Born: 1901. Died: 1943-01-01.
Throughout the early 1940's Thiel and his team sought to produce a single chamber 25 tonne thrust engine in place of the kludged prototype engine that used 18 separate 1.5 tf chambers. They managed to demonstrate a 60 second burn time in the 18-chamber design, but the engine itself was considered too complicated to fabricate in production, requiring thousands of hand-assembled tubes to introduce fuel and oxidiser into the chamber. Thiel sought to replace these thousands of tubes with a simpler injection system - rows of simple bored holes on a flat injector plate at the head of the chamber. Beck at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden developed a ring-pattern injector that worked well in subscale engines. But the design proved unstable in the 25 tf engine. Therefore, it was decided to stick with the 18-head chamber for V-2 production.