pendray. Over a series of lunches they hatched a plan for what would become the Westinghouse Science Talent Search (STS). The STS would be, in Pendray’s words, a “promotional program” for “dramatizing the science clubs.”

In 1942, 12th graders in the continental United States were invited to complete a multiple-choice “science aptitude examination,” submit an academic and personal record via a teacher, and enter a 1,000-word essay on “How Science Can Help Win the War,” describing a research proposal or completed research work containing an “original idea, suggestion, or invention.” Forty lucky applicants—31 male and 9 female applicants, chosen in proportion to the numbers of male and female applicants—were selected for a trip to the nation’s capital to attend scientific lectures and other events. After further judging, 20 of these finalists were awarded college scholarships.

The 40 winning essays were published by Penguin in “Youth Looks at Science and War,” a paperback sponsored by Science Service. “The time will come when a school without a science club will be like a schoolroom without books,” Davis wrote in the book’s foreword.

Over the years, the STS has increased its emphasis on achievements in original research and eliminated its multiple-choice exam but remains in essence the same. Every year, 40 finalists are brought to Washington to participate in a Science Talent Institute culminating in an awards ceremony.

For at least 20 years, Pendray was a regular presence. At the third annual gathering, he welcomed the students to Washington after their meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House. The next day, anthropologist Margaret Mead delivered a talk titled “Can Women Remake Our World?”

Pendray, who would one day attend the 1967 STS ceremonies with his eldest daughter—by then a geologist at Princeton—seemed particularly eager to draw women into science. Some of this motivation might have come from Lee, his partner in life, business, and writing. Lee had been a key member of the ARS in its early years, and her interest in engineering had grown over time. After Pendray left Westinghouse in 1945 to start an independent science-focused PR firm, Lee eventually joined as partner. One of Lee’s clients was the Society for Women Engineers, for which she also served as an executive secretary.

In 1940 Science and Engineering Club member Theresa Zinghini was invited to speak at the sealing of Westinghouse’s Time Capsule. “Perhaps the girl of 5,000 years from now will be . . . studying to be a scientist, or executive, or doctor,” the 17-year-old said. “I think women and men will be doing the same things.”

Ultimately, out of the American Institute’s clubs and gatherings came not only the lasting institution of the STS but also the thousands of science fairs held around the world each year. These included the first national science fair in 1950, which became the International Science and Engineering Fair in 1971, another institution that endures. The science club network faded away with time, but Science Service continues its mission as the Society for Science. And educators still rely on STS and the society’s affiliated fairs to motivate students and as sources of professional support.

“Why are we doing these things?” asked 17-year-old science club member Irving Lazarowitz in 1940.

IN 1939 A VERY YOUNG Carl Sagan visited the New York World’s Fair. There he saw an exhibit that made sound visible and another that turned light into audible static. He was awed.

“Plainly the world held wonders of a kind I had never guessed,” he remembered later. “How could a tone become a picture and light become a noise?” And he witnessed the Time Capsule, “packed with artifacts . . . for the benefit of those in the far future—who, astonishingly, might not know much about the people of 1939.”

As Ann Druyan, Sagan’s wife and partner on Cosmos, later remarked, “It was there that he discovered there was such a thing as the future and that the only way to get to it was science.” Sagan would spend his career as a scientist and educator pursuing that belief. He would even invent his own version of the Time Capsule—the “golden records” attached to the Voyager spacecrafts, meant to be discovered by beings from other worlds.

He recorded his memories of the World of Tomorrow in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, published in 1995, the year before his death. But at a time when the Cold War was winding down and the threat of ICBMs seemed to be easing, the typically optimistic Sagan saw peril.

The safeguard against such regression, Sagan argued, was a scientific education. But science, for Sagan, was “more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.” Such a sentiment echoed Einstein’s remarks at the opening of the world’s fair in April 1939, remarks Druyan likes to repeat: “If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of people.”

Einstein, who had watched Europe slide deeper into chaos since penning his letter to the future, was an active participant at the fair, recognizing as well as Pendray its potential to draw public attention to a cause.

“The World’s Fair is in a way a reflection of mankind, its work and aspirations. But it projects the world of men like a wishful dream,” Einstein said at the dedication of the Jewish Palestine Pavilion. “Only the creative forces are on show, none of the sinister and destructive ones which today more than ever jeopardize the happiness, the very existence of civilized humanity. . . . Whoever has learned to appreciate and admire the positive side of man’s aspirations is sure to be willing to protect and, if necessary, to fight with all his might in defense of what has been achieved.”

It is still possible to stand where Sagan, Einstein, and Pendray once stood when they peered into the world of tomorrow. The building that housed the Junior Hall of Science is gone. In its place are grass and trees. Most buildings were torn down after the fair closed in October 1940. The same happened after the 1964 World’s Fair ended.

The time capsules, presumably, remain—buried under a concrete circle ringed with stone benches that are ringed, in turn, by hedges, that are surrounded by sycamores. In the center, a 3-foot-tall, chipped granite marker shaped like a hockey puck is the only thing disclosing their presence. Seen from above, the site might resemble a bull’s-eye. An etching on the marker reads,

THE TIME CAPSULES DEPOSITED
SEPTEMBER 23, 1938
AND
OCTOBER 16, 1965
BY THE
WESTINGHOUSE ELECTRIC CORPORATION
AS A RECORD OF
TWENTIETH CENTURY CIVILIZATION
▪︎
TO ENDURE FOR 5,000 YEARS

Barring intervention, experts predict rising seas will leave the site susceptible to frequent flooding by the end of the century. Meanwhile, the Pendrays’ books, letters, and records of their achievements—carefully curated by Ed in the years after Lee’s death in 1971—rest snug inside 106 boxes in the Princeton University library, near the home they moved to in their retirement.

Flushing Meadows Corona Park is nearly empty on a cold and windy day in early 2025—thin patches of frozen snow cling to the ground. But the air is filled with scattered sounds of skateboards and the steady roar of highway traffic, the Grand Central Parkway just visible beyond the trees. Strangely, the occasional bark of sea lions interrupts the sirens and traffic noise.

Across a pedestrian bridge spanning the parkway, the sea lion sounds grow louder. Around the bend are the two entrances to the Queens Zoo. On the left, cattle gather beneath a former helipad for the 1964 fair that’s now a wedding venue called Terrace on the Park. The hungry sea lions mingle far off to the right. Further along the curving path stands the New York Hall of Science and, beside it, two rockets, also remnants of the 1964 fair. The 100-foot-tall Titan II and the slightly shorter Atlas were both originally made to deliver nuclear warheads to the surface of the earth. For the fair, with its tagline “Peace through Understanding,” the rockets were instead topped with  space capsules—the Titan II bore a mock Gemini capsule and the Atlas a leftover from the Mercury mission.

Just 25 years earlier Pendray’s comparatively tiny ARS 3 rocket had been displayed—and lost—at the 1939 fair. How could it be that so quickly humanity went from those small, experimental rockets to devices that carried, alternately, nuclear weapons and astronauts? In his Book of Record of the Time Capsule of Cupaloy, Pendray considers how the world might look not merely three decades, but 5,000 years in the future. And while he acknowledges, mildly, Einstein’s fears and reproduces the great scientist’s letter, the PR man fully embraces optimism:

Why did Pendray choose to believe in a glorious future? Was it only because, writing on behalf of Westinghouse, he had no other choice?

There are similarities between Pendray’s 1930s and today. Both are times of global uncertainty. Scientists continue to bring to life technologies that were once the stuff of science fiction—drones, artificial intelligence, the surveillance state. And yet, in the words of Einstein, we still fear elimination from the economic cycle. We still struggle to integrate women and other marginalized groups into scientific fields and fail to deliver an equitable share of science’s gains to these communities. And we continue to use the fruits of technology to abuse and kill each other. Can we really say technology is carrying us to a glorious future when bombs still rain from our skies? 

In his 1945 book, The Coming Age of Rocket Power, Pendray acknowledges that in a war fought in the age of rockets, “no spot on the earth’s surface will be safe from potential destruction.” Nonetheless, he focuses on the beauty of rockets themselves, and on their potential to take us to new understandings—and even new worlds.

“We do not know exactly what we have loosed into the earth, any more than Gutenberg with his movable types, or DeForest with his radio tube,” he wrote. “But we feel in our souls that it is magnificent and wonderful, and that the human race will be richer for it in time to come.”