Robert H. Goddard
Robert Hutchings Goddard was an American physicist, inventor, and engineer credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket, which was successfully launched on March 16, 1926. By 1915 his pioneering work had dramatically improved the efficiency of the solid-fueled rocket, signaling the era of the modern rocket and innovation. He and his team launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941, achieving altitudes as high as and speeds as fast as 885 km/h.
Goddard's work as both theorist and engineer anticipated many of the developments that would make spaceflight possible. He has been called the man who ushered in the Space Age. Two of Goddard's 214 patented inventions, a multi-stage rocket, and a liquid-fuel rocket, were important milestones toward spaceflight. His 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is considered one of the classic texts of 20th-century rocket science. Goddard successfully pioneered modern methods such as two-axis control to allow rockets to control their flight effectively.
Although his work in the field was revolutionary, Goddard received little public or financial support for his research and development work. He was a shy person, and rocket research was not considered a suitable pursuit for a physics professor. The press and other scientists ridiculed his theories of spaceflight. As a result, he became protective of his privacy and his work.
Years after his death, at the dawn of the Space Age, Goddard came to be recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth. He not only recognized early on the potential of rockets for atmospheric research, ballistic missiles and space travel, but also was the first to scientifically study, design, construct and fly the precursory rockets needed to eventually implement those ideas.
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was named in Goddard's honor in 1959. He was also inducted into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame and National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1966, and the International Space Hall of Fame in 1976.
Early life and inspiration
Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, to Nahum Danford Goddard and Fannie Louise Hoyt. Robert was their only child to survive; a younger son, Richard Henry, was born with a spinal deformity and died before his first birthday. His father Nahum was employed by manufacturers and invented several useful tools. Goddard had English paternal family roots in New England with William Goddard a London grocer who settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1666. This line of Goddards were previously called Goddardville. On his maternal side he was descended from John Hoyt and other settlers of Massachusetts in the late 1600s.Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Boston. With a curiosity about nature, he studied the heavens using a telescope from his father and observed the birds flying. Essentially a country boy, he loved the outdoors and hiking with his father on trips to Worcester and became an excellent marksman with a rifle. In 1898, his mother contracted tuberculosis and they moved back to Worcester for the clear air. On Sundays, the family attended the Episcopal church, and Robert sang in the choir.
Childhood experiments
With the electrification of American cities in the 1880s, the young Goddard became interested in science—specifically, engineering and technology. When his father showed him how to generate static electricity on the family's carpet, the five-year-old's imagination was sparked. Robert experimented, believing he could jump higher if the zinc from a battery could be charged by scuffing his feet on the gravel walk. But, holding the zinc, he could jump no higher than usual. Goddard halted the experiments after a warning from his mother that if he succeeded, he could "go sailing away and might not be able to come back."He experimented with chemicals and created a cloud of smoke and an explosion in the house.
Goddard's father encouraged Robert's scientific interest further by providing him with a telescope, a microscope, and a subscription to Scientific American. Robert developed a fascination with flight, first with kites and then with balloons. He became a thorough diarist and documenter of his work—a skill that would greatly benefit his later career. These interests merged at age 16, when Goddard attempted to construct a balloon out of aluminum, shaping the raw metal in his home workshop, and filling it with hydrogen. After nearly five weeks of methodical, documented efforts, he finally abandoned the project, remarking, "... balloon will not go up.... Aluminum is too heavy. Failior crowns enterprise." However, the lesson of this failure did not restrain Goddard's growing determination and confidence in his work. He wrote in 1927, "I imagine an innate interest in mechanical things was inherited from a number of ancestors who were machinists."
Cherry tree dream
He became interested in space at the age of 16 when he read H. G. Wells' newly published novel The War of the Worlds, in which England is invaded by an alien species from Mars. His dedication to pursuing space flight became fixed on October 19, 1899. The 17-year-old Goddard climbed a cherry tree to cut off dead limbs. He was transfixed by the sky, and his imagination grew. He later wrote:For the rest of his life, he observed October 19 as "Anniversary Day", a private commemoration of the day of his greatest inspiration.
Education and early studies
The young Goddard was a thin and frail boy, almost always in fragile health. He suffered from stomach problems, pleurisy, colds, and bronchitis, and he fell two years behind his classmates. He became a voracious reader, regularly visiting the local public library to borrow books on the physical sciences.Aerodynamics and motion
Goddard's interest in aerodynamics led him to study some of Samuel Langley's scientific papers in the periodical Smithsonian. In these papers, Langley wrote that birds flap their wings with different force on each side to turn in the air. Inspired by these articles, the teenage Goddard watched swallows and chimney swifts from the porch of his home, noting how subtly the birds moved their wings to control their flight. He noted how remarkably the birds controlled their flight with their tail feathers, which he called the birds' equivalent of ailerons. He took exception to some of Langley's conclusions and in 1901 wrote a letter to St. Nicholas magazine with his own ideas. The editor of St. Nicholas declined to publish Goddard's letter, remarking that birds fly with a certain amount of intelligence and that "machines will not act with such intelligence." Goddard disagreed, believing that a man could control a flying machine with his own intelligence.Around this time, Goddard read Newton's Principia Mathematica, and found that Newton's third law of motion applied to motion in space. He wrote later about his own tests of the law:
Academics
As his health improved, Goddard continued his formal schooling as a 19-year-old sophomore at South High in Worcester in 1901. He excelled in his coursework, and his peers twice elected him class president. Making up for lost time, he studied books on mathematics, astronomy, mechanics and composition from the school library. At his graduation ceremony in 1904, he gave his class oration as valedictorian. In his speech, entitled "On Taking Things for Granted", Goddard included a section that would become emblematic of his life:ust as in the sciences we have learned that we are too ignorant to safely pronounce anything impossible, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp. Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been, at some time, in the same condition as he, and that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.
Goddard enrolled at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1904. He quickly impressed the head of the physics department, A. Wilmer Duff, with his thirst for knowledge, and Duff took him on as a laboratory assistant and tutor. At WPI, Goddard joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and began a long courtship with high school classmate Miriam Olmstead, an honor student who had graduated with him as salutatorian. Eventually, she and Goddard were engaged, but they drifted apart and ended the engagement around 1909.
Goddard received his B.S. degree in physics from Worcester Polytechnic in 1908, and after serving there for a year as an instructor in physics, he began his graduate studies at Clark University in Worcester in the fall of 1909. While studying at Clark, Goddard continued working in Salisbury Labs at WPI and anecdotally caused a damaging explosion, whereupon his work was moved to the Magnetic Lab.
Goddard received his M.A. degree in physics from Clark University in 1910, and then stayed at Clark to complete his Ph.D. in physics in 1911. He spent another year at Clark as an honorary fellow in physics, and in 1912 he accepted a research fellowship at Princeton University's Palmer Physical Laboratory.
First scientific writings
The high-school student summed up his ideas on space travel in a proposed article, "The Navigation of Space," which he submitted to the Popular Science News. The journal's editor returned it, saying that they could not use it "in the near future."While still an undergraduate, Goddard wrote a paper proposing a method for balancing airplanes using gyro-stabilization. He submitted the idea to Scientific American, which published the paper in 1907. Goddard later wrote in his diaries that he believed his paper was the first proposal of a way to automatically stabilize aircraft in flight. His proposal came around the same time as other scientists were making breakthroughs in developing functional gyroscopes.
While studying physics at WPI, ideas came to Goddard's mind that sometimes seemed impossible, but he was compelled to record them for future investigation. He wrote that "there was something inside which simply would not stop working." He purchased some cloth-covered notebooks and began filling them with a variety of thoughts, mostly concerning his dream of space travel. He considered centrifugal force, radio waves, magnetic reaction, solar energy, atomic energy, ion or electrostatic propulsion and other methods to reach space. After experimenting with solid-fuel rockets he was convinced by 1909 that chemical-propellant engines were the answer. A particularly complex concept was set down in June 1908: Sending a camera around distant planets, guided by measurements of gravity along the trajectory, and returning to earth.
His first writing on the possibility of a liquid-fueled rocket came on February 2, 1909. Goddard had begun to study ways of increasing a rocket's efficiency using methods differing from conventional solid-fuel rockets. He wrote in his notebook about using liquid hydrogen as a fuel with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. He believed that 50-percent efficiency could be achieved with these liquid propellants.