Robert Goddard

Robert Goddard (born October 5, 1882, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.—died August 10, 1945, Baltimore, Maryland) was an American professor and inventor generally acknowledged to be the father of modern rocketry. He published his classic treatise, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in 1919.

Early life and training

Goddard was the only child of a bookkeeper, salesman, and machine-shop owner of modest means. The boy had a genteel upbringing and in early youth felt the excitement of the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution when Worcester factories were producing machinery and goods for the burgeoning country. From childhood on he displayed great curiosity about physical phenomena and a bent toward inventiveness. He read in physics and mechanics and dreamed of great inventions.

In 1898 young Goddard’s imagination was fired by the H.G. Wells space-fiction novel War of the Worlds, then serialized in the Boston Post. Shortly thereafter, as he recounted, he actually dreamed of constructing a workable space-flight machine. On October 19, 1899, a day that became his “Anniversary Day,” he climbed a cherry tree in his backyard and “imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars…when I descended the tree,” he wrote in his diary, “existence at last seemed very purposive.”

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Physics and Natural Law

Goddard’s fascination with space flight and the means of attaining it continued into his college years at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In an assigned theme, “Travelling in 1950,” he was also intrigued with the notion of “the fastest possible travel for living bodies on the earth’s surface” and projected a plan for travel inside a steel vacuum tube in which cars were suspended and driven by the attraction and repulsion of electromagnets. Patents on a vacuum-tube system of transport were later granted the inventor, with thrust—acceleration and deceleration—the chief principle.

Research in Massachusetts

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In 1908 Goddard began a long association with Clark University, Worcester, where he earned his doctorate, taught physics, and carried out rocket experiments. In his small laboratory there, he was the first to prove that thrust and consequent propulsion can take place in a vacuum, needing no air to push against. He was the first to explore mathematically the ratios of energy and thrust per weight of various fuels, including liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. He was also the first to develop a rocket motor using liquid fuels (liquid oxygen and gasoline), as used in the German V-2 rocket weapon 15 years later. In a small structure adjoining his laboratory, a liquid-propelled rocket in a static test in 1925 “operated satisfactorily and lifted its own weight,” he wrote. On March 16, 1926, the world’s first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket engine took place on his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, achieving a brief lift-off.

As is frequently the case with scientific theory and invention, developments proceeded in various parts of the world. In achieving lift-off of his small but sophisticated rocket engine, Goddard carried his experiments further than did the Russian and German space pioneers of the day. While Goddard was engaged in building models of a space-bound vehicle, he was unaware that an obscure schoolteacher in a remote village of Russia was equally fascinated by the potential for space flight. In 1903 Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky wrote “Investigations of Space by Means of Rockets,” which many years later was hailed by the Soviet Union as the forerunner of space flight. The other member of the pioneer space trio—Hermann Oberth of Germany—published his space–flight treatise, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, in 1923, four years after the appearance of Goddard’s early monograph.

Goddard’s early tests and others were modestly financed over a period of several years by the Smithsonian Institution, whose secretary, Charles G. Abbot, had responded to Goddard’s appeal for financial support. In 1929, following an aborted and noisy flight test that brought unwanted press notice to the publicity-shy inventor, Charles A. Lindbergh was instrumental in procuring greater financial assistance for Goddard’s experiments. From 1930 to the mid-1940s, the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics financed the work on a scale that made possible a small shop and crew and experimental flights in the open spaces of the American southwest, at Roswell, New Mexico. There Goddard spent most of his remaining days in the unending trial-and-error reach for high altitudes.

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Experiments at Roswell

In the course of his experiments there he became the first to shoot a liquid-fuel rocket faster than the speed of sound (1935). He obtained the first patents of a steering apparatus for the rocket machine and of the use of “step rockets” to gain great altitudes. He also developed the first pumps suitable for rocket fuels, self-cooling rocket motors, and other components of an engine designed to carry man to outer space. Furthermore, his experiments and calculations took place at a time when any news of his work drew from the press and the public high amusement that “Moony” Goddard could take seriously the possibility of travel beyond Earth. His small rockets, early prototypes of the modern Moon thrusters, achieved altitudes of up to 1.6 km (1 mile) above the prairie.

During World War II Goddard offered his work to the military, but lack of interest in rocket development led to his closing down the Roswell establishment and participating in the war effort through a small Navy contract for work at Annapolis, Maryland, on the development of a jet-thrust booster for seaplane takeoff. Lindbergh and the industrialist and philanthropist Harry F. Guggenheim remained staunch advocates of the Worcester inventor and the feasibility of space exploration.

Goddard died of throat cancer in 1945, at the threshold of the age of jet and rocket. Years later his work was acknowledged by the United States government when a $1,000,000 settlement was made for the use of his patents. The Goddard Memorial Library at Clark University was named in his honour.