Wilhelm Angele Collection

Wilhelm Angele was born in Memmingen, Germany, in 1905. After graduating with an engineering degree from the University of Nuremberg, he worked as an engineer for the German electrical giant Siemens in Berlin. There, he assisted in making colored film for the German cinema industry and later helped to develop the guidance systems for German V-2 rockets. After the war, he like many German scientists, was secretly recruited by the U.S. army for the American rocket program at NASA. In 1950, his team would move to Huntsville, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Angele retired from NASA in 1974 and lived for another twenty years until his death in 1996.

During his time at NASA, Angele worked on a number of projects. He assisted with the Saturn launching rocket, which was instrumental in space exploration and eventually manned missions into space. Angele specialized in developing flat conductor cables for electricity, which made the development of space technology easier due to these cables taking up less physical space than previous cables. He would also find a way to produce perfectly round spheres with machinery in the 1960s, which helped lead the way for the development of the Gravity Probe B project, which sought to measure space in reference to time. It was launched 8 years after his death in 2004.