Robert H. Goddard was a professor, physicist and inventor. For his invention of the liquid-fueled rocket, he is known as the Father of modern rocketry. When first launched on March 16, 1926, Goddard’s rocket flew just 184 feet across a field, but it marked the inception of the space age.
As a young man, Goddard’s interest in aerodynamics led him to study some of Samuel Langley’s scientific papers in the periodical “Smithsonian.” Interestingly, it was through the auspices of the Smithsonian that Goddard was awarded Research Corporation grants totaling $5,000 to support his work with rocketry in 1923. In the Research Corporation internal annual report, then-president Arthur Hamerschlag wrote, “These rockets are to be used for the purpose of securing data concerning atmospheric conditions at great distances from the earth’s surface, information which will be invaluable to our Weather Bureau at Washington D.C.” Hamerschlag, obviously impressed with Goddard’s work, finished his report by noting, “The president recommends that additions be made to this research fund whenever the corporation is ready to make additional grants.”
With the 1923 award from Research Corporation, Robert Goddard continued his experiments. At the time of his rocket’s first flight on March 16, 1926, he was an instructor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. In his diary on that day, Goddard wrote, “The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn. The day was clear and comparatively quiet. The anemometer on the Physics lab was turning leisurely when Mr. Sachs and I left in the morning, and was turning as leisurely when we returned at 5:30 pm. Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate. It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.’ Esther said that it looked like a fairy or an aesthetic dancer, as it started off. The sky was clear, for the most part, with large shadowy white clouds, but late in the afternoon there was a large pink cloud in the west, over which the sun shone. One of the surprising things was the absence of smoke, the lack of very loud roar, and the smallness of the flame.”
As early as 1913, Goddard was thinking about and experimenting with elements of rocketry. His research ideas were so fantastic at the time that they were ridiculed by many in the scientific community and it was, as a result, difficult for Goddard to find funding for his work. In 1920, the “New York Times” ran an editorial attacking Goddard’s theories about solid-fueled rockets reaching the moon. In part, the editorial said, “That professor Goddard, with his “chair” in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to reaction; and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react – to say that would be absurd. Of course, he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”
Forty years later, after the first landing of men on the moon in 1969, the “New York Times” ran a correction: “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.” Unfortunately, Goddard, who was greatly hurt by ridicule and became highly protective of his research as a result, had been dead over 20 years by the time those regrets were offered.
Goddard continued working at Clark and at a laboratory he built in Roswell, New Mexico, for the rest of his life and eventually was awarded 214 patents. During World War II, he worked with the U.S. Navy to develop rocket-assisted takeoff of carrier planes and variable-thrust liquid-fuel rocket motors.
In his valedictorian speech at Worcester’s South High School in 1904, Goddard said, “It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.” When Robert Goddard died in 1945, he had realized dreams beyond even his own imagination.