Hugo Gernsback
This novel was popular in the Germany of its day. Wernher von Braun and Walter Hohmann were inspired by reading it as children just as Robert H. Goddard was by reading "The War of the Worlds". While there was no English translation before 1971, Everett F. Bleiler notes that it likely influenced American genre SF via Hugo Gernsback: "Hugo Gernsback would have been saturated in Lasswitz's work, and Gernsback's theoretical position of technologically based liberalism and many of his little scientific crotchets resemble ideas in Lasswitz's work."