It's 1944, London.

And in a smoke-filled room, the English War Minister has Germany's newest weapon on display.

Flash bulbs pop as men in bowler hats jockey to photograph the pilotless robot plane with its windowless fuselage and stubby, in elegant wings.

Sitting side saddle atop this flying bomb, a pretty young woman smiles for the cameras, as if it has not been terrorizing Great Britain for months. Beauty and fear, optimism

and death, all in one raucous press conference. Wow, that's the original from

1944. That's super cool. I got this scene from an old article in Flight Magazine, published shortly after the world's

first guided missile was revealed to the public.

Stephanie and I found it stuffed into one of our mom's old manila envelopes.

Somebody made a copy and wrote on this.

Please do not lose.

That's mom.

Mom wrote on that.

It's five pages, single-spaced.

Words and pictures crammed close together.

The first in-depth look my sister and I have ever had

into how our grandfather's V-1, or vengeance weapon, worked.

Somewhere in here they say it looks like a complete Rube Goldberg machine.

That's not a flattering comparison.

A Rube Goldberg machine, named after the eponymous American cartoonist, is defined as any contraption that is deviously complex and impractical.

Oh yeah, here we do. We have now seen an examined a flying bomb. It is a brilliant technical achievement, and it bristles with the cleverest of ideas.

One feels, however, when examining it and realizing the purpose for which it was designed,

and the use to which it has been put, that it is the product of a collection of insane professors.

...