Robert Goddard

Chapter 1 · 1882 – 1898 A Boy Who Watched the Trains

Long before the rockets, there was a bell cord. Robert Hutchings Goddard was still a baby when his parents took him by train to Boston. For the whole journey, he recounts in the life story he wrote in 1927, he never took his eyes off the cord that ran beneath the ceiling of the car, the one passengers pulled to signal a stop. Two or three years later, his family discovered a sure way to keep him quiet for half a day: park his baby carriage facing a rail yard and let him watch the locomotives switching.

The man recalling these memories is forty-five years old. The year before, in a snowy Massachusetts field, he has flown the first liquid-propellant rocket in history. He claims no glory for it in these pages. Instead, with something like an entomologist’s curiosity, he tries to understand where the stubbornness that never left him came from. The first clues he records are modest: a child who watches how things work, and who wants to know what makes them move.

Worcester, Boston, Worcester

Robert Goddard was born on October 5, 1882, in Worcester, Massachusetts, in a house the family called Maple Hill. Worcester was then an industrial New England city, proud of its shops and its machines. In 1883 his parents moved to Boston. There he grew up, attending the Mount Pleasant and Hugh O’Brien schools and finally, in 1898, the English High School.

His father, Nahum Danford Goddard, worked in machinery. He held a share in a shop that made knives for industrial machines. His mother’s family, the Hoyts, were in the same trade: grandfather Henry Hoyt owned the L. Hardy Company, a maker of machine knives. Robert would later learn a story told about his birth. That day, grandfather Hoyt had stood drinks and cigars for the whole shop, and a French workman, raising his glass, was said to have declared that this boy would never die. The family remembered the line. Years later it would take on an almost ironic ring.

A family photograph taken around 1890 shows four generations together: his mother, Fannie Hoyt Goddard; his grandmother, Mary Upham Goddard; his great-grandmother, Elvira Goddard Ward; his father, Nahum; and Robert, the little boy among the grown-ups. Goddard would note more than once that his ancestors had been mechanics, people skilled with their hands. He saw in this one of the roots of his love for the workshop.

The Zinc and the Fence

The first “scientific” memory he records dates from the age of four or five. Little Robert had heard that rubbing your feet on a carpet produced sparks. Electricity, that household mystery of the late nineteenth century, seemed to him capable of far more. He took the zinc from a Leclanché cell, the kind of battery that powered doorbells in those days, and launched an experiment of his own devising. He scuffed his feet along the gravel walk, climbed onto the little garden fence, and jumped. Then he did it again, scuffing longer, and tried to convince himself that he jumped a little higher each time.

His mother saw him. She called out to be careful: if it ever worked, he might sail away and never come back. Robert took the warning seriously. He hid the zinc and never tried again. He told the story twice in his life, in 1904 in a student essay and in 1927 in his autobiography. At twenty-two he wrote that electricity had then seemed to him almost supernatural. At forty-five he smiled at it. But he had not forgotten: the child’s first dream was already to leave the ground.

A Whale, Some Frogs, and Eyes

Robert Goddard’s childhood projects all had something outsized about them. In the summer of 1893, at ten, he imagined a wooden whale on wheels, modeled on an advertisement he had seen for a soap called Soapine. The venture collapsed at the precise moment he asked his father to finance it. It was, he would note with humor, the first of a long series of difficulties in financing his ideas.

Another project grew out of a stay with a family friend he called “Aunt” Lizzie Woodward, near Worcester: a frog hatchery. He and his father were, in his words, great chums. They took long walks together, the father with his camera, the son with his air rifle. The boy drew plans of hatcheries, paddle wheels, and pumps. The project stayed with him a long time: in 1900 or 1901, as a teenager, he would still build a little house about a foot by three feet, painted gray with red trim and tiny windows, meant for his frogs. It was never used.

For a while Robert wanted to be a doctor. He was fascinated by the plates in his physiology book, especially those showing the eye and the ear. He set out to “test” the eyesight of his paralyzed great-grandmother Ward with experiments of his own. His interest in the inner ear never left him: a few years later he would draw from it one of his first engineering ideas, a balancing device inspired by the semicircular canals that allow human beings to stand upright.

“Good at Arithmetic”

At school nothing set him apart. In the essay he wrote in November 1904 on entering the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he described himself, up to 1898, as an average boy, perhaps a little below average. Mathematics in particular was a source of worry: he made mistakes constantly.

One episode, however, changed the way he saw himself. He was given an impromptu entrance examination for the Roxbury Latin School, one of the most respected schools in Boston. He failed. But the headmaster told him he had beaten all the other candidates in arithmetic, mental and written. It was, Goddard wrote, the first time he had heard that he might have a gift for mathematics, the very subject in which he stumbled so often.

In Boston he was a choirboy at St. Anne’s Church. One winter the parish put on a pageant called Sixteenth-century Christmas at Winthrop Hall. His costume was lent by Mrs. Goodwin, the mother of the famous actor Nat Goodwin. During a performance Robert fell down a flight of stairs and was knocked unconscious. He came to in the arms of a horned figure: the actor playing the devil had come to pick him up. For a moment, he says, he thought he was dead.

The Aluminum Balloon

In the spring of 1898 Robert was fifteen and had one fixed idea: to build a permanent balloon. The balloons of his day lost their gas and came down; his, he imagined, would be made of aluminum, filled with hydrogen, and would stay aloft indefinitely. Aluminum was then a modern and still costly metal, hard to work. Robert set out to make thin sheets of it himself. He melted it on the family stove, putting out the fire several times with his aluminum ladle. He finally obtained a sheet one five-hundredth of an inch thick, which he shaped like a pillow, sealing the seams with a mixture of litharge and glycerine.

To fill it, he enlisted the help of Jim Young, a neighborhood drugstore clerk. The two boys spent a whole rainy morning on the sidewalk trying to get gas into it. Jim Young got a bad cold out of it. The balloon did not rise. The diary Robert had been keeping since the start of the year records the verdict on February 19, 1898, in a still childish spelling: the aluminum balloon will not go up; aluminum is too heavy; failure crowns the enterprise.

That diary is one of the most precious sources on his life. Robert Goddard would keep it almost without a break from 1898 to 1945, first in small notebooks, then in desk diaries. The entries are brief, often ordinary, sometimes decorated with little sketches of flowers, clouds, or machines. Put end to end, they form the surest thread for following his life day by day.

The Year 1898 in a Boy’s Notebook

The 1898 diary tells of an ordinary boy in a restless world. On February 16 he notes that the Maine has blown up in Cuba: the American battleship has just exploded in Havana harbor. The next day he writes that there is danger of war with Spain. On April 25 war is declared. Between these grave lines slip the events of his own life. On March 12 he visits Percy Long, a Harvard student, and sees a performance of As You Like It with the tragedian Helena Modjeska. On March 19 his father buys a phonograph. On May 2 he sees the first bumblebee of spring. On June 29 he receives his grammar school diploma.

And then there are the rockets. Not his own, not yet: holiday rockets. On June 17, Flag Day, he sets off firecrackers, a rocket, and Roman candles. On July 4, Independence Day, it is cannon and firecrackers all day, then, in the evening, five rockets, three Roman candles, a big pinwheel, and a red fire. These rockets of paper and black powder, which climbed a few hundred feet with a whistle, were then the only ones known in the United States. Robert records them with the pleasure of a fifteen-year-old. Nothing suggests he saw in them anything more than a show.

Diamonds in the Attic

The same year, now at the English High School in Boston, he embarked on an even more ambitious venture: making artificial diamonds. He had noticed, he recounted in 1904, small crystals that scratched glass; they were in fact iron carbide, but the teenager saw in them the beginnings of a process. He set up a hydrogen generator in the attic of the house. The apparatus exploded. Glass tubes stuck in the ceiling, charcoal flew everywhere, and the maid began screaming that she had been killed. Robert got off with a cut on one knuckle. That was the end of the diamonds.

Another time he made a bow and copper-weighted, lead-tipped arrows, which he shot straight up. They climbed two or three hundred feet before coming back down. One of them came straight down on the elderly neighbor who was gardening and knocked off her spectacles. Robert went to retrieve the arrow, he writes, without comment but with mixed emotions. Already he was trying to send something as high as possible; already he was learning that what goes up comes down, and not always where one would like.

The Martians of Boston

In January 1898 the Boston Post began serializing an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds under the title Fighters from Mars, or The War of the Worlds, in and near Boston: the Martians no longer attacked London, but Boston and its surroundings. The paper followed it with an American sequel, Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars, in which the inventor Thomas Edison builds electric spaceships to carry the war to the red planet.

Robert Goddard devoured these installments. They gripped his imagination tremendously, he would write. This was no passing read. All his life he would return to these books. In December 1915, at thirty-three, already at work on rockets, he reread The War of the Worlds on the porch of the family house. In 1932 he would write to H. G. Wells himself to tell him what the book had meant to him. Mars entered his life through a morning newspaper, in Boston, the year he turned fifteen.

Back to Maple Hill

In 1898 the family’s life changed course. Robert’s mother, Fannie, had pulmonary tuberculosis, the great illness of the age, which no one knew how to cure and against which doctors prescribed fresh air, rest, and the countryside. Robert himself suffered from stomach trouble that forced him to leave school. His father gave up his share in the Boston knife shop, and the family returned to Worcester, to the Maple Hill house where Robert had been born.

They settled upstairs, in the home of his great-aunt Czarina White Ammidown. Downstairs lived family friends Robert called “Uncle” George and “Aunt” Ella Boswell, along with a pack of some thirteen cocker spaniels. Uncle George had a workshop the young man spoke of with wonder: tools, workbenches, everything needed to turn an idea into an object.

Behind the house stretched a rural property: a barn, meadows, a brook, and, near the barn, a tall cherry tree. Robert Goddard was fifteen. He was ill, he no longer went to school, and he found himself in the country with whole days ahead of him. He would say so himself: those two years away from school were no misfortune. It was in this yard that the afternoon that would decide his life was about to unfold.

Sources: R. H. Goddard’s autobiography (July 1927, completed in 1933); essay “Who I Am and Why I Came to the Institute” (November 22, 1904); 1898 diary; biographical calendar compiled by Esther C. Goddard — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 2 · 1899 – 1901 The Cherry Tree

On October 19, 1899, a seventeen-year-old boy climbs an old cherry tree behind the family home in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has been asked to cut off the dead branches. Up there, though, Robert Goddard forgets the saw. He looks at the autumn sky above the meadows and begins to imagine a machine that could tear itself from the ground and rise, and keep rising, all the way to Mars. When he came down, he would later write, he was not the same boy. For the rest of his life he would celebrate that day as a second birthday.

The cherry tree stood near the barn behind Maple Hill, on a patch of ground where Robert had once dreamed of setting up his frog hatcheries. To climb it, he had made himself a small ladder. In 1927 he still had the saw he took up with him that day; he owned several photographs of the tree, taken later, with the ladder leaning against the trunk. The place has since changed names: the property became 17 Gates Lane, then 1 Tallawanda Drive. But in Goddard’s memory it would always remain “the tree.”

An October Afternoon

What happened that afternoon we know only from Goddard himself, through two accounts that do not say quite the same thing. The first is his diary. The entry for October 19, 1899, is perfectly ordinary: he tried to survey the land, raised the flag, and trimmed a large cherry tree in the afternoon. Nothing else. That evening Robert did not yet know that he had just lived the most important day of his life.

The second account is his autobiography, written twenty-eight years later. There he describes the scene with striking precision. It was, he writes, one of those quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty that New England has in October. Armed with his saw and a hatchet, he was trimming the dead limbs. He looked toward the fields to the east and thought how wonderful it would be to make some device that had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale if sent up from the meadow at his feet.

Then comes the sentence he never revised: he was a different boy when he came down the tree, for “existence at last seemed very purposive.”

We should be careful not to turn this moment into a legendary illumination. Goddard himself does not. He does not say he saw the rocket. The idea he imagined in the tree, in fact, had nothing to do with a rocket. It relied on centrifugal force: a weight whirling around a horizontal axis, faster in the upper part of its path than in the lower, ought in his view to produce an upward thrust. It was a false idea, as he would soon discover. What was born in the cherry tree was not a solution. It was a problem: how to make an object rise, without a balloon, without wings, without pushing on the air, all the way to other worlds?

The Anniversary

What gives that afternoon its force is what Goddard made of it afterward. A year later, on October 19, 1900, his diary notes that he climbed the cherry tree and sat on the porch in the afternoon. In the margin, a new notation: Anniversary Day. On October 19, 1901, he climbed the tree in the morning. On October 19, 1902, he sat in the cherry tree in the afternoon and threw apples with his slingshot. In 1903 he climbed it again.

The tradition would never be broken. Year after year, wherever he was, Goddard devoted October 19 to a kind of private pilgrimage. When he lived in Worcester, he went back to the tree. When he was away, he simply noted the date. In 1917, in the middle of the war, he would go to see the cherry tree in the dead of night and pick up a leaf at the foot of the trunk; it would be found, dried, tucked into his diary. In 1938, when a hurricane brought the tree down, he would write a sentence that says a great deal about what it meant to him. And in 1943, at sixty-one, in wartime, in a Navy laboratory, he would still write in his diary: Anniversary Day.

The cherry tree was not only the origin of a dream. It was an appointment Goddard kept with himself every autumn, to make sure he had not given up.

Dinner Aboard the Olympia

A few days after October 19, 1899, Robert accompanied his grandmother to Boston. They dined aboard the Olympia, Admiral Dewey’s flagship, just back from the Battle of Manila Bay, as guests of William Long, an assistant paymaster in the Navy, his wife Annie, and their son Percy, a Harvard student. Robert explained his centrifugal machine to Percy. Percy replied that it would not work, but he could not explain convincingly why. Goddard would later remark that this was perhaps a fortunate circumstance: had Percy been able to show him his error, the boy might have given up.

Newton in the Brook

The following winter Robert fell ill with a kidney ailment and was bedridden for several weeks. He spent his convalescence building wooden models fitted with moving weights to test his centrifugal principle. The results were negative, stubbornly negative. Little by little, he writes with hindsight and humor, he began to think there might be something in Newton’s laws after all.

He had read them in Cassell’s Popular Educator, a popular encyclopedia in several volumes his father had given him. The third law, the law of action and reaction, held his attention: to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If that was true, then no machine could lift itself by whirling weights inside itself. But if it was true, there was another way: throw something backward in order to be pushed forward.

Robert wanted to see for himself. He hung devices from rubber bands, set others on floats that he launched on the brook running behind the barn, and watched how they reacted when they threw something out. The law held every time. From these experiments the teenager drew a conclusion that would shape his whole life: navigation in space would not come from a stroke of mechanical genius, but from physics and mathematics. To go toward Mars, one first had to learn.

The Projecting Apparatus

He had other ideas in mind, too. On March 7, 1901, when he was only eighteen, the New York patent firm Munn & Co., which also published Scientific American, wrote back that his “projecting apparatus” appeared patentable, at a total cost of 75 dollars. We know nothing about this apparatus: no description has been found in his papers. The word “projecting” invites speculation, but it would be rash to say more.

Six days later, on March 13, 1901, he wrote to Professor Edward C. Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory and one of America’s most famous astronomers. He introduced himself with somewhat stiff politeness: he was a student at the English High School in Boston but was in Worcester for his health; had he stayed in school, he pointed out, he could have entered Harvard that year. He submitted to Pickering the idea of an instrument that could give an image of a luminous object in whatever color of its spectrum one chose. He closed by asking to be pardoned if he had been troublesome. Pickering’s reply has not been found.

The Chimney Swifts

In the spring and summer of 1900 Robert “wasted,” as he put it, a great deal of time watching chimney swifts through field glasses, those small dark birds that wheel above rooftops and nest in chimneys. He noticed that they made very little use of their tails. To turn, they lowered one wing and raised the other; they steered by warping their wings.

On June 19, 1901, he set out his observations in a long letter to Edward F. Bigelow, who ran a nature column in St. Nicholas Magazine, the great illustrated magazine for American young people, of which, he noted, he had been a faithful reader for seven years. The swifts glide with their wings outstretched, he wrote, and they turn by lowering one wing and raising the other, like a man pushing against the banister as he goes down a spiral staircase. Their tail is only an auxiliary mechanism. From this he drew a prediction: the perfect flying machine of the future would have a tail only for emergencies. He even described the model he had in mind: a suspended copper weight which, as it tilted, would close electrical contacts and work electromagnets that would tilt the edges of the wings.

Bigelow replied on June 26. He found the observation interesting but doubted the machine. A bird’s flight, he explained, is like riding a bicycle: it rests on unconscious movements, and the machine would not act with intelligence. He added that he had once seen a tailless wood thrush fly without difficulty. The answer was kind, even encouraging, but Goddard would judge it of little use.

Two years before the Wright brothers’ first flight, a sickly teenager in Worcester had nonetheless described, from watching swifts, two ideas that would go far: warping the wings to steer a craft, and automatic control of balance by a device sensitive to tilt. He would return to them in 1907 in an article in Scientific American, and the principle of an automatic pilot correcting the course would come back, in another form, at the heart of his rockets.

Back to School

Those two years of illness were not wasted. Robert read, observed, experimented, and made a decision: he would go back to school, but not just any way. He would enter Worcester’s brand-new South High School, and he would shine there, because he now knew why he needed to learn. His days in 1901 show a young man getting ready. On October 19, Anniversary Day, he climbed the cherry tree in the morning. At Christmas he received a letter scale, a calendar, a school bag, and two dollars. And he began writing a text whose title alone says everything about his ambition: The Navigation of Space.

Sources: R. H. Goddard’s diary (October 19, 1899, 1900, 1901, 1902); autobiography (1927); autobiographical statement for the Inventors Bulletin (February 6, 1921); letter from Munn & Co. (March 7, 1901); letter to E. C. Pickering (March 13, 1901); letter to E. F. Bigelow (June 19, 1901) and reply (June 26, 1901) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 3 · 1901 – 1904 Class President

Between Christmas and New Year’s 1901, from December 25 to 29, Robert Goddard wrote his first essay on space travel. He was nineteen, he had not yet gone back to school, and he titled his text, with no false modesty, The Navigation of Space. In it he reviewed the means one might imagine for leaving the Earth and the obstacles that stood in the way. His conclusion was disarmingly honest: it could safely be inferred, he wrote, that space navigation was an impossibility at the present time; yet it was hard to predict what science might achieve in this field in the distant future.

Goddard’s whole method is already contained in that sentence. He does not claim to have found the answer. He observes that, given what is known, the thing is impossible. But he refuses to make that impossibility final.

The Downward-Pointing Gun

The 1901 text is no vague daydream. The teenager discusses concrete solutions. He imagines, for example, a gun pointed downward whose recoil would lift the craft: the principle of reaction before its time, but applied with a heavy weapon and a single charge. He wonders whether space is filled with some substance one could push against. The physicists of his day spoke of an “ether” that bathed the whole universe and carried light; Goddard cites the American Amos Dolbear’s speculations on the subject. He also worries about meteors, the small bodies that cross space at great speed: according to the estimates he has read, they are on average 250 miles apart. Would a spacecraft have a chance of slipping between them?

He sent his text to Popular Science News. On January 27, 1902, the magazine replied politely that it could not publish it for lack of space. It was the first rejection in a long series. Goddard showed no visible bitterness: a few days earlier, on January 2, he had already begun a new essay, The Habitability of Other Worlds, on the possibility of life on other planets. That text is now lost.

The Inner Ear and the Smithsonian

On January 4, 1902, he recorded in his papers the idea of an automatic balancing device inspired by the semicircular canals, the three small fluid-filled tubes of the inner ear that let human beings sense their position and keep their balance. The boy who had “tested” his great-grandmother’s eyesight had learned the lesson of his anatomy plates. If the human body could stay upright thanks to so simple an organ, why couldn’t a flying machine?

He wrote on the subject to Samuel P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Langley was then one of the most prominent scientists in America, and was himself working on flying machines. On March 7, 1902, he forwarded the young man’s letter to the Surgeon General of the Army, who replied on March 12. It was no more than a courteous exchange, with no sequel. But it was the first time Robert Goddard’s name reached the Smithsonian. Fifteen years later, that same institution would fund his first research on rockets.

South High

Goddard at last entered Worcester’s South High School, a brand-new school. He was two years behind the boys his age, but he was also ahead of them: he knew what he wanted to learn. In physics his teacher was Mr. Calvin H. Andrews; in geometry, Miss Hill. For her he kept a notebook of original geometric propositions, proofs he devised himself. He finished first in the class, he says, despite the competition of a very gifted girl.

The “average, perhaps a little below average” boy from Boston had become an outstanding student. In his 1904 essay he would report that some of his teachers even suggested he turn to literature. He collected butterflies and prepared microscope slides with the scales of their wings.

His 1902 diary describes a studious, full life. He read Scientific American. He set up a small laboratory, made electromagnets, built a coherer, the forerunner of radio detectors, and ran his wireless telegraphy setup all the way to the barn. On September 2 he twice saw President Theodore Roosevelt, who was passing through Worcester City Hall, and in the evening he counted four meteors in the sky. On October 3 he was elected president of his class.

On October 19, 1902, Anniversary Day, he sat in the cherry tree in the afternoon and threw apples with his slingshot. In November his report card showed three A’s and two A-minuses. The same month he attended a lecture by Professor Arthur Gordon Webster, the physicist of Clark University, and summed up his enthusiasm in a single word. Webster would become one of the most important people in his life.

On December 3 he gave a talk to the physiology class on the semicircular canals. On December 6 he went to hear John Philip Sousa’s band and proved a sharp observer: Sousa, he noted admiringly, added a hundred percent to the value of his music by his gestures.

“Two Dozen Rockets”

The year 1903 was that of a happy young man. On March 10 he sang at Mechanics Hall, Worcester’s great concert hall. On April 7 he made artificial semicircular canals. On April 11 he watched an eclipse. On July 2 he worked on a kite, a rocket stand, and propellers. On July 4, Independence Day, he set off two dozen rockets in the evening and noted his delight.

On July 12, 1903, he opened a notebook he titled Suggestions. Its first page laid down a rule he would observe all his life: it is very important to write down suggestions as they come to mind, because the most useful thoughts do not come to order. He added advice to himself on moderation and activity. This taste for methodical writing would become one of his strengths: Goddard would note everything and date everything, and thanks to those thousands of pages his thinking can be reconstructed today almost day by day.

In the fall of 1903 he was re-elected class president, and also elected class pianist. He took dancing lessons with Mrs. Day and came home from one evening writing that it had been glorious. On October 19 he climbed the cherry tree.

Miriam

On April 16, 1904, he attended a leap-year dance, an evening on which, by an old custom of leap years, the girls invited the boys. His comment, usually so sober, overflows with exclamation marks: everything had been very, very fine. On June 24, 1904, graduation day, he was accompanied by Miriam P. Olmstead, the other speaker at the ceremony, whom the editors of his papers describe as a youthful sweetheart. He noted: “Bouquet.” We know nothing more, and it would be dishonest to imagine more.

“The Dream of Yesterday”

On that June 24, 1904, Robert Goddard stepped up to the platform of Mechanics Hall in Worcester. He had been chosen to give one of the graduation orations. His subject: On Taking Things for Granted.

The text survives in full. It is a high school speech, but that of a student who had read a great deal. Goddard reviewed errors of scientific reasoning. He recalled that serious scientists had declared arc lighting impossible, or engines more than fifty percent efficient, before technology proved them wrong. He mentioned William Pickering’s observations of the Moon, where Pickering believed he saw traces of an atmosphere, volcanoes, ice, and “variable spots” that might be vegetation. He spoke of radium, discovered six years earlier, which was overturning what people thought they knew about matter and energy.

His conclusion is the most famous sentence he ever wrote. It is dangerous, he said, to assume hastily that anything is possible or impossible. No one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly tried. And he ended: “the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”

After his death the sentence would be quoted endlessly, often out of context. It is fairer to put it back in its place: that of a twenty-one-year-old, a brilliant but still fragile student, speaking before his classmates and their families in a provincial concert hall. He had invented nothing yet. He was only setting down, for himself as much as for others, the rule that would guide his life.

The Dining-Room Stove

Yet at the same time Goddard went through a crisis he would mention only once, in his autobiography. His own dream, he wrote, did not look very rosy. The more physics he learned, the more he grasped how hard the problem was. One day he gathered all the notes he had accumulated on space travel and burned them in the little wood stove in the dining room.

But the dream would not die. In less than two months he was taking notes again. There was, he added, something inside him that simply would not stop.

That gesture says a great deal about the man. Goddard was no visionary who believed himself called. He doubted. He knew better than anyone that his ideas might be absurd. But something stronger than doubt always brought him back to the worktable. He would never burn his notes again. On the contrary: from 1906 on he would record them in bound notebooks with numbered pages and dated entries, which he would call his “green notebooks.”

Choosing the Polytechnic

He still had to choose a college. Goddard might have aimed for a traditional university. He chose the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, his city’s engineering school, whose student paper was the Tech News. Goddard’s papers do not say why he preferred this school to another. We can only observe that it offered what his project needed: physics, mechanics, workshops, and the chance to stay in Worcester, near the family home and the cherry tree.

In the essay he wrote on entering, dated November 22, 1904, and titled “Who I Am and Why I Came to the Institute,” he traced his path with striking clarity. He told of the zinc, the crystals in Boston, the two years of illness, which were no misfortune, the inaugural address by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark, that had made a deep impression on him, then South High, his class presidency, his oration, and his graduation with highest honors.

At the end of 1904 he copied out two maxims of his own. The first: everything is possible to the man who makes the best use of every minute of his time. The second: there are unlimited possibilities for the man who understands that his own mind is the only key that unlocks them. One may smile at their tone, that of the self-improvement manuals of the day. But Goddard would take them literally.

Sources: “The Navigation of Space” (December 25–29, 1901); letter from Popular Science News (January 27, 1902); S. P. Langley correspondence (March 7 and 12, 1902); diary 1902–1904; Suggestions notebook (July 12, 1903); oration “On Taking Things for Granted” (June 24, 1904); essay of November 22, 1904; autobiography (1927) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 4 · 1904 – 1908 The Impossible

On March 4, 1906, Robert Goddard, a sophomore at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, wrote a flat verdict in his diary: he had decided that day that space navigation was a physical impossibility. In his green notebook he developed the reasoning. From the standpoint of energy alone, the problem was hopelessly impossible, unless energy could be drawn from the atom. The plan he had been examining could not work. Therefore, he concluded, as far as physical science allowed, space navigation was impossible.

This was no passing moment of discouragement. It was the verdict of a student who had done his calculations. And yet, a few months later, he took up his notes again. To understand how Goddard went from “impossible” to “perhaps,” and then to “here is how,” is to understand his whole method.

“Traveling in 1950”

Goddard entered WPI in the fall of 1904. He would follow the physics course there until his graduation in 1908. In his first year, Professor Coombs set the students an essay topic that came at just the right moment: Traveling in 1950. What, Goddard asked himself, is the limit of rapid transit?

His answer was a vehicle that would not exist for another century: wheelless cars, suspended by electromagnets, speeding through a tube from which the air had been pumped out to eliminate air resistance. The car accelerates until the halfway point, then brakes until arrival. In January 1906 he turned the topic into a short story titled The High-speed Bet: a certain Maurice Sibley bets a thousand dollars to one cent that within ten years one will travel from Boston to New York in ten minutes. On November 15, 1958, in the future the student imagined, the trip takes nine minutes and fifty-seven seconds, and Sibley, a good sport, slips ten hundred-dollar bills to his ruined friend Adams.

Editors turned the story down. But the idea made its way. On November 20, 1909, Scientific American published an unsigned editorial drawn from a letter by Goddard, titled The Limit of Rapid Transit: New York to Philadelphia in six minutes forty-four seconds, New York to Boston in ten minutes four seconds. He was paid five dollars. Goddard never let go of this parallel dream: in 1945, a few months before his death, he would still file patent applications on a vacuum-tube transportation system.

Elections and Lectures

The young man who had been class president in high school soon became one again. On January 31, 1905, he lost the vice presidency of his class by five votes; on February 5, 1906, he was elected president. Over his years of study he would serve in turn as president, vice president, and secretary of his class.

His diary shows a student eager to hear the great names of science. On February 15, 1907, he attended a lecture by Ernest Rutherford at Clark University; his only comment was a brief word of approval. On March 27 and 28, 1908, he heard Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the electrical genius of General Electric. On June 8, 1908, he heard Professor Webster speak on research. In February 1909 he would go to hear the pianist Paderewski and note his enthusiasm.

In his small red notebook, which he called his Journal, he recorded reflections that amounted to rules of conduct. On February 2, 1905: if there is no law against something, it will come about some day. On February 16, 1905: we must not be original merely for the sake of originality. On July 26, 1906: experience lets one apply what one knows; theoretical science lets one apply things one never dreamed of.

The Teacher: A. Wilmer Duff

At WPI Goddard studied physics with Professor A. Wilmer Duff, a demanding man who would play a large part in his training. It was to Duff that he submitted, on February 22, 1906, a paper titled On the Utilization of Atomic Energy. On March 1 he recorded, without comment, the professor’s verdict: the paper was of no use.

Three days later he decided that space navigation was impossible.

The link between the two dates is plain. Goddard had understood that the known chemical sources of energy, powder and explosives, would not be enough to launch a craft off the Earth, at least with the efficiencies he then imagined. He had turned to the energy of the atom, whose existence had just been revealed by radioactivity. Duff made him see that no one knew how to release it at will. The door had closed.

“The Exasperating Side”

It soon reopened. As early as September 6, 1906, his green notebooks record a new idea: propulsion by ions, electrically charged atoms that would be accelerated and ejected. On September 9 he noted what should be stressed in the introduction of a future article on space navigation: the exasperating side of the problem. The unexplored regions of the Earth, he wrote, cannot be seen; but these other regions, the heavenly bodies, can be seen almost every day, and cannot be reached.

On August 6, 1905, he had watched a balloon ascension through a telescope. Balloons were then the only way to rise high into the atmosphere, and they climbed only a few miles with passengers, a dozen or so with instruments. Beyond that lay the unknown.

The green notebooks, which Goddard kept from 1906 to 1915 in five volumes, show a mind that kept returning to the attack. In July 1907 he studied solar energy combined with electrostatic repulsion. On November 24, 1907, he wrote a memo on atomic energy applied to space travel. On January 16, 1908, a solar boiler. On April 4, 1908, a large mass of explosive. In June 1908, a camera sent around the planets, and the idea of circling a planet to slow down before landing. On August 18, 1908, an automatic signal sent from a planet. On October 15, 1908, guidance by light-sensitive cells. None of these ideas could be carried out with the technology of 1908. But each foreshadowed a reality of twentieth-century space exploration.

“On the Possibility of Navigating Interplanetary Space”

On October 3, 1907, Goddard handed his English professor an assignment with an ambitious title: On the Possibility of Navigating Interplanetary Space. He started from a statement by Pickering that little more would be learned about Mars without far more powerful instruments. There are, he said, three ways of knowing other worlds: observing them, “communicating” with them, or traveling to them. The planets might harbor, he wrote, the life of our own past, and perhaps of our future.

Then he went into detail, as an engineer. To live in space one needs food, air, and heat; for heat he thought of Dewar’s insulated flask, the ancestor of the Thermos bottle. On meteors he cited the astronomer Lockyer: they are on average 250 miles apart, only 60 in swarms. Hence a startling idea: travel inside a swarm itself, whose bodies would serve as a shield. For propulsion he invoked the law of action and reaction and the conservation of energy. He calculated that a velocity of 4.01 miles per second was needed to rise to an altitude of 2,000 miles, and that 135.7 pounds of cordite, a military explosive, would be required for each pound sent up. He grasped a crucial point: the smaller the mass ejected, the more velocity, and therefore the more energy, is needed. He even mentioned the pressure of sunlight, which he estimated at four pounds per square mile.

His conclusion came back to the atom: navigation of interplanetary space depended, for its solution, on the problem of atomic disintegration. But he added a sentence that recalls his high school oration: something impossible would probably be achieved by means of something else that had always been considered just as impossible, but was no longer.

Rejections

Goddard tried to get this text published. On October 2, 1907, J. McKeen Cattell of Popular Science Monthly turned down one of his manuscripts. On October 9, Scientific American found his article very ingenious but too long; it sent him a summary of the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius’s theory of panspermia, the idea that life travels from planet to planet in the form of spores. On January 15, 1908, W. W. Payne, editor of Popular Astronomy, was blunter: the impossibility of ever doing such a thing was so certain, he wrote, that it was not practically useful. And he added that Goddard had written well and clearly, but not, in his opinion, usefully for science.

He had already had a first success, though. On June 28, 1907, he noted a letter from Scientific American that morning, with ten dollars: article accepted. The next day the magazine’s supplement published his article on using the gyroscope to balance and steer airplanes. He proposed three gyroscopes set at right angles, whose movements would close electrical contacts that tilted the leading edge of a wing. He drew again on his observations of the chimney swift, which seldom uses its tail. And he predicted that the high-speed aviator would need no rudder at all. It was his first published text. He was twenty-four. And it was already a text about automatic piloting by gyroscope, the principle that would stabilize his rockets twenty-five years later.

“A Grave, Thoughtful, and Reserved Young Man”

In 1908 Goddard completed his studies. His senior thesis dealt with a subject far from rockets: the electrical conductivity of powders, starting from the coherer, the detector of the first radio sets. He drew from it an article in the WPI journal in November 1908, then in the Physical Review in June 1909. He had observed a curiosity: the resistance of freshly ground barium sulfide drops on its own over time.

On January 31, 1908, he was initiated into the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity; on June 3, elected to Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society. On April 21 the Institute offered him a post as instructor for the following year, at 850 dollars. On June 11, 1908, he received his Bachelor of Science degree, along with a first prize of 75 dollars.

The class yearbook, The Aftermath, devoted to each graduate a short portrait written by classmates. Goddard’s is strikingly apt. It describes a quick-witted young man, grave, thoughtful, and reserved among his fellows, who devotes to work the hours others give to sports and meals. The word “grind,” it says, would be too weak for his appetite for knowledge. He delights in the strangest corners of physics. He has studied the gyroscope for relaxation. And yet his voice was once heard, one evening, in the Glee Club, the school chorus.

On July 20, 1908, a diary entry offers a glimpse of a man other than the grind: he had written under the trees all day and could hardly write, the view was so beautiful. On August 9 he noted a maxim: no one can do too much, or too many things, provided he does them well.

At the end of the year another, more melancholy sentence appears in his papers: the years go by, and God pity the man who has only one dream. Goddard had one, and it was a dream he himself had judged impossible two years earlier. On November 8, 1908, his father bought an automobile; on the 14th they went for a drive together as far as Holden. In less than three months, the student turned instructor would make the calculation that changed everything.

Sources: diary 1905–1908; “Journal” notebook (1905–1906); green notebooks (1906–1908); “The High-speed Bet” (January 1906); assignment of October 3, 1907; correspondence with magazines (1907–1908); article in Scientific American Supplement (June 29, 1907); yearbook The Aftermath (1908); autobiographical statement (1921); autobiography (1927) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 5 · 1909 – 1911 The First Calculation

On January 24, 1909, Robert Goddard opened the fourth volume of his green notebooks and wrote a modest heading: slow propulsion by explosives. He was twenty-six, he was teaching physics to students at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and on a few pages of figures he was about to make the first serious calculation of what a rocket might accomplish. Nine years later he would sum up his intellectual life this way: the general idea of lifting a device without using the air came to him while trimming a cherry tree on the afternoon of October 19, 1899; the idea that rocket action had possibilities, on January 24, 1909.

That day Goddard was no longer thinking of a gun firing downward, or of whirling weights, or of the mysterious energy of the atom. He was thinking of the rocket: a craft that carries its own fuel and moves forward by continuously throwing its gases backward. The rocket pushes against nothing. It needs no air. It obeys Newton’s third law, the one he had verified as a teenager on the brook behind the barn.

Hydrogen and Oxygen

For the calculation to make sense, a fuel had to be chosen. Goddard took the best he knew: hydrogen burned in oxygen, the chemical combination that releases the most energy for a given weight. He assumed a velocity of seven miles per second, roughly the speed needed to escape the Earth’s pull. Then he calculated the mass required at the start.

The result was dizzying. Depending on the engine efficiency he assumed, the initial mass ranged from hundreds of tons to millions of tons. A rocket able to leave the Earth would have to be a mountain of fuel for a tiny payload. On February 2 he redid his calculations and noted that ordinary rockets, which eject solid particles, would not do: more than 500 tons would be needed.

But amid these discouraging figures Goddard had two ideas that would change everything. The first was to drop the tanks as they emptied: cylinders released downward once exhausted, so as not to carry their weight uselessly. This was, in embryo, the principle of the multistage rocket. The second was to use gases compressed in small tanks, also to be dropped. He also noted that the chamber where the fuel burned should be spherical, the strongest shape, and that the altitude reached could be measured by exploding, at the top of the flight, a charge with a known light spectrum and locating it from the ground by triangulation.

On June 11, 1909, he added to his notebooks a memo that would become, eleven years later, the starting point of his life’s work: continuous propulsion produced by liquids under pressure. Two days earlier, on June 9, he had noted the idea of using liquid hydrogen and oxygen and of cooling the nozzle. Those three lines contain the modern rocket.

Going Abroad or Staying

In the spring of 1909 Goddard had to decide his future. On March 15 his teacher Duff advised him to study abroad for two years: first at Cambridge, under J. J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, then in Germany. It was the classic path of ambitious young American physicists of the time. But Goddard did his sums: he could not see how to raise more than 800 dollars for two years.

On March 27 he drew up in his diary a list of reasons for going and for staying. Among the reasons for staying he noted one that weighed heavily for a young man whose mother had tuberculosis and who had himself long been ill: a good chance of keeping his health. On March 29, Webster of Clark University assured him that he could obtain a fellowship and take his doctorate in a year. On May 7, 1909, he was appointed Senior Fellow at Clark. He would stay in Worcester.

Clark University

Clark University was a singular institution. Founded in 1887 with the fortune of a wealthy merchant, it was devoted almost entirely to research and graduate study, on the model of the German universities. Its president, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, had brought leading scientists to Worcester. In physics the strong man was Arthur Gordon Webster, a brilliant theorist with an uncompromising character, who would become Goddard’s protector.

In September 1909 Clark celebrated its twentieth anniversary with an international conference. From September 7 to 11 Goddard mingled with luminaries: Albert Michelson, Nobel laureate in physics in 1907; Ernest Rutherford, Nobel laureate in chemistry in 1908; the Italian mathematician Vito Volterra; the American physicist R. W. Wood. He appears in the group photograph. He attended a lecture by the astronomer Percival Lowell on Venus and judged it good. Lowell was then the man who claimed to see canals on Mars, built, he believed, by a dying civilization.

On September 10, in the midst of those days, Goddard noted in his diary a thought that was almost an objection to his own dream: perhaps we could discover everything worth knowing about the planets without going there. On June 20 he had already reflected on life on Mars and concluded that life as advanced as ours seemed impossible there, since Mars had, in his view, evolved faster than the Earth.

Meteors from the Porch

His 1909 diary keeps the record of evenings spent watching the sky. On August 9, sitting on the porch, he counted four meteors; on August 11, thirty-five, all of which seemed to spring from the constellation Cassiopeia. On October 19 he noted the cherry tree anniversary in the evening.

On November 1 a chemistry professor, Rosanoff, gave the students a lecture that Goddard summarized with care. Science, Rosanoff said, is a growing thing, like a city: one does not know all its houses, but one knows its roads, and so one can join the army of workers pushing back the suburbs. The next day Goddard went to hear the singer Geraldine Farrar and the pianist Olga Samaroff. Twenty years later, in 1929, he would buy a piano on which Olga Samaroff had played in Worcester.

At the end of the year he noted two reflections that show the man he was becoming. On December 12: the most wonderful thing in nature is uniformity, the fact that two and two make four. On December 27: nature is wasteful; the Sun gives enough energy for thousands of worlds. The next day, December 28, 1909, he drew up in his notebooks a summary of twenty-six possible methods for reaching great altitudes.

“No More Difficult”

The year 1910 began with a new fellowship. On May 26 he watched Halley’s Comet in the evening sky. On June 16 he received his master’s degree from Clark, with a thesis on the theory of diffraction. On July 9 a typewriter arrived, an important purchase for a man who wrote so much.

On August 23, 1910, he noted in his diary a sentence that marks a psychological turning point. Of his high-altitude problem he wrote: it is no more difficult than many other physical investigations; make it one of them. Space travel ceased to be a dream, or an obsession, or an impossibility. It became a research subject like any other, to be approached with the ordinary methods of physics.

That year the ideas kept piling up in his notebooks. On February 10, producing hydrogen and oxygen on the Moon itself, to refuel on the spot. On August 3, a theory of the hydrogen-oxygen rocket. On November 27, a way of compensating for the absence of weight for a pilot by spinning him to create artificial gravity. At the end of the year, a more personal reflection: what happens after death should no more change the fulfilment of present duty than what will happen in ten years.

The Doctorate

Goddard’s doctoral thesis was not about rockets. It studied crystal detectors, the small pieces of mineral that allowed the first radio sets to pick up signals. He studied them in a vacuum and discovered that, without oxygen or air, the crystal no longer rectified the current. The work would appear in the Physical Review in June 1912.

On January 7, 1911, he went to see Sarah Bernhardt perform on her American tour. In March he built an apparatus that made a beam of electrons travel in a circle. On March 24 Webster watched it work and called it very pretty. On May 17 the University of Missouri offered him a post at 1,000 dollars. On May 19 Webster called his apparatus the most compact he had ever seen. On May 30 the thesis was finished.

On June 9, 1911, Goddard took his doctoral examination. Afterward Webster told him he had done himself credit. Another professor, Taber, said he was proud that one of his students had such command of his subject. On June 15, 1911, Robert Goddard received his doctorate in physics from Clark University cum laude, the only one that year to earn the distinction. The next day someone introduced him for the first time as “Dr. Goddard.” He recorded it in his diary.

In his green notebooks of this period there is a memo that sounds like an order he gave himself: go all the way; be the one to find out what can be done.

“When May We Go to the Moon?”

The summer of 1911 was a time of uncertainty. On August 16 he still had no position. Duff advised him to turn to mathematical physics. On August 21 a Boston newspaper, the Boston American, carried an article titled When May We Go to the Moon?; Goddard noted it in his papers. On September 4 he saw the first airplanes fly over Worcester: the monoplane of the aviator Earle Ovington.

On September 15, 1911, good news arrived: Columbia University in New York offered him a post at 1,600 dollars. Goddard got a haircut, bought a derby hat and a suitcase, and went to visit Columbia. He met the physicists Pegram and Burnside and dined at the faculty club. Then he did not take the post. According to the editors of his papers, the teaching load would have left him too little time for research. On September 26 Pegram wrote that he regretted Goddard would not be working with them that year.

So Goddard stayed at Clark as an honorary fellow, a researcher without salary. He lived on the savings from his year of teaching at WPI. It was a risky bet. But it was the first example of a choice he would make all his life: to prefer free time for research over the security of an ordinary career.

Sources: green notebooks (January 24, February 2, June 9 and 11, 1909; February 10, August 3, November 27, 1910); “The Last Migration” (January 14, 1918); diary 1909–1911; Scientific American editorial (November 20, 1909); Columbia correspondence (September 1911); autobiography (1927); autobiographical statement (1921) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 6 · 1911 – 1913 Princeton

On the eve of a meeting of the American Physical Society in the spring of 1912, Robert Goddard was in a situation every researcher dreads. He had sent in an abstract announcing a new result, and he could no longer reproduce it. He believed he had measured a mechanical force produced by what physicists call a displacement current, a subtle notion in electromagnetic theory. On repeating the experiment, he discovered that the apparatus had in fact been reacting against a nearby wire. The result collapsed. The paper was scheduled in less than twenty-four hours.

Goddard did not give up. With his friend Harold F. Stimson, a student at Clark, he started over. They worked for three hours straight and finally measured a real force on a piece of hard rubber. On April 27, 1912, in Cambridge, near Harvard, Goddard read his paper: On Mechanical Force from the Magnetic Field of a Displacement Current. He would call the episode a good lesson. He never forgot that a result exists only if it can be repeated.

Washington, December 1911

The preceding months had been those of a young Ph.D. making a name for himself. From December 26 to 31, 1911, he attended the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington. He visited the Smithsonian, its meteorite collections, and the Bureau of Standards. He presented his work with lantern slides, and a colleague, Powers, reported that everyone craned their necks when he showed his pictures. He heard President William Taft give a speech, and the physicist Albert Michelson declare that a new Newton, a new Kepler, would be needed to read the message the worlds send us through their light waves.

On March 2, 1912, at Columbia, the physicist Olshausen remarked, about the post Goddard had declined, that Columbia had missed a valuable man. At the April meeting, Pegram of Columbia greeted him with a line that showed his growing reputation, asking what he had up his sleeve this time. Duff offered him a post. On April 29 Webster wrote of him that he showed great ingenuity and much skill in experiment.

A Charter of Liberty

The April 1912 paper had an important listener: Professor Owen W. Richardson of Princeton, one of the world’s specialists in the emission of electrons by hot metals, who would receive the Nobel Prize in physics in 1928. Richardson wanted Goddard in his laboratory. An administrative route had to be found. On May 24, 1912, Professor William Magie of Princeton explained that the Proctor fellowship, intended for such cases, required a liberal arts degree: his engineering degree would not do. Another solution was sought: a post as research instructor, paid 1,000 dollars from a special fund.

On June 8, 1912, it was settled. Magie announced his appointment and added a sentence Goddard would treasure: keep this letter as a kind of charter of your rights and liberties. The post left him time for research. For a man who had turned down Columbia for lack of time, it was the finest of gifts.

The Train in the Tube

That spring the press was talking about a French inventor living in the United States, Émile Bachelet, who was showing a model train floating above its rails by means of electromagnets. On May 27, 1912, Goddard wrote to the Boston Sunday American. He recalled that he had proposed a similar idea as early as 1905 in his freshman essay, and that his story on the subject had been rejected. And he made an observation that applies to his whole life: fiction often comes before successful experiment. He specified that in his scheme the New York-Boston trip would take ten minutes with an acceleration of 11.6 feet per second per second, about a third of gravity.

On July 30, 1912, he filed a patent application on a device for producing electrical impulses, which would become patent No. 1,159,209. Between July 28 and August 1 he wrote in his green notebooks a long “summary” of his jet problem. The list shows the scope of his thinking: protection against meteors; the physiological effects of acceleration on a passenger; recording thermographs and barographs to measure temperature and pressure at altitude; a camera flying around a planet; the return to Earth of a craft placed in orbit; electric propulsion; solar energy; liquid hydrogen and oxygen; guncotton. At twenty-nine, Goddard had already asked almost all the questions of astronautics.

Arriving at Princeton

On September 10, 1912, his father saw him off at the Worcester station. That evening Goddard settled into the Peacock Inn in Princeton, dined on roast beef by candlelight, strolled along Nassau Street, the main street of the little college town, and wrote to his mother. His grandmother, “Gram,” Mrs. N. P. Goddard, also moved to Princeton; the editors of his papers believe she was worried about her grandson’s health. He rented rooms from a Mrs. Brown.

Princeton made what he would call an indelible impression on him. The Palmer Physical Laboratory, its handsome buildings, its tall trees: everything breathed prestige. The physicist R. W. Wood showed him around the laboratory. On September 23 he met Dean Andrew West and noted that he was one of the most inspiring men he had ever seen.

And as early as September 29 his diary records a particular evening: he had written up notes on liquid hydrogen and oxygen.

Day and Night

Goddard’s life at Princeton was now split in two. By day he worked for Richardson on the displacement current. His experiments were extremely delicate. He measured a force on a strip of hard rubber of less than one six-hundred-millionth of a pound, produced by a current reversing direction three million times a second. To keep static electricity from distorting the measurements in cold weather, he placed radium bromide in the apparatus to make the air slightly conducting. He sealed the windows with cotton. He used a hydrogen generator that gave off sulfuric acid fumes. On November 5, 1912, that generator exploded.

At night he returned to his real subject. During the year 1912–1913 he worked out in his notebooks the mathematical theory of rocket propulsion. He studied two propellants: smokeless powder, the explosive of modern armies, and hydrogen burned in oxygen. He assumed an efficiency of fifty percent, meaning that half the chemical energy would be turned into motion of the gases. The figure then seemed fanciful: fireworks rockets used only a tiny fraction. His experiments would nevertheless confirm it a few years later.

On October 19, 1912, Anniversary Day, he wrote a work program in his green notebook: air resistance, calculation for guncotton, shape of the jet, feed mechanism and cartridges. It was the list of what would have to be solved to go from theory to object.

Election Night

On October 23, 1912, the displacement-current experiment finally gave a positive result. Richardson demanded an explanation of the observed effect; Goddard found it on the very morning he was to give it. On November 5, presidential election day, he joined the evening parade up to the house of Woodrow Wilson, the former president of the university turned governor of New Jersey, who had just been elected President of the United States. There were speeches and songs. Goddard got home at ten minutes to midnight.

On November 27, for Thanksgiving, he went home to Worcester. His father had built a new house on the hill near Maple Hill. His mother showed him his room and the towels she had hemmed with his initials. Two days later his friend Stimson said something that sounds like a prophecy: if you send a rocket off the Earth, it will make a sensation; remember, Jules Verne used a cannon.

“The Most Beautiful Thing”

The winter of 1912–1913 brought recognition. On March 3, 1913, Goddard watched Woodrow Wilson leave by train for his inauguration in Washington and sang Old Nassau, the Princeton anthem, with the crowd. On March 6 he attended a banquet in honor of Richardson, who sang a song about the corpuscle, that is, the electron. On March 13 he presented to the physics colloquium his work on the production of light by cathode rays. The astronomer Henry Norris Russell, one of the greatest of his day, declared before his colleagues that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, a new kind of discharge. Another professor, Northrup, asked him whether he had reasoned out all those steps himself.

Goddard was thirty. He was becoming a recognized physicist at one of the best universities in the country. He worked by day on minute forces and by night on voyages to the Moon. He slept little. He would admit it himself in 1921: trying to finish two or three years of work in one led to the breakdown of his health.

On March 19 or 20, 1913, he went home to Worcester for the Easter vacation, which fell early that year. He had, he thought, a slight cold. His diary, so regular, then stopped for almost a month.

Sources: autobiography (1927); autobiographical statement (1921); diary 1911–1913; green notebooks (July 28–August 1 and October 19, 1912); letters from W. F. Magie (May 24 and June 8, 1912); letter to the Boston Sunday American (May 27, 1912) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 7 · 1913 – 1914 Two Weeks to Live

At the Worcester house, in the spring of 1913, Robert Goddard’s “slight cold” would not go away. He coughed in fits. His mother applied the family remedy, a mixture of snuff and lard. The family doctor came, then a specialist. The diagnosis was tuberculosis of both lungs. The patient at once asked the only question that mattered to him: would he still be able to do much work? A little work outdoors, he was told, if he was careful. He learned later that the doctors had given him two weeks to live.

In his autobiography Goddard tells the scene with a lightness that hints at what it cost him. His first thought, he writes, was for his problem, the high-altitude problem. And he slips in a joke: his recovery, he would say, was largely due to the position of the Moon, since it is the Moon that fixes the date of Easter; in 1913 Easter fell early, and it was that vacation that had brought him home.

The Night of the Storm

Tuberculosis in 1913 had no treatment. Antibiotics did not yet exist. Patients were treated with rest, fresh air, and good food, and then one waited. Many died. Robert’s own mother had suffered from it for years. He knew what it meant.

One March night a thunderstorm broke over Worcester. Across the valley a house caught fire. Robert, in bed, watched the blaze and began to laugh: if he could stay calm on such a night, he told himself, he was saved. The next day he dictated to his father a letter asking his grandmother and his aunt Annie to pack up all his papers. He truly believed, he would write, that his father was more agitated than he was.

That laugh in front of a fire, that immediate concern for his papers, say something essential about the man. Goddard was neither a hero nor a saint. But he had a kind of inner calm, almost stubborn, that would keep him on his feet through most of the trials of his life.

Breathing

Goddard’s diary, so regular, falls silent from March 21 to April 17, 1913. Then it resumes, in short entries that measure each victory. April 18: sat in a chair by the bed. April 19: walked to a chair and sat in it. Then a new silence until May 13.

During those weeks he imposed on himself a treatment of his own devising. Despite the doctor’s skepticism, he practiced deep-breathing exercises. He had his room heated while leaving the windows wide open, so as to breathe cold air without catching cold. A nurse, Margaret Doyle, cared for him. In two weeks the fever dropped. In two months he could take short walks.

On May 14, 1913, he noted that he had come downstairs for the first time that day. On May 18 he sat on the porch, in his usual place, with his mother and father. On May 19 a letter announced a post at Clark College for the year 1914–1915: he had not been forgotten. On May 25 he dined downstairs for the first time. His parents had decorated the dining room in Princeton’s colors, orange and black, with a tiger, the university’s emblem, on the table. Everyone, he noted, the dog included, was dressed up. Aunt Cal and Uncle Fron were there. After the meal he took his first automobile ride: twelve minutes.

The Patent of Convalescence

On June 2, 1913, barely able to get down a flight of stairs, Robert Goddard began drafting a patent application. He wrote for only an hour a day, in the afternoon. On July 2 his father took the text to the attorneys Southgate & Southgate in Worcester. It was there that Charles T. Hawley began handling Goddard’s patents. He would follow them all his life, and after his death: the two hundred fourteenth and last Goddard patent would be issued in 1956.

A patent protects an idea, but it also dates it: it establishes, in law, who had it first. For a man the doctors had just written off, it was a way of putting his work in safe keeping, whatever happened.

Two patents came out of this convalescence, both titled Rocket Apparatus. The first, filed on October 1, 1913, was issued on July 7, 1914, as No. 1,102,653. The second, filed on May 15, 1914, was issued on July 14, 1914, as No. 1,103,503. Goddard would sum up their three principles this way: a combustion chamber extended by a nozzle, which turns the heat of the gases into velocity; the feeding of this chamber with successive portions of fuel, liquid or solid; and the use of several rockets, dropped one after another once exhausted. The second was the first of his patents to mention liquid propellants: a fuel and an oxidizer held in tanks and sent by pumps to the chamber.

These three principles, the nozzle, continuous feed, and stages, are those of every modern rocket. They were laid down by a thirty-one-year-old man, half convalescent, who wrote for one hour a day.

“The Navigation of Interplanetary Space”

Between September 10 and October 11, 1913, still convalescing, Goddard wrote the outline of an article he titled The Navigation of Interplanetary Space. It is the most visionary text of his youth. He first explains the practical value of the enterprise: a camera placed near a planet would be worth a telescope several thousand feet long on Earth.

Then he turns to a justification of another scale. Interplanetary navigation, he writes, must be achieved to ensure the continuation of the human race. He relied on a theory of the astronomer George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, that the Moon was moving away from the Earth and would one day come back and strike it. It would then be necessary to leave for a planet nearer the Sun. And the Moon, that agent of destruction, would also be, he writes, its salvation: it could serve as a departure base, and the hydrogen and oxygen needed for the voyage could be made there.

He describes the three key improvements to the rocket at the heart of his patents: a nozzle like those of steam turbines; several rockets in succession, each smaller than the one before; and a small chamber fed from a magazine. He estimates that with guncotton burned at seventy percent efficiency, 500 pounds would be needed at the start for one pound to leave the Earth. To prove that the Moon had been reached, he proposes exploding flash powder on it at new moon, when the face turned toward us is dark. For life aboard, he observes that the problems of food and air have already been solved in submarines, and that of heat by the Thermos bottle. Against meteors, a long, narrow craft would offer less target. And to go as far as Mars, the Sun’s energy would have to be used along the way.

The text was not published. Goddard knew all too well how such ideas would be received.

The Hermitage

From the fall of 1913 to the spring of 1914 he walked. His walks took him over the wooded hills around a place the family called “the Hermitage.” On October 19, 1913, Anniversary Day, he noted a program in his green notebook: finish the patents, an electric pump, Darwin, meteors. And he added: also try a jet.

In February and March 1914 he drew and drafted the second patent. On March 26 he had the idea of adding the section on fluids, the part describing the liquid feed. On April 1 he noted that he had thought of an aerial torpedo in the morning.

On April 2, 1914, he recorded the story of his birth: grandfather Hoyt standing drinks for the whole shop, and the French workman prophesying that this boy would never die. In that spring of convalescence the line took on a particular weight.

On April 8 Professor Magie wrote from Princeton. He was delighted with his recovery: he had felt, he said, that Goddard had a great future as a researcher. He might yet do first-rate work, provided he worked patiently, but not for too long at a stretch.

“Worth a Million Dollars”

On April 22, 1914, Goddard was examined by Dr. Lapham of the Rutland sanatorium in Massachusetts. The verdict was encouraging: he could work the following year, six to eight hours a day, provided he avoided overwork. And if he held out for five years, he would probably never have a relapse. To the family doctor, Dr. Fisher, Lapham confided a sentence that sounded like a prognosis: if Mr. Goddard had lived a healthy life, it would be worth a million dollars to him.

On May 23, 1914, Clark College appointed him instructor in physics for one year, part time and on trial, for 500 dollars. On June 20 Magie wrote that if he had been thought capable of full-time work, Princeton would have offered him a post. Princeton would remain only a memory. His career would be made in Worcester.

A Letter to the Navy

On July 25, 1914, a few days after his two patents were issued, Goddard wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. He proposed using his rocket as a weapon against aircraft, firing projectiles along its path. But he specified that his apparatus had been designed for high-altitude meteorological observations, and that he would assign his patents only on condition that he could keep using them for research. He even raised the possibility of wireless guidance. On August 12 Daniels asked for data and samples.

That double movement would define his whole career: Goddard would offer his rockets to the military, because they alone could fund such costly research, but he would never give up his first aim, science and altitude.

On August 21, 1914, he began writing a long paper, The Problem of Raising a Body to a Great Altitude above the Surface of the Earth. It was the first draft of the text that would make him famous. In it he recalled that sounding balloons hardly rose above twenty miles, and that beyond them lay an unknown region: the upper atmosphere, the auroras, the Sun’s ultraviolet rays. He calculated that a one-foot camera lens passing 500 miles from the Moon would be worth a 443-foot telescope on Earth. He proposed photographing the far side of the Moon. And he wrote a crucial sentence that answered his critics in advance: the ether cannot serve as a support. The rocket needs nothing to push against.

On September 12 he handed the typed manuscript to Webster. On October 19 he noted that he had walked around the square to Gates Lane and seen the tree at dusk. On October 24 the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a certain Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed a demonstration at Newport. On the 26th Goddard declined for the time being. He had not yet built a single rocket. It was time to begin.

Sources: autobiography (1927); diary (March–October 1913 and 1914); green notebooks (October 19, 1913, 1914); outline “The Navigation of Interplanetary Space” (September–October 1913); patents No. 1,102,653 and No. 1,103,503 (July 1914); letters from W. F. Magie (April 8 and June 20, 1914); Navy correspondence (July–October 1914); manuscript of August 21, 1914; Esther C. Goddard’s calendar — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 8 · 1915 – 1916 A Rocket in a Vacuum

On January 25, 1915, Robert Goddard, thirty-two, a part-time instructor in physics at Clark College, wrote in his diary a sentence that sums up the situation of a man who has come back from far away: it is frightening how short life is, and how much one would like to do; one must be a good sport, take chances, and do what one can. Tuberculosis had spared him. He had two patents in his pocket and a manuscript in a drawer. He lacked the essential thing: proof, by experiment, that his calculations were not daydreams.

“An Airplane Is Nothing Beside It”

The manuscript of August 1914 was circulating among his teachers. On January 6, 1915, Webster read it. Goddard recorded his reaction precisely: Webster found no flaw but seemed to judge the whole thing unreasonable. Two days later Duff, his Polytechnic professor, reacted quite differently: an airplane, he said, was nothing beside it.

These two reactions sum up what Goddard would face for thirty years. His calculations were sound, and the best physicists acknowledged it. But what they demonstrated was so far from ordinary experience that even those physicists hesitated to believe it.

On January 12 and 26, 1915, WPI’s Tech News reported on a colloquium at which Goddard had presented new methods of reaching high altitudes. The student reporter cautiously concluded that it was not yet known whether all the mysteries of flight would be revealed, or our relations with Mars explained. On February 1 Goddard spoke from five o’clock to six-thirty-five before a large number of sophomores. The next day the Worcester Evening Gazette ran a headline saying he had invented a high-altitude engine. His father, amused, began calling him “the angel shooter.”

Ship Rockets

To test his theory, Goddard needed to measure what existing rockets were really worth. In February and March 1915 he ordered some in town and wrote to the Du Pont company, the great powder manufacturer. He weighed Coston rockets, the life-saving rockets used to fire lines to ships in distress, and opened one to study its construction. On February 25 his father brought him a gun for his “jet experiments.” He built a ballistic pendulum, a heavy suspended block whose recoil makes it possible to calculate the force of a jet. He polished the inside of a nozzle with emery paper.

The editors of his papers note that throughout 1915 and 1916 his diary mentions experiments almost every day. The invalid of 1913 had become a tireless experimenter.

On April 1, 1915, he made an experiment with a “gas gun” behind the Maple Hill barn. On April 10 he fired three ship rockets inside Clark’s building and noted that he had scared the janitor. On May 15: it worked, and plaster was knocked off. On May 21 he measured a gas velocity of 4,440 feet per second, an efficiency he estimated, with a question mark, at 16.7 percent.

Two Percent Efficiency

To understand what Goddard was after, one must understand what a rocket’s efficiency is. A rocket turns the chemical energy of its powder into energy of motion of its gases. The faster the gases leave, the more efficiently the rocket is pushed. Now ordinary rockets, those of fireworks and ship signals, were extraordinarily inefficient. Goddard measured that the Coston rocket used only about two percent of the energy of its powder. Its gases left at barely a thousand feet per second, and its range was a quarter of a mile.

No one had really noticed. When Goddard presented his results in April 1916, he would note that nobody had realized how low the efficiency of the ordinary rocket was, himself included.

His solution was to burn the powder in a strong steel chamber, then let the gases out through a carefully shaped nozzle flaring toward the rear. This was the principle of the nozzle invented by the Swede Gustaf de Laval for steam turbines: expanding in the cone, the gases accelerate and their heat turns into velocity. Applied to a rocket, this nozzle changed everything.

In June 1915 the measured velocities climbed: 5,750, 6,140, 6,390, then 6,730 feet per second, with a commercial powder called “Infallible.” On June 16 he went to fire rockets at Coes Pond in Worcester with Stimson and a man named Ellison. Rocket No. 9 crossed the pond; he estimated that it reached about 486 feet.

A Professor

On March 19, 1915, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, offered him the post of Karl T. Compton, a young physicist who would later become president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Goddard declined because of the research he was conducting at Clark. On May 28 Clark appointed him assistant professor of physics, at a salary of up to 1,125 dollars. There he found two colleagues with whom he would often work: the physicist Hubbard and the chemist Charles A. Kraus, who would become one of the pioneers of leaded gasoline.

On July 19 he read on the porch, in Cosmopolitan magazine, H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. On October 23 he wrote to Pickering at Harvard about a new spectroscopic method developed with Hubbard; Pickering invited him to visit. On October 19, Anniversary Day, he noted a strategy in his green notebook: have the device developed by the Navy or the Army for coast defense, provided he could use it for altitude research; failing that, publish.

The Dream of August 8, 1915

On August 8, 1915, at a quarter past six in the morning, Goddard woke up and recorded a dream in his diary. He had gone to the Moon. He wondered where to land on the way out and on the way back. He lit a red flare at a time and place announced in advance, so that everyone could see it. It was cold, there was not enough oxygen, and he went back into the cabin for a while. He photographed the Earth with a small Kodak, two views to make a stereoscopic picture. On the way back he caught sight of the Earth and wondered whether what he saw was South America. His craft carried a ladder that also served as a crowbar, a tripod, and legs folded up during the voyage.

This dream is one of the rare documents in which Goddard lets himself imagine a human voyage into space. He would never speak of it in public. He noted it with the same technical precision as his experiments, down to the folding legs of his craft.

In December 1915 he prepared an experiment for his great demonstration project: how much magnesium powder would have to be exploded on the Moon for the flash to be visible from the Earth? On December 27 he reread The War of the Worlds on the south porch. On the 28th he read Other Worlds and The Moon by Garrett P. Serviss, the author of Edison’s Conquest of Mars, which had thrilled him in 1898.

“Jets of Gases Having High Velocities”

On February 25, 1916, a firing in the large tank gave 5,890 feet per second, with an efficiency of thirty-nine percent. On March 1 President Sanford of Clark appointed him acting head of the physics department, at a salary of 1,500 dollars, if his health permitted.

On April 10, 1916, he presented his work in a talk titled Jets of Gases Having High Velocities. Webster judged it very ingenious. It was then that Goddard realized how much his results surprised people: no one had suspected that ordinary rockets wasted almost all their energy.

On May 5 he installed U-tubes in the laboratory for his measurements, and Webster joked that it was worse than putting up a stove. On May 17 a student, Chester Wentworth, paid him a compliment he noted with pleasure: here was a man, he said, who was willing to build apparatus instead of gluing things together. On June 1 he gave his last mechanics class of the year: the class applauded. He bought a Colt automatic pistol to study and adapt its reloading mechanism: he was looking for a way to feed a rocket chamber with successive cartridges, like an automatic weapon.

The Vacuum

There remained the great question, the one all his critics would put to him for years: can a rocket move in a vacuum? Many people, including educated minds, believed that a rocket moves because its gases “push” against the air behind it. With no air, it would have nothing to push against. Goddard knew this was wrong: Newton’s third law applies everywhere. But he wanted to show it.

He built an apparatus of great simplicity. A firing chamber of nickel steel was placed in a large vessel from which he pumped the air, down to a pressure of half a millimeter of mercury, less than a thousandth of atmospheric pressure. The chamber was mounted so that it could recoil freely; its recoil was measured. On June 28, 1916, he obtained in the vacuum a gas velocity of 8,242 feet per second and punctuated his diary with an exclamation mark. On July 17 he finished the series with 7,650 feet per second for a charge of 1.52 grams.

The result was unambiguous: the thrust was at least as great in a vacuum as in air. The rocket does not lean on the atmosphere. It is indeed the only known means of moving through space. The biographical calendar later compiled by Esther Goddard keeps a simple image of this series of experiments: a revolver fired in a vacuum, to prove that reaction occurs even where there is nothing.

The Summer of the Safe-Deposit Box

In July and August 1916 Goddard calculated and wrote on the porch. He made a clean copy of the great paper begun in 1914, incorporating his measurements. A secretary, Miss Soderberg, typed it. On August 7 he deposited his patents and his manuscript in a box at the Worcester Safe Deposit Company.

The document was ready. It showed that the rocket could, in theory, reach altitudes nothing else could reach; that well-built rockets were up to thirty times more efficient than ordinary ones; and that they worked in a vacuum. But to take the next step, building a real rocket able to climb high, he needed money, mechanics, a shop. He had reached, he would soon write, the limit of what he could do alone.

Sources: diary 1915–1916; green notebook (October 19, 1915); Tech News (January 12 and 26, 1915); Worcester Evening Gazette (February 2, 1915); experiment notes and report to the Smithsonian (1916); Esther C. Goddard’s calendar; autobiography (1927) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 9 · 1916 – 1917 “A Whale of a Grant”

On September 27, 1916, Robert Goddard wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington the most important letter of his youth. In a few pages he set out what he had done, what he believed possible, and what he needed. And he ended with an admission few researchers dare put in writing: he had reached the limit of what he could do alone.

Why the Smithsonian

The choice of addressee was no accident. Goddard had first written to the Aero Club of America, the country’s great aeronautical association: the letter went unanswered. The Smithsonian Institution, founded in the mid-nineteenth century through the bequest of an English scientist, James Smithson, was then the leading public scientific institution in the United States. It ran museums, observatories, research funds. A few years earlier it had supported its Secretary Samuel Langley’s work on flying machines. And it had a special fund, the Hodgkins Fund, from the 1891 bequest of a certain Thomas George Hodgkins, expressly intended for the study of the atmosphere.

Goddard said it plainly at the end of his letter: the Smithsonian alone was where he must turn. There was a reason for this, which he explained with care. Webster, a member of the Naval Consulting Board, the committee of scientists created to advise the Navy, had wanted to present his device to that board. Goddard had hesitated. First, because he could trust no one else to explain his apparatus. Second, because reserving his rocket for military use would be, he wrote, a loss to science.

The Letter of September 27

The heart of the letter was a demonstration in figures. Goddard recalled ordinary rockets: a one-pound Coston rocket carried a quarter of a mile, with an efficiency of barely two percent, and its gases left at about a thousand feet per second. His own steel chambers fitted with nozzles, built on the model of de Laval turbines, had reached an efficiency of over sixty-three percent. This figure, he stressed, was the highest ever obtained from a heat engine: the best steam engine reached twenty-one percent, the Diesel engine forty. His gases left at an average of more than 7,000 feet per second, and at most a little under 8,000.

Then he explained the theory he had worked out at Princeton. The gas velocity enters the calculation exponentially: multiplying the exhaust velocity by five amounts to reducing the required initial mass to its fifth root. That is why improving efficiency changed everything. With his improved rockets, one pound of payload could reach an altitude of 35 miles for a starting mass of 3.6 to 12.6 pounds; 72 miles for 5.1 to 24.3 pounds; 232 miles for 9.8 to 89.6 pounds. With ordinary Coston-type rockets, those masses would have to be raised to the twenty-seventh power: in other words, no ordinary rocket could ever climb that high.

He even provided for a parachute to bring the instruments back to the ground. And he cited his patents: Nos. 1,102,653 and 1,103,503 of 1914, and 1,191,299 and 1,194,496 of 1916.

Abbot

The letter landed on the desk of Charles G. Abbot, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and a specialist in solar radiation. On October 2, 1916, Abbot wrote to his superior, the Secretary of the Institution, the paleontologist Charles D. Walcott. His first reaction was astonishment: Goddard claimed he could reach several hundred miles! But Abbot had read the calculations. He considered the method probably sound. He even noted that he had discussed it with the astronomer George Ellery Hale at Mount Wilson five years earlier: the idea of sending instruments beyond the atmosphere was already circulating among astronomers.

Charles Abbot would become one of Goddard’s most faithful supporters. For nearly thirty years he would back his requests, read his reports, and advise him in his dealings with the military and the press. The editors of Goddard’s papers would publish part of their correspondence, which shows a friendship built on trust and mutual respect.

On October 11 Walcott, back from an expedition to the Canadian Northwest, where he was studying the fossils of the Burgess Shale, asked Goddard what his program would cost.

The Budget

During these weeks of waiting Goddard went on with his experiments. On October 7 he tried flash powders in a barn belonging to a man named Eaton. On October 17 his grandmother died. She was buried on October 19, Anniversary Day. That evening Goddard simply noted that he had gone by the road and seen the cherry tree.

On that same October 19, 1916, he sent his budget to the Smithsonian. He would need an experimenter and two mechanics for a year, at least 5,000 dollars. Each rocket would cost about 250 dollars. He described a reloading mechanism based on his patent No. 1,103,503: the chamber would be fed with successive cartridges, like an automatic weapon, so that the rocket could burn a great deal of fuel without needing an enormous chamber.

On October 28 and November 2 he carried out at Auburn, near Worcester, the flash experiment he had been preparing for a year. He exploded minute amounts of magnesium powder and observed at what distance the flash remained visible. A quantity of 0.0029 gram was still visible at a distance. From this he drew a first estimate: the minimum mass to be sent to the Moon might be on the order of ten pounds. He noted the figure with a question mark.

The Wooden Box

On November 29, 1916, Walcott wrote that the principle seemed to him evident and sound. He asked precise questions about the theory and the reloading mechanism. Goddard then decided to send his complete manuscript to Washington. On December 4 he shipped it, bound, in a wooden box made for the occasion. The box has been preserved: it is now on display, with the manuscript, at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

On December 18 Abbot delivered his written opinion. The theory was sound, and the experimental work both sound and ingenious. And he added a sentence whose value Goddard would long appreciate: he could be trusted to carry the work through as he saw fit. On December 26 Edgar Buckingham, a physicist at the Bureau of Standards, whom Duff described as the clearest mind in the country on thermodynamics, also gave his approval.

The Atom, Again

Between December 28 and 30, 1916, while awaiting the decision, Goddard filled pages of notes on an entirely different subject: the disintegration of the atom. He imagined accelerating ions by making them circle in a magnetic field, giving them a push on each turn. The editors of his papers would see in this a foreshadowing of the cyclotron that Ernest Lawrence would build at Berkeley between 1928 and 1932, the device that opened the era of experimental nuclear physics. Goddard went no further down this path. But the atom, which he had thought indispensable in 1906, remained for him a door left ajar.

January 5, 1917

On January 5, 1917, Charles Walcott informed Goddard that the Smithsonian Institution was granting him 5,000 dollars from the Hodgkins Fund. A first check for 1,000 dollars was enclosed with the letter.

On January 8 Goddard read the letter to his parents. His father told him he had presented the thing to them beautifully. His mother, ill for years, had a reaction her son recorded closely: it was the most wonderful thing she had ever heard. Just think, she said: you send the government a few typewritten sheets and some pictures, and they send you a thousand dollars and tell you they will send four more. On January 12 she added that she thought he could do it.

On January 11 his friend Thompson found a phrase that made Goddard laugh: it was, he said, “a whale of a grant.” On January 15 Duff told him how highly he thought of Buckingham.

Five thousand 1917 dollars was three to four years of his salary as an assistant professor. Above all, it was the first time an institution had officially recognized that the project of sending a rocket into the upper atmosphere deserved public money. For the man who had written alone, at night, in a room at Princeton, it was a consecration. He did not yet know that three months later the United States would be at war, and that his rocket would change character in the eyes of everyone who took an interest in it.

Sources: letter from R. H. Goddard to the Smithsonian (September 27, 1916); letter from C. G. Abbot to C. D. Walcott (October 2, 1916); budget of October 19, 1916; notes on the flash experiment (October–November 1916); letters from Walcott (November 29, 1916, January 5, 1917); opinions of Abbot (December 18, 1916) and Buckingham; diary December 1916–January 1917; autobiography (1927) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 10 · 1917 – 1918 The Magnetic Laboratory

In early 1918, at the far end of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute campus, a small thick-walled stone building with a single door housed one of the strangest projects of America’s war. It was called the “magnetic laboratory.” At night a watchman armed with a Winchester rifle guarded the entrance. Drunks sometimes came and rang the bell; they vanished quickly when the watchman appeared with his gun. Charles Abbot, who came to inspect the place, wrote to Washington that spies seemed to be active. Behind those walls Robert Goddard was building rockets for the United States Army.

The Magnetic Laboratory

It had all begun quietly. With the Smithsonian’s 5,000 dollars, Goddard needed a larger shop than Clark’s. The president of WPI, Ira Hollis, lent him a small campus building, the Magnetic Laboratory. On March 13, 1917, the Tech News informed students that Dr. Goddard’s new rocket was being developed there and that the experiments were being conducted by C. D. Haigis of the physics department. The Winchester arms company donated nickel steel worth 160 dollars.

On February 22, 1917, Goddard had received a letter from Hudson Maxim, the famous inventor of explosives and brother of the inventor of the machine gun. Maxim gave him a recipe for a powder made of nitroglycerin, camphor, and guncotton, and advised him to stand behind a barricade, as a precaution.

The tests began. On March 17 a new firing gun, loaded with 20.9 grams of powder, gave 6,300 feet per second, but the gun bulged under the pressure. On March 31, 7,200 feet per second with 35 grams. On April 3 Goddard sketched, on the south porch of the family house, the reloading mechanism of his rocket.

War

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered the European war. Five days later Goddard wrote to the Smithsonian proposing military applications for his rocket. His arguments were an engineer’s: a range greater than that of artillery, a device easy to carry and fire, needing no fixed emplacement the enemy could locate. He asked for status as a “ballistics expert” and wished his patents to remain secret until the end of hostilities.

Charles Abbot was enthusiastic. On April 14 he proposed that the War Department spend up to 50,000 dollars on the project. In the climate of 1917 he imagined bombs sent a hundred miles and wrote, about the Krupp works at Essen and the German population, a sentence of great harshness that reflects the violence of the time. Walcott was more cautious. On April 20 he replied that a demonstration was needed first: couldn’t Goddard make a small rocket?

The question was cruel and fair. Goddard had theories, measurements, patents. He had not yet built a rocket that flew.

A Machine Gun Firing Downward

The summer of 1917 was difficult. On July 9 a hardened gun exploded with 42 grams of powder. On August 6 Goddard wrote a report for the Smithsonian. He described his team: Haigis, assisted by Carl S. Carlson, a machinist and WPI student; Nils Riffolt, mechanic of the Clark physics shop, who did the precision machining. The combustion chambers were made at the L. Hardy Company, his grandfather’s machine-knife firm. In June Goddard had bought a secondhand Ford roadster, which he gave Haigis for his errands, to be resold in the fall. At President Hollis’s request, blankets were hung at the windows to muffle the noise of the firings. A powder called “Lightning,” made by the Hercules company, was tested, along with an entirely combustible cartridge. The chrome-vanadium steel chamber weighed 7.5 pounds and burned 40 grams of powder with each shot.

On August 20, 1917, Goddard wrote to the Chief of Ordnance of the Army. He described his rocket as a kind of machine gun firing downward through a de Laval nozzle: each cartridge burned pushes the rocket upward. He enclosed a table of ranges. A 300-pound rocket could reach 70 miles. It would cost about 150 dollars.

On August 27 and 28 he was at West Point, the military academy. An officer, Captain Dunwoody, exclaimed: couldn’t he see there were millions in it for him? Goddard noted it without comment. Money was not what interested him.

The Cherry Leaf

On October 19, 1917, Anniversary Day, Goddard went to see the cherry tree in the dead of night. His diary describes the scene with moving restraint. There were arc lamps to the south; the foliage was thicker than he remembered. Quiet, and secluded, he writes. He leaned hard against the trunk of the tree. He picked up a leaf from the ground, at the top of the bank, southeast of the tree. When the 1917 diary was opened decades later, a dried leaf was found slipped in at the end of the volume.

“Practically Hopeless”

In November 1917 Goddard went to Washington. He met Dunwoody again, then the officers of the Signal Corps, the Army’s communications branch, which was then in charge of aviation. Industrialists took an interest in him. Winchester Bennett, president of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, offered him his firing range. George I. Rockwood, head of the Rockwood Sprinkler Company, wanted to manufacture the rocket. Goddard set one condition: he wanted it called the “Goddard Rocket,” so that he could later use it for science. The negotiations with Rockwood broke down on January 24, 1918.

On December 5, 1917, the Ordnance reply showed that Goddard had not managed to make his device understood: without a working model, the project seemed practically hopeless. That same month William W. Bird, professor of mechanical engineering at WPI, lent him machinists. In December Goddard had the flu. On January 9, 1918, he sent a new report. He had solved the firing problem: there were no more misfires above a certain striking energy. He proposed stabilizing the rocket with fins or rods pointing backward rather than by spin. He imagined a circular magazine from which cartridges would be taken alternately from opposite rows, to keep the balance.

The Signal Corps

On January 16, 1918, Webster recommended Goddard to Admiral Ralph Earle, Chief of Naval Ordnance, as a meticulous and tireless investigator. On January 17 Goddard was in Washington. He slept at the Archbolds’, on a couch in the dining room near the fireplace, and heard the clock strike the hours all night.

On January 22, 1918, Walcott and Samuel Stratton, director of the Bureau of Standards, recommended to General George Squier, Chief Signal Officer, that 10,000 dollars be granted to develop the “Goddard Rocket.” A report by Abbot and Buckingham accompanied the request: a 9-pound rocket could carry 7 miles, a 32-pound one 120 miles. In three months, they assured, it would be known whether it worked. The funds were granted.

A Fortress

On February 7, 1918, the magnetic laboratory was transformed. The Smithsonian lent a precision lathe, a Rivett. Goddard hired toolmakers, a chemist, Dr. Henry C. Parker, and two designers of player pianos and textile machinery who came to help, he wrote, out of patriotism; one of them reduced the number of moving parts in the mechanism from ten to three. A private telephone was installed. Armed watchmen guarded the premises.

On March 5 the shop was completely reorganized, with a loft for the chemist. Worcester firms, Norton and WPI’s Washburn Shops, lent tools. The team included toolmakers, Fagerquist and Sloan; a carpenter, Liljehook; a draftsman, Crane; and a high school boy, Thurston, who served as messenger. The night watchman, McDermitt, had his rifle. The gases from the tests were piped to the cellar to muffle the noise. The cartridges mixed TNT and potassium nitrate.

On March 16 Abbot came to see. Goddard had really made progress, he said; he could not see why it should not work now. His report to Washington described a shop set up in twelve days, nights and Sundays included, thanks to Haigis’s energy. In one test the rocket had lifted fifteen pounds about a foot. The chamber, nozzle, and breech together weighed only about a pound. In a small tower six feet square, three drafting tables and two galvanometers had been installed. The whole thing, Abbot concluded, should be ready to try within a month. It was in this report that he mentioned the spies and the drunks the watchman put to flight. Three days later Goddard came down with German measles.

“I Must Be the Boss”

Tension rose with Haigis. From April 8 to 11, 1918, Haigis asked Goddard for a share in the invention, or a partnership, then took it back. Goddard held firm: as long as he was responsible for the project, he had to be its boss. On April 1 he had had a chamber built wound with piano wire, weighing only 241 grams; the breech of that rocket would later serve as a shell.

On April 19 and 30 Walcott congratulated him. Of the 10,000 dollars, 8,000 had been spent; he recommended granting another 10,000. But on May 12 Goddard found Haigis’s work less and less satisfactory. He was making better progress alone, on a small scale, in the Clark shop: there he had developed a new breech, a new feed principle, and above all a new kind of rocket, the single-charge rocket, which burned all its powder at once, with no reloading mechanism.

The Colonel and the Pipe

On May 18, 1918, Goddard dismissed Haigis. A Justice Department agent made him promise silence. The same day his allotment was raised to 20,000 dollars. But a telegram warned him: his former foreman was now working for a firm developing an infringing copy of his rocket, Rockwood’s, supposedly at the request of an Ordnance officer, Colonel Shinkle. On May 22 Goddard offered the Army his terms: a royalty of one tenth of the cost of each rocket, a free military license, and his rights reserved for science.

On May 29, 1918, Colonel Shinkle arrived in Worcester with Rockwood and Haigis. He wanted to inspect the laboratory, without written orders. Goddard followed Abbot’s instruction, to say not a word to anyone, and stayed out of sight. Shinkle then telephoned Goddard’s father: if his son did not come to see him at the Bancroft Hotel, he would have the laboratory closed, and Dr. Goddard could put that in his pipe and smoke it. Nahum Goddard called Abbot from a private line. On May 31 Walcott protested officially to General Squier.

After this affair Goddard would have all his employees, for the rest of his life, sign a pledge of confidentiality. And those who later found him secretive, suspicious, reluctant to share his results, would often forget that a United States Army colonel had once tried to take his work from him.

The solution came from Washington. Between June 1 and 3, 1918, Walcott and Abbot arranged for the work to be moved far from Worcester, to the shop of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, which belonged to the Carnegie Institution. The observatory’s director, George Ellery Hale, and the president of the Carnegie, Robert Woodward, agreed. Goddard left for Pasadena.

Sources: Tech News (March 13, 1917); letter from Hudson Maxim (February 22, 1917); Smithsonian correspondence (April 1917–June 1918); reports by R. H. Goddard (August 6, 1917, January 9, 1918); letter to the Chief of Ordnance (August 20, 1917); report by C. G. Abbot (March 1918); diary 1917–1918 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 11 · 1918 Pasadena

On June 3, 1918, before leaving Worcester, Robert Goddard made one last test. His single-charge rocket weighed about two pounds; the powder was only an eighth of that. He fired it horizontally. It traveled about half a mile. The idea he had worked out alone, in the little Clark shop, worked. Five days later he was crossing America by train, with enough in his suitcases to build it again in California.

The Crossing

The preparations were carried out with the secrecy the circumstances demanded. Goddard’s father, Nahum, a factory superintendent, packed the machines himself one Sunday at his plant. On June 6 a truck loaded with the apparatus left Worcester with two toolmakers, Fagerquist and Sloan; the license plate had been covered. Goddard carried the powders and propellants in suitcases. Abbot had given him to understand that he could not be officially ordered to do so, but that no danger was seen in it.

He boarded the train at Springfield, changed at Chicago, and sped west. On June 8, near Dodge City, Kansas, he watched a solar eclipse from the train and noted the yellow color of the solar corona. On June 10 the thermometer read 99 degrees Fahrenheit at Grants, New Mexico, then 112 after crossing the desert. He checked in at the Hotel Marengo in Pasadena and at once telephoned George Ellery Hale.

Hale

George Ellery Hale was one of the most influential men in American science. An astronomer and builder of giant telescopes, he had founded the Mount Wilson Observatory above Pasadena, where a hundred-inch telescope, the largest in the world, had just entered service. The observatory shop was one of the best equipped in the country. Hale placed it at Goddard’s disposal for three-quarters of its time; the rest remained reserved for the great telescope.

On June 12, 1918, Goddard noted that he had engaged Mr. Hickman, with Dr. Hale’s approval. Clarence N. Hickman was a young physicist, a former Clark student. He would become one of Goddard’s closest working companions during the war, then his faithful friend for twenty-five years. A test site was found near the Arcadia Balloon School, the region’s military ballooning school.

On June 20 Goddard discovered the place where the firings would take place: a canyon at the foot of Mount Wilson, Baldy Canyon, with an old abandoned corral. His diary, usually so dry, opened up to the landscape: there was something grand and majestic about the mountains, he wrote. On June 23 he dined at Hale’s, in a house surrounded by gardens where bamboo, papyrus, a banana tree, and fig trees grew. Hale told him something he carefully noted: the anomaly is the interesting thing. He also suggested an experiment: photographing the Sun’s corona from high altitude with a camera pointed automatically at the Sun by a thermocouple and a gyroscope.

The Recoilless Rocket

In July 1918 Goddard and Hickman developed a new kind of weapon. The single-charge rocket was fired from a tube. If the tube was open at both ends, there was no recoil at all: the gases escaped backward, and the firer felt nothing. If the tube was closed at the rear, the projectile’s velocity tripled, to 1,158 feet per second, but the recoil returned. Goddard imagined specific uses: a trench mortar, a weapon against machine-gun nests. He also studied the fault artillerymen call keyholing, when the projectile tumbles in flight and strikes the target sideways; fins or rifling should prevent it.

On July 9 he gave a demonstration before Hale and two of the observatory’s astronomers, Anderson and Babcock. The rocket climbed to the top of the canyon and disappeared 250 feet beyond. A fragment knocked a four-inch chip off a granite block. The scientists all jumped at the first shot. A man named Ed Smith declared it was the prettiest thing he had ever seen. Hale telegraphed Abbot: excellent results. On July 15 a 3.5-pound chamber climbed 876 feet up the mountain slope.

Mars Through the Telescope

A photograph taken by Hickman in 1918 shows Goddard on an outing at Mount Wilson. On August 4 he went up Mount Lowe as far as Inspiration Point, watched the sun set and then the lights of Pasadena come on below. On the way down he stopped at the observatory and looked at Mars through the telescope. His diary records a small exchange: signs of life? No. And a soldier who was there added, joking, that there had never been signs of life in Pasadena, and never would be.

The Accident

On August 7 and 8 money began to run short. The Ordnance inspector who was to come and judge the results did not appear. Abbot wrote that official inertia was the only obstacle. Goddard was working on a new version of the reloading mechanism inspired by the Roman candle: 25-gram cartridges projected one after another into the chamber.

On August 8, 1918, Clarence Hickman was removing the paper cap from a detonator when a ten-gram cartridge exploded in his hands. The toll was heavy. He lost his left thumb at the first joint, the first two fingers of his left hand at the second joint, and his right index finger at the first. His face and chest were cut, but his eyes were spared. The investigation showed that the detonators were of uneven quality. A few days earlier, on July 28, the chemist Henry Parker had broken a bone in his hand while searching the canyon for a lost projectile.

Hickman would go on working on rockets all his life. In 1940 he would head a section of the National Defense Research Committee devoted to powder rockets.

On August 17 Hale wrote Abbot a letter that shows how Goddard was seen by those who helped him. He was an enthusiast, Hale said. He had overloaded the shop, against Hale’s advice. And he had a childlike way of forgetting about expenses. The judgment was not unkind. It was even fairly accurate: Goddard thought only of the result.

On August 25, though, he allowed himself a day of rest. With Parker, Hickman, and Mrs. Hickman, he took the boat to Santa Catalina Island off Los Angeles and viewed the sea floor from a glass-bottomed boat.

Hudson Maxim’s Powder

On September 1, 1918, a one-inch projectile reached 722.5 yards. They tried “Motorite,” a powder developed by Hudson Maxim, who chaired the explosives committee of the Naval Consulting Board, the body headed by Thomas Edison. In September and October Ordnance let it be known that it wanted a “decisive test” at its proving ground at Aberdeen, Maryland. The date kept being postponed.

In Europe, meanwhile, the war was drawing to a close. On October 26, 1918, Goddard arrived at Aberdeen and slept in the barracks.

Sources: diary June–October 1918; correspondence of R. H. Goddard with C. G. Abbot and G. E. Hale (June–August 1918); telegram from Hale to Abbot (July 9, 1918); report on C. N. Hickman’s accident (August 1918); autobiography (1927) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 12 · 1918 – 1919 Aberdeen

On November 6, 1918, at the Army proving ground at Aberdeen, Maryland, a launching tube was set on a music stand, before representatives of the Army and the Navy. A music stand is a flimsy support: at the slightest recoil it would topple over. The shot went off. The rocket flew away, and the music stand stayed put.

This scene, which his papers call “the music-stand demonstration,” sums up everything he had learned at Pasadena. A rocket fired from an open tube does not recoil. It can therefore be fired from a soldier’s shoulder, from a fragile support, from an airplane. A light tube can launch a projectile that, with an ordinary gun, would require a heavy artillery piece.

The Program

Goddard had arrived at Aberdeen on October 26 and slept in the barracks. The program of the demonstration was a full one. Recoilless guns of one, two, and three inches were shown, that is, rocket-launching tubes of different calibers. A gun and a mortar Goddard called “double-acting” were shown. And finally the multiple-charge rocket, the one meant to burn several successive cartridges.

Goddard’s diary on the evening of November 6 sums up the results in telegraphic style. An eight-and-a-half-pound rocket had traveled 500 yards from an open tube; the nozzle gave it its spin. The multiple charge had been hard to fire, and the head had blown off. The next day, November 7, the multiple-charge rocket flew straight for 27 yards at an angle of sixty degrees: it weighed five pounds and burned three nine-gram cartridges.

The False Armistice

On the evening of November 7 Goddard was in Washington. He noted in his diary that Germany had surrendered that day: the streets were packed, people paraded with tin horns and flags. It was in fact false news, a premature wire report that brought whole crowds into the streets across the United States. The real armistice would not be signed until four days later, on November 11.

On November 9 Hickman, recovered from his accident, fired the two-inch launcher: the projectile carried about 750 yards. On November 15 Goddard wrote his report. The demonstration had not entirely satisfied him. But he noted signs of interest. Captain Purinton of the aircraft armament service was interested in the recoilless gun for arming airplanes. The two-inch antitank launcher, Goddard stressed, was lighter than its own projectile. The double-acting mortar carried to 1,150 yards, three hundred more than the Stokes mortar, the standard trench weapon. And Captain Bushnell had told him something he reported with care: Goddard had convinced him that he could make a multiple-charge rocket that fired a few shots and flew straight.

“The Bottom Has Dropped Out of Everything”

But the armistice had changed everything. On November 18, 1918, Captain Purinton told Goddard bluntly: two months earlier the matter would have gone through quickly. Development was stopped. That day Goddard took Hickman to the station and said goodbye. Abbot summed up the situation in a phrase: the bottom had dropped out of everything. On November 20 the Smithsonian announced that there would be no more funds.

On November 26 Walter S. Adams, an astronomer at Mount Wilson, wrote him a comforting letter. The end of the war, he said, should change nothing about the interest of his work; and a future “league of nations,” if it came about, would have a better chance of success if it had big guns at its disposal.

On December 17, 1918, Goddard submitted a report on the multiple-charge rocket. Before the armistice a small rocket of this type had worked and flown straight for sixty to eighty feet. The mechanism, a gas-operated piston for inserting the cartridges, had been Hickman’s idea. Goddard said so, as he would always say what he owed to his collaborators.

The Legacy of Aberdeen

It is worth pausing for a moment on what Goddard showed at Aberdeen, because history would prove him right long afterward. A light tube resting on the shoulder, launching a recoilless rocket able to pierce armor: that is exactly the principle of the bazooka, the American antitank weapon of the Second World War. In 1945, in the list of his achievements he would draw up for Clark University, Goddard would say so himself, without false modesty: the powder rockets of 1918, fired from open steel tubes, developed with Hickman and Parker and demonstrated at Aberdeen in November 1918, were the origin, together with Colonel Skinner’s shoulder launcher and Professor Monroe’s shaped charge, of the bazooka-type rockets used in the war. His 1918 reports, he would add, had remained in the War Department’s confidential files, which explains why they had been overlooked.

“Indefinite Postponement”

In early 1919 Goddard returned to Worcester and resumed teaching. On January 8 and 9 he filled pages with calculations on hydrogen and oxygen. The editors of his papers see in this a return to the idea of June 11, 1909: liquid propellants. Powder had shown its limits; he knew something else would be needed to climb really high.

On February 7 Ordnance informed him that it would make no further experiments for the time being. On February 18 he dined with the Hickmans. On March 13 Hickman, who had joined the Bureau of Standards, wrote that work on the multiple-charge rocket would have to be taken up again some day. On March 22 the War Department announced an “indefinite postponement.”

The Leak

On March 28, 1919, Goddard opened the Worcester Evening Gazette and found an article that infuriated him. Picked up by the Associated Press, it announced that the professor had invented a rocket able to climb to an altitude of 70 miles, a “terrible engine of war” that could carry 200 miles horizontally. The figures were wrong, or at least distorted: his table had said 120 miles. But above all, the article spoke of work he regarded as confidential. Goddard discovered, for the first time, what the press could do with his research. He would not forget it.

On April 1 he made a simple calculation from cautious figures: a rocket whose starting mass was six times that of the empty rocket, with gases ejected at 5,500 or 7,000 feet per second, would reach, without air resistance, an altitude of 287 or 465 miles. He wrote the relation linking mass, acceleration, and gas velocity in the form of an exponential. It was, in another form, the fundamental rocket equation, which the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had published independently in 1903.

Webster

On April 7, 1919, Arthur Gordon Webster lost patience. He threatened to publish an article on rockets himself if Goddard did not make up his mind to make his work known. Goddard then proposed that the Smithsonian publish the manuscript he had sent in 1916, brought up to date. On April 10 the Institution agreed. The printing would be paid from the balance of his funds, a little over 3,000 dollars.

On April 26, 1919, Goddard presented in Washington, before the American Physical Society, a paper titled On High-velocity Jets of Gas, Applicable to Rockets. He recalled that ordinary rockets had an efficiency of two percent, and that his chambers reached from thirty to 64.53 percent. His gases left at more than a mile and a half per second: enough, he pointed out, to escape the Moon’s pull.

Between April 28 and May 17 the British Director of Artillery at the War Office in London asked for his reports. Copies were sent to the British and French military attachés.

On May 4, 1919, Goddard wrote in his diary a sentence that announced the battles to come: there was one good thing about this work, he observed, which was that one did not see many monuments raised to those who had opposed the airplane twenty-five years earlier. The physical principle of the rocket, he added, was as sound as that of the airplane.

An Automobile and a Laboratory

The spring of 1919 also brought a lighter life. On May 22 his father had an automobile accident against a wall; his mother said she had felt a pang of anxiety at the very hour of the accident, and Goddard discussed it with Thompson, as a curious physicist, from the angle of thought transference. In May he bought his first car, a Chevrolet, jointly owned with Thompson, Riffolt, and a few others. On May 28 he took his first driving lesson. With the same friends and Hickman he founded the “Industrial Research Laboratories” of Worcester, a consulting firm whose scientific board consisted of Webster and the chemist Kraus. The project would be short-lived. On September 22 Goddard bought his first car of his own, an Oakland roadster.

On May 26, 1919, he dated his preface. On June 2 he sent the manuscript to Washington.

Sources: program and diary of the Aberdeen demonstration (November 6–9, 1918); report by R. H. Goddard (November 15, 1918); report on the multiple-charge rocket (December 17, 1918); correspondence with the Smithsonian and Ordnance (November 1918–April 1919); Worcester Evening Gazette (March 28, 1919); paper to the American Physical Society (April 26, 1919); diary 1918–1919; statement for Clark University (April 26, 1945); letter to Colonel Codd (July 13, 1938) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. I and III.

Chapter 13 · 1919 A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes

On October 9, 1919, Robert Goddard noted in his diary two seemingly flat sentences: he had stopped at Miss Kisk’s with the manuscript; he had played the piano in the evening. Miss Esther Kisk was the secretary of President Sanford of Clark College. In her spare time she typed the manuscripts and theses of the faculty. She typed the text that would make Goddard famous throughout the world, and that would also bring him the worst ridicule of his life.

Miss Kisk

Esther Christine Kisk was born in Worcester. Her parents were Swedish immigrants: her father, August Wilhelm Kisk, came from the province of Västmanland; her mother, Augusta Johnson, from Småland. On October 15, 1919, Goddard read the proofs sent by the Smithsonian. On October 18 he took Miss Kisk for an automobile ride to Leicester and Charlton, two villages near Worcester. That evening he worked with Hickman and Riffolt on a new multiple-charge rocket. The next day, October 19, Anniversary Day, he drove up the speedway to the old house and went behind the barn, where the cherry tree stood.

It would take almost five years for the story of Esther and Robert to become that of a couple. But it began there, around a manuscript on extreme altitudes.

The Text

A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes appeared in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, volume 71, number 2. The Institution dated it 1919; according to the editors of Goddard’s papers it was published in December 1919, and Goddard received his copies at the very beginning of January 1920. It was an austere pamphlet, full of equations, tables, and photographs of apparatus. Nothing in its presentation hinted at a scandal.

Goddard first set out the problem. Sounding balloons carrying recording instruments rose no higher than about twenty miles. Above that, the atmosphere remained unexplored. Yet meteorologists wanted to know the composition and temperature of these high layers; the German geophysicist Alfred Wegener had even supposed that an unknown gas existed up there, which he called “geocoronium.” Only the rocket, Goddard explained, could reach those regions.

Then he showed why the ordinary rocket would never get there. His measurement of the Coston rocket’s efficiency was relentless: two percent, gases at a thousand feet per second, a range of a quarter of a mile. He described his own steel chambers and their nozzles, which reached an efficiency of over sixty-four percent and an exhaust velocity close to 8,000 feet per second. He set out his vacuum experiments and their conclusion: the rocket produces the same recoil there as in air.

Then came the mathematical heart of the text: the calculation of the starting mass needed to raise one pound of payload to a given altitude. With his improved rockets, between 3.6 and 12.6 pounds would be needed to reach 35 miles, between 5.1 and 24.3 pounds for 72 miles, between 9.8 and 89.6 pounds for 232 miles. With a Coston-type rocket, those masses would have to be raised to the twenty-seventh power: astronomical figures, literally. He provided for a parachute to bring the instruments back.

A Flash on the Moon

And then, in the last pages, Goddard allowed himself a hypothesis that would cause all the commotion. He asked what it would take to send a craft to the Moon and prove it had arrived. He returned to his 1916 flash experiment: at a distance of 2.24 miles, 0.0029 gram of magnesium powder had still been visible, and 0.015 gram clearly visible. He extrapolated: on the Moon, 220,000 miles away, with a telescope one foot in diameter, 2.67 pounds of powder would be needed for a barely visible flash, 13.82 pounds for a clearly visible one. The rocket’s starting mass would have to be 3.21 tons in the first case, 16.63 tons in the second. Eight or ten tons, he concluded, would probably suffice.

Goddard took every precaution. This project, he wrote, was not of obvious scientific importance. He proposed it only to show that the method had possibilities that depended on nothing really impossible. And he concluded soberly that only certain preliminary experiments remained to be made.

In his 1927 autobiography he would explain why he had chosen this example: to avoid seeming too speculative, he had preferred to speak of a flash of powder on the Moon rather than of interplanetary navigation. The irony is that he would probably have made less noise by talking about Mars. The Moon, so close, so visible, was about to set the public’s imagination on fire.

What the Text Does Not Say

What strikes one on rereading is everything Goddard kept to himself. The 1919 text says nothing of passengers, or crewed ships, or voyages to the planets. It does not develop the idea of liquid propellants: it merely refers to his 1914 patent. It does not mention multistage rockets except through the same reference. Everything he had imagined in his green notebooks, hydrogen and oxygen, fuel made on the Moon, artificial gravity, cameras circling Mars, stayed in his drawers.

This was not timidity. It was a strategy. Goddard had known, since the rejections of 1907 and 1908, how the scientific community received speculation about space travel. He wanted to be judged on measurements and equations, not on dreams. He had written only what he could demonstrate.

A Printing of 1,750 Copies

The Smithsonian printed 1,750 copies of the pamphlet, sent to its usual list of libraries, scientists, and institutions. On January 7, 1920, Goddard received his 90 author’s copies. The edition would soon be exhausted. The text would be reprinted in 1946, after his death, by the American Rocket Society, together with the 1936 paper, under the title Rockets.

Among the readers of that first printing was, at the other end of Europe, a student born in Transylvania, Hermann Oberth, who would write to Goddard from Heidelberg in 1922 to ask for a copy. There were also the journalists. The Smithsonian’s press service was preparing a release. It would present the flash on the Moon as the first real contact between one planet and another.

Sources: R. H. Goddard, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 71, no. 2, 1919; diary of October 1919 and January 1920; autobiography (1927); biographical note by Esther C. Goddard — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 14 · 1920 The Moon Man

On Monday, January 12, 1920, the Boston Herald ran a headline that would follow Robert Goddard to the end of his days: a new rocket devised by Professor Goddard might hit the face of the Moon. The evening before, the Smithsonian Institution had issued a press release on his paper. The text was accurate, but it was written for newspapers: it announced rocket efficiency raised from two to nearly sixty-four percent, an atmosphere extending up to two hundred miles, daily weather observations, a 1,274-pound rocket able to go up and come back down in less than half an hour. And it presented the flash on the Moon as the first real contact between one planet and another. Reporters from the Post, the American, and the Herald crowded to Goddard’s door.

The Deluge

Within days the affair had gone around the United States, then the world. Mail arrived by the sackful. Scientific American Monthly wanted a summary. A photo agency wanted pictures. The Bronx Exposition, a New York amusement park, offered its grounds, the Starlight Amusement Park, for the launch of the rocket to the Moon. Some readers wanted to market the invention; others were alarmed or indignant; most were enthusiastic; and some volunteered to make the trip.

On January 15 the cartoonist Bronstrup published in the San Francisco Chronicle a cartoon in which the inhabitants of the Moon demonstrate, placards in hand: they are, says the caption, opposed to any new annexation schemes. On January 28 a correspondent from Altoona, Pennsylvania, asked Goddard what would happen if the inhabitants of the Moon, feeling threatened, decided to destroy the Earth.

On January 22 Karl T. Compton wrote to him from Princeton: in Paris, Hale had shown him Goddard’s photographs and report, and the paper had provoked a great deal of discussion.

“A Severe Strain on Credulity”

On January 13, 1920, the New York Times, the most influential American daily, devoted to Goddard an unsigned editorial titled A Severe Strain on Credulity. The text doubted that a rocket could work in a vacuum, since it would have nothing left to push against. It insinuated that the professor was ignorant of notions taught every day in high schools.

This was exactly the error Goddard had refuted by experiment in 1916. The rocket does not push against the air: it is pushed by the reaction of its own gases, just as a rifle recoils when it fires, whether in air or in a vacuum. Goddard had measured that recoil in a nearly empty enclosure, and he had written it in his paper. The editorialist had not read it, or had not understood it.

The New York Times would take forty-nine years to acknowledge its mistake. On July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 left for the Moon, the paper published an ironic correction: further research and experiment had confirmed Isaac Newton’s findings of the seventeenth century, and it was now definitely established that a rocket could function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere; “The Times regrets the error.” Goddard had been dead for twenty-four years.

“The Difficulty of Being Understood”

Goddard tried to set the record straight. On January 18 he issued a statement to the press. Too much attention, he said, had been given to the flash on the Moon and too little to exploring the atmosphere, which was the real object of his work. If one wished to speculate boldly, he added, one could speak of photographs taken in space by a craft guided by light-sensitive cells; but to pursue the speculation further would be unwise. He proposed raising 50,000 to 100,000 dollars by public subscription, to be entrusted to the Smithsonian. On January 19 he added a sentence that was a creed: real progress is a succession of logical steps, not a leap in the dark.

On February 6 he published a letter in the journal Science under the title On High-altitude Research. He wrote that he was beginning to realize how difficult it was to make himself understood. This was not, he explained, an exploration of “darkest Africa”: every result would be obtained not by discussion but by applying real methods of research.

That January of 1920 left a deep mark on Goddard. For the rest of his life he would distrust journalists, refuse most interviews, and do everything to work far from prying eyes. He would be called “the Moon man,” said to be secretive, even paranoid. One must remember those weeks to understand why.

January 29

In the midst of this tumult Goddard’s life was shaken. His mother, Fannie Hoyt Goddard, ill with tuberculosis for more than twenty years, died. On January 29, 1920, he noted in his diary, with his usual restraint, that his mother had died at 1:55. The funeral took place on Sunday, February 1, at half past two, conducted by Fred Danker. There were many flowers. That evening Robert talked with his father and his uncle Scott Hoyt in the smoking room.

It was she who, three years earlier, on hearing the Smithsonian’s letter, had said it was the most wonderful thing she had ever heard, and that he could do it. She did not live long enough to see a single one of his rockets fly.

A Confidential Report

In March 1920 Goddard submitted to the Smithsonian a long report not meant for the public: Report Concerning Further Developments of the Rocket Method of Investigating Space. Since the press had fantasized so much about the Moon, he set out in it seriously, as a physicist, everything he had kept to himself.

One could photograph the Moon and the planets at close range: a one-foot telescope passing 1,000 miles from Mars would be worth an instrument 6.6 miles in diameter on Earth. The craft would be guided by gyroscopes and small side jets. To come back, it would enter the atmosphere tangentially, protected by a shield of hard, insulating layers, like the inside of meteorites, which stays cold. To communicate with possible inhabitants of another planet, one could send them metal plates engraved with geometric figures and a map of the constellations. In 1929, rereading this text, he would add a startling note: it would be better to destroy the rocket before it landed, to prevent a disorderly use of rockets by the inhabitants of another planet.

With hydrogen and oxygen, only 43.5 pounds would be needed at the start, instead of 438 with powder, to send one pound “to infinity.” These gases could be made on top of a snow-capped mountain, from water. For the first time in writing before his sponsors, he raised a flight with an operator on board, and even a round trip to the Moon, where the hydrogen and oxygen for the return would be produced in a crater near a pole, thanks to a plant set up on a peak always lit by the Sun, sheltered from meteors under the rock. To go to Mars, at an average speed of seven miles per second, the voyage would take a little over seven weeks. With solar energy collected by mirrors of thin foil and ion propulsion, it would take about fourteen.

His conclusion was unambiguous: the rocket method was superior to all others for interplanetary communication, it did not call for enormous expense, and an appeal for public support was justified.

Esnault-Pelterie

The 1919 paper had attentive readers in Europe. On March 31, 1920, the French aviator and engineer Robert Esnault-Pelterie, an aviation pioneer and one of the first European theorists of spaceflight, wrote to him from Paris. He did not understand how Goddard could speak of an efficiency rising from two to sixty-four percent, when turbine nozzles exceeded ninety. He enclosed his own 1913 essay. On April 20 Goddard explained the difference between the two situations. On May 10 Esnault-Pelterie congratulated him on his very good scientific method and his conical nozzle, and offered to speak of it to the Société astronomique de France. On June 16 he suggested sending a projectile around the Moon to photograph its far side. Goddard replied by mentioning guidance by photosensitive cells toward a light source.

The Banquet and the Volunteers

Goddard was now a famous man, whether he liked it or not. On March 20, 1920, he gave a lecture in Boston; a newspaper marked the occasion with a cartoon of a bald man signaling toward Mars. On April 1 he received a letter from a Miss R. of Kansas City, ready to accompany a captain on a “rocket hop to the Moon or to Mars.” On April 2 he was in Chicago, a guest at the banquet of the American Association of Engineers, and danced until ten minutes to midnight. On April 7 he visited the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he met a young naval aviator, Richard Byrd.

Between April 8 and 15 Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, asked to meet him. On April 14 Goddard lunched with Gilbert Grosvenor, editor of the National Geographic and Bell’s son-in-law, then spent the evening at Bell’s home with Abbot and the meteorologist Marvin. He kept the memory of an old man with a quick mind and very pleasant manners, who showed him his hydrofoils. On April 27 he read before the National Academy of Sciences a paper on the possibilities of the rocket in weather forecasting: sending instruments every day to an altitude of six miles from several stations, in twenty seconds, with an eleven-pound rocket for one pound of instruments.

The Navy and Indian Head

The military, for their part, had not forgotten Aberdeen. On March 27, 1920, the Navy, through Admiral Earle, wanted to develop a rocket grenade launcher against submarines. On May 11 an agreement was reached, signed on June 14: Goddard would be a part-time consultant, for a hundred dollars a month and fifteen dollars per day on site. He would work for the Navy for three years at the Indian Head proving ground in Maryland. In August 1920 he made his first tests there and said he was delighted with the way he had been treated.

On June 7, 1920, Clark appointed him full professor of physics for three years. On June 12 he wrote that what he had been able to do so far was only a tiny beginning. On June 16 he sent a farewell letter to President Sanford, who was retiring: when he had come to Clark, he wrote, he had been only a semi-invalid. On September 23 he attended the reception given in honor of the new president, the geographer Wallace W. Atwood. Atwood would lead Clark for twenty-six years and would be, in the years that followed, one of Goddard’s protectors, not without friction.

On October 19, 1920, Anniversary Day, Goddard went down behind the barn, ate apples, and leaned against the cherry tree. Two days later he noted that he had founded a radio club at Clark. On November 2 he listened to the presidential election returns on the radio.

The year of “the Moon man” was ending. Goddard had been mocked, praised, solicited. He had lost his mother. He had found a new employer in the Navy. But he still had not flown a rocket more than a few hundred feet. And he was beginning to understand that powder would not take him where he wanted to go.

Sources: Boston Herald (January 12, 1920); Smithsonian press release (January 11, 1920); statements by R. H. Goddard (January 18 and 19, 1920); letter to Science (February 6, 1920); report to the Smithsonian (March 1920, with notes of 1929); correspondence with R. Esnault-Pelterie (March–July 1920); Navy contract (May–June 1920); diary 1920 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I. New York Times editorial of January 13, 1920, and correction of July 17, 1969: Astronomy; Columbia Journalism Review.

Chapter 15 · 1921 – 1923 Liquid Oxygen

In the early 1920s Robert Goddard carried in his car, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to Worcester, a most unusual load: a few quarts of liquid oxygen, at minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit, in double-walled spherical glass flasks. Professor Frederick G. Keyes’s laboratory supplied it. The liquid boiled slowly during the trip, and part of it evaporated before arrival. With what remained, Goddard would attempt what no one had yet done: burn a liquid fuel and liquid oxygen in a rocket chamber.

“Reaction Against Nothing”

During the winter of 1920–1921 Goddard continued his tests for the Navy at Indian Head. There he developed the antisubmarine grenade launcher. In December 1920 and March 1921 he fired a 725-pound rocket whose gases left at 5,930 feet per second with no visible flame: only a cloud of dust could be seen. On March 24, 1921, he submitted to the Navy a report on another idea: using a rocket to accelerate armor-piercing bombs dropped from airplanes, so that they would strike ships’ decks harder.

But the press had not forgotten him. On February 25, 1921, the Vatican Observatory wrote to him: Italian newspapers were announcing that his rocket would leave for the Moon the following summer; what truth was there in it? The next day Goddard published in Scientific American a clarification titled That Moon Rocket Proposition — Refutation of Some Popular Fallacies. He explained that he preferred to work quietly. He pointed out that he had asked for no volunteers for the trip, but had received eighteen. He was amused that people had been surprised to see the Smithsonian support the “absurd” idea of motion produced by a “reaction against nothing.” He recalled his measurements: the thrust was even greater at one and a half thousandths of normal pressure. And he denounced the attitude of saying that everything is impossible until it has been done.

On February 6, 1921, he had written a short autobiographical statement for the Inventors Bulletin. He made a point of saying that his research concerned not only rockets but also airplanes, radio detectors, high frequencies, and rapid transit. He recalled the altitude records of his day: kites had reached a mile and a half, airplanes and crewed balloons 6.8 miles, instrument balloons 21.7, small pilot balloons 24.3. The Weather Bureau admitted it did not hope to exceed twenty-five miles; beyond that, the rocket was needed.

Nahum’s Marriage

On February 9, 1921, Robert’s father, Nahum Goddard, remarried. He married Jennie Ward Messick, a distant cousin who had helped nurse his wife during her illness. Robert was a witness. The ceremony took place at the home of Fred Danker, the same man who had conducted Fannie’s funeral a year earlier. Jennie would remain close to Robert: twenty years later she would be found at the chapel of the Naval Academy in Annapolis, sitting beside him one Sunday in May.

Two Liquids

The decision that would change everything was first a budget decision. On April 11, 1921, Goddard asked the Clark trustees for 5,000 dollars. On June 3 they granted him 2,500, and 1,000 more the following year. President Atwood had pleaded his case. It was with this money that Goddard began his experiments with liquid propellants.

In July 1921 he designed a constant-pressure combustion chamber and a pump. On September 10 he went to Linde Air Products, the great oxygen producer, to make inquiries. On September 12, 1921, with his mechanic Nils Riffolt, he made his first test with liquid oxygen. Some was lost; the rest did not even reach the chamber. The editors of his papers regard this day as the beginning of the experimentation that would lead to the first liquid-propellant rocket.

Why liquids? Goddard had understood it in 1909: powder is a convenient propellant, but it forces one to build a chamber strong enough to hold the whole charge, and it releases less energy than a good fuel burned in pure oxygen. With two liquids, fuel and oxygen can be stored in light tanks and fed into a small chamber only as needed. The chamber stays small and light, however much propellant is carried. This was the third principle of his 1914 patent. It was time to put it into practice.

“Aunt Effie’s” Farm

On April 1, 1922, Goddard submitted his first report to the Clark trustees. He announced that he was abandoning powder cartridges for two liquids: ether, a very volatile fuel, and liquid oxygen. The first test had been spectacular: mixed abruptly in a test tube, the two liquids had exploded and sent the wooden block serving as a support flying. But introduced slowly, they burned without violence. A test outdoors had given four pounds of thrust. And Goddard added a sentence that spoke of his hope: the lightness would be far greater than had been imagined.

These tests took place outdoors at Auburn, a small town south of Worcester, on the farm of Miss Effie M. Ward. Goddard called her “Aunt Effie,” and himself presented her as an aunt in a 1922 report; the editors of his papers specify that she was in fact a distant cousin. Her farm would serve as a test site throughout the decade. It was there that the first liquid-propellant rocket would fly in 1926.

In April and May 1922 the tests at the farm followed one another with Riffolt. They were laborious: flashbacks, burning pipes, the lid of the ether tank blowing off. The pioneer’s work was made of these small, repeated disasters.

“Professor and Student”

On April 4, 1922, the Worcester Telegram published news that owed nothing to rockets: the professor and the student were to marry; Miss Esther Kisk would become the wife of Dr. Robert Hutchings Goddard. Esther was then taking courses at Clark while working for the president’s office. The engagement would be long: the wedding would not take place until June 1924.

On September 4, 1922, Goddard gave a radio talk on the occasion of the New England Fair. Esther and her mother came to listen. Every year he measured the rain that fell during the fair for the company that insured the exhibitors: a small physicist’s job, paid and useful.

Oberth

On May 3, 1922, a letter arrived from Heidelberg, Germany. It was signed Hermann Oberth. This young man born in Transylvania had learned from the newspaper, he wrote, that he was not alone in working on the problem of the space rocket. He believed that only the joint work of scientists of all nations could solve this great problem, and he asked Goddard for a copy of his 1919 paper. Goddard sent it. Oberth’s copy would be destroyed more than twenty years later in the bombings of the Second World War. On June 12 Oberth thanked him and promised to mention Goddard’s work in an appendix to his own book.

On August 1, 1923, Goddard discovered that book: Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen, “The Rocket into Planetary Space,” published in Munich. He found in it, he noted, practically the same theory as his own, presented as an original method. He added a prediction that would prove accurate: he would not be surprised if it were only a matter of time before the research became something of a race.

Oberth’s book would launch in Germany a wave of enthusiasm for rockets, amateur societies, experiments, and, fifteen years later, a military program. Goddard, for his part, carried on alone in his corner of Massachusetts. On December 27, 1923, in what he called “self-defense,” he decided to present a short note, without technical details, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Cincinnati, to date his own work publicly.

The Pump

The main technical obstacle was feeding the chamber. Liquid oxygen and fuel had to be sent into the chamber at a pressure higher than the pressure inside it. Goddard first chose pumps, as in his 1914 patent. On March 21, 1923, he described a tiny piston pump: ten grams of moving parts, forty strokes a second, and a weight of 0.718 pound per horsepower, a third of that of the famous Liberty aircraft engine.

Pumping liquid oxygen was a feat. The liquid is so cold that it makes most metals brittle and freezes the seals. Oberth, in his book, asserted it was impossible. In August 1923 Goddard had a pump that worked: sixteen tests in five months. But oxygen cost five dollars a liter. In July, “desperate,” he had made the rounds of institutions to obtain it: the Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Mines, the Navy, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, MIT. In the end the Linde company agreed to give him free the oxygen left over at the end of a “run”: two liters a week on average.

In May 1923 the Navy stopped the grenade-launcher program, and the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, which had taken an interest in rockets, decided not to invest. That same month Arthur Gordon Webster, Goddard’s teacher, died. He would not see fly the rocket he had pushed his student to make known.

“Consumed with Impatience”

In October and November 1923 Goddard set up his test apparatus at a window of the Clark physics laboratory. On November 1 the motor lifted fifty pounds for fifteen seconds. On November 3 Abbot wrote him a letter in which the impatience of all his supporters showed through: he was consumed with impatience; interplanetary space, he added, would seem much closer to him after seeing one of Goddard’s rockets rise five or six miles. Goddard replied that his own impatience was equal to Abbot’s.

The fact had to be faced, though: Goddard had the best ideas and a complete theory, but he was advancing slowly. He worked alone or nearly so, with one mechanic, a few liters of oxygen a week, and budgets of a few hundred dollars. He taught full time. Each failed test cost him weeks. And he refused to show anything before he was sure.

Sources: reports to the Navy (1920–1923); “That Moon Rocket Proposition,” Scientific American (February 26, 1921); statement for the Inventors Bulletin (February 6, 1921); correspondence with Clark University (1921–1922); report to the Clark trustees (April 1, 1922); Worcester Telegram (April 4, 1922); letters from H. Oberth (May 3 and June 12, 1922); notes of August 1, 1923; letter from C. G. Abbot (November 3, 1923); diary 1921–1923 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. I.

Chapter 16 · 1924 – 1925 Esther

On Saturday, June 21, 1924, at noon, in St. John’s Episcopal Church in Worcester, the Reverend Charles Lancaster Short married Robert Hutchings Goddard, forty-one, professor of physics and director of the physical laboratories of Clark University, and Esther Christine Kisk, the young woman who, five years earlier, had typed the manuscript on extreme altitudes. There were no attendants. The bride wore a dress of white georgette crêpe. The couple left on their honeymoon by automobile for the White Mountains of New Hampshire. On their return they would settle at 1 Tallawanda Drive, the old Maple Hill house, the one behind which the cherry tree stood.

A Working Partner

It should be said at once what Esther Goddard would be in her husband’s life, because his papers show it on every page. She would not be only a wife. She would attend almost all his tests. She would film his rockets with a movie camera, take photographs, keep the accounts, type his reports, travel with him. She would nurse him when he was ill. And after his death, for more than twenty-five years, she would devote her life to his memory: she would sort his papers, secure one hundred thirty-one patents from his notes, and publish with G. Edward Pendray the three volumes of his papers, from which this book draws most of its material.

In a poem read at a faculty dinner at the end of 1927, which Goddard copied into his diary, she is described this way: tall and fair, with a smile in her eyes and a gleam of light in her hair. Goddard’s diary almost never says “Esther.” It says “E.” E. came to the farm. E. filmed. E. read aloud in the evening.

Before the Wedding: The Moon Rocket “Perfected”

The months before the wedding show how cumbersome Goddard’s fame remained. In January 1924 Watson Davis of Science Service, a science news agency, proposed to finance his work through a syndicate of newspapers. Abbot refused to let the Smithsonian be associated with it. Goddard, for his part, explained that he preferred a complete demonstration to records. Davis also asked him to serve as technical adviser for a modernized edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Goddard did the work; the book never appeared.

On June 16, 1924, five days before the wedding, President Atwood announced at Clark’s commencement that the rocket would be launched that summer. The New York Herald Tribune at once ran a headline saying the Moon rocket had been perfected. It had not. Goddard was still trying to make tiny pumps work on a test stand.

The mail kept pouring in. In 1924 a thirty-year-old Czech reporter, an orphan, volunteered for the first trip. A Parisian Buddhist protested: the inhabitants of the Moon might retaliate. And a voice from Denmark pleaded: leave the Moon in peace!

A Few Hundred Dollars at a Time

In 1924 the Smithsonian could give only modest sums: 500 dollars in January and in April. The American Association for the Advancement of Science granted 190 dollars. The Research Corporation, a foundation created by the chemist Frederick Cottrell to fund research with the income from his patents, granted 2,500 dollars through the Smithsonian.

On March 25, 1924, Abbot came to Worcester to see how the work stood. Goddard showed him a liquid-oxygen feed, a perfected chamber and igniter, sticks of smokeless powder for firing, a two-cylinder pump that would “run for weeks,” a small oxygen motor to drive it, and parts made of aluminum-magnesium alloy. He promised a successful test within the year. Walcott, for his part, advised discretion: the less publicity, the better.

In February 1924 Goddard published in the Monthly Weather Review, the meteorologists’ journal, an article proposing to explore the atmosphere from 20 to 465 miles up. The aim, he wrote, was much more than a spectacular feat: it was the development of a new method.

The Secret Report of March 1924

That same month he submitted to the Smithsonian a strictly confidential “supplementary report on ultimate developments.” In it one discovers what he really thought. He described a ship using liquid hydrogen and oxygen, with a large central hydrogen tank surrounded by the oxygen, the excess hydrogen serving to cool the motor. A 1,200-pound observation cabin for one or two operators, stabilized by gyroscopes. A flame deflector on the ground for the launch. A return braked by the atmosphere with lifting planes, wings, then a parachute.

He estimated a round trip to the Moon: 200,000 pounds at the start, less than the weight of a Navy sixteen-inch gun; half that if the hydrogen and oxygen for the return were made on the Moon itself. Six thousand pounds of water would suffice for the return, a cube barely more than four and a half feet on a side. For a planet with an atmosphere, twenty-four tons would be needed. On Venus, he imagined, the wind might perhaps be used.

A 1924 photograph shows Goddard standing before a Clark blackboard, chalk in hand, explaining how a rocket might reach the Moon. That is the public image of the professor. The March 1924 report is the private image of the engineer who, twenty years before the first satellites, was already calculating the weight of a lunar expedition.

Sachs

In August 1924 Nils Riffolt, the mechanic who had helped him since the war, left for the naval proving ground at Dahlgren, Virginia. In his place Goddard hired Henry Sachs, an instrument maker from the Bureau of Standards whom he called very skillful. Sachs would stay at his side until February 1931, then join him again at Annapolis in 1944, until Goddard’s death. Like all his employees since the Shinkle affair, he signed a pledge of confidentiality.

On August 17, 1924, a Swedish astronomer, Axel Corlin of the Lund Observatory, wrote that he might be given a Nobel Prize if his experiments succeeded. On September 11 the French military attaché asked for information. On September 9 Goddard replied in the British journal Nature to a critic who had compared him with Oberth. He traced his chronology: a serious interest since 1899, writings from 1907, hydrogen and oxygen in 1909, the theory in 1912, liquids published in 1914 and tested in 1921. Oberth had written to him on May 3, 1922, and his book had reached him in July 1923. He added that he had always known how conservative the average person is toward new applications of physics.

The Pump That Was Too Small

The summer of 1924 was lost. For two months, in July and August, Goddard struggled with a pump that was too small, a problem that, he noted bitterly, would not exist on a larger scale. Oxygen was cut to two liters twice a week.

On January 13, 1925, he began building a flight model in magnesium alloy. Welding thin aluminum was a nightmare. Linde supplied four liters of oxygen a week until June; otherwise it had to be bought at two dollars a liter in Boston, and each test used four liters.

On February 7, 1925, W. J. Humphreys, a physicist at the Weather Bureau, asked him the question everyone was asking: how is the rocket coming along? He had just returned from a congress in Madrid where, he said, the reply had been in substance: a fine idea, so go ahead and do it. On February 11 Goddard replied that he had not the slightest doubt he could reach thirty to sixty miles. But his record was still about a mile, with his small powder rockets. And he summed up his situation in a sentence: it was always the same story, no support without results, and no results without sufficient support. The bigger the rocket, the better it would work. But a height of half a mile or so would be enough to show that it worked.

“Your World-Famous Rocket”

On February 15, 1925, a correspondent in Montevideo, Uruguay, published a long article on “your world-famous rocket.” In May and June Goddard turned down 500 dollars from the Smithsonian for as long as he could manage, then finally accepted it. His igniters did not work well, his chamber overheated; the thrust varied from two to eight pounds, when twelve to fifteen were needed. Oxygen had come down to 75 cents a liter.

On October 5, 1925, his rocket was ten and a half feet long and weighed ten pounds. He tried it in a frame that allowed it to rise nine inches. With each stroke of the pump it jumped and fell back. On October 31 a Berlin business newspaper asked him for an article on “the Moon rocket.” He politely declined: he had not yet demonstrated anything.

In November 1925 he had a decisive idea: a small double-acting engine driving both pumps at once, the oxygen pump and the fuel pump. And on Sunday, December 6, 1925, at last, something happened.

December 6, 1925

That Sunday Goddard had been able to get liquid oxygen. He made a test at noon at the Clark laboratory, the rocket set up in a shed in front of a window of the physics building. His diary is telegraphic: twenty-four seconds and more; it lifted during the last ten seconds; twelve pounds empty; chamber pressure, a hundred pounds; pump pressure, seventy-five. Under the photograph of the test he would write a caption: the first test in which a liquid-propellant rocket operated satisfactorily and lifted its own weight.

In his report of May 5, 1926, he would specify that the test lasted twenty-seven seconds, until the propellants were exhausted, and that the thrust just balanced the weight of the rocket. It was a historic step: for the first time a liquid-propellant motor had produced enough thrust to carry its own weight. But it was not a flight. And Goddard drew a disappointing conclusion: the pump-fed rocket was too small, too heavy for its size. It would not be able to fly.

He then decided to simplify radically. No more pumps: he would pressurize the tanks themselves to push the liquids into the chamber. The rocket would be lighter, simpler. It would not climb high, but it would leave the ground.

On December 21, 1925, Goddard wrote one of the affidavits, texts dated and signed before a witness, that he had been keeping since 1924 to protect his ideas. This one was not about rockets. It was titled The Doctrine of Recurrence. In a universe infinite in time, he wrote, every configuration of matter will eventually recur. We would therefore live our lives again. And this kind of immortality ought, in his view, to have a very beneficial effect on conduct: the more sordid, narrow, and devoid of ideals our lives, the less pleasant the prospect of living them again.

Sources: wedding announcement and Worcester press (June 1924); correspondence with the Smithsonian and Science Service (1924–1925); supplementary report on ultimate developments (March 1924); Monthly Weather Review (February 1924); letter to Nature (September 9, 1924); letter to W. J. Humphreys (February 11, 1925); diary 1924–1925 (including December 6, 1925); report of May 5, 1926; affidavit of December 21, 1925 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. I and II.

Chapter 17 · March 16, 1926 Auburn

On the morning of Tuesday, March 16, 1926, Robert Goddard and his mechanic Henry Sachs left the physics laboratory of Clark University with a rocket that weighed less than six pounds empty. As they left, Goddard glanced at the laboratory anemometer: its cups were turning lazily. There was little wind. The two men took the road to Auburn, about three miles south of Worcester, to the farm of his cousin Effie Ward. There was still snow and ice in the fields.

Three Months of Preparation

Since the test of December 6 Goddard had rethought everything. In January 1926 he built a new combustion chamber pierced with four injection holes. On January 20 it gave a thrust of more than six pounds. On the 26th he bought a movie camera. He had adopted the simplest possible principle: no more pumps, but pressurized tanks that pushed the liquids into the chamber.

The rocket he designed resembled none of those that would be drawn later. It had a startling, almost upside-down shape: the motor, that is, the combustion chamber and its nozzle, was at the top, and the two tanks at the bottom, connected to the motor by two long tubes. The gasoline tank and the liquid-oxygen tank were light. To build up pressure, a little liquid oxygen flowed through a small hole into an inner tank and vaporized there, heated by a small alcohol burner placed under the tank. The gasoline injector was now just a plug of Alundum, a ceramic, pierced with four small holes. A preliminary test had shown that the lower part of the chamber had to be steel, not aluminum.

On February 21 Goddard filmed a parachute opening. On the 22nd Sachs made a magnesium valve and a small cup for the alcohol flame. On the 23rd they carried all the equipment to Auburn with Roope, a Clark colleague, and Esther: too much wind. On the 25th, a new attempt at “Aunt Effie’s”: still too much wind.

On March 5 the Smithsonian let him know it would like a “big story” on a successful flight, for a major ten-million-dollar fund-raising campaign it was preparing. On Saturday, March 6, Goddard made a test at Auburn at four in the afternoon. The upper part of the nozzle burned; the film would show that the rocket had almost reached the top of its frame. That evening he went to the Kappa Phi student society dance with Esther; they were its patrons.

The Frame in the Snow

On March 16 Goddard and Sachs set up the launching frame, a simple metal framework, in a field of the farm on Pakachoag Hill. Photographs of that day have survived: in one, Goddard stands beside the rocket in its frame; in another, Sachs lights it.

At one o’clock Esther and P. M. Roope arrived. Roope, of the Clark physics department, was in charge of the transit, the instrument used to measure angles, and the stopwatch. Esther had brought a camera, a French “Sept” that filmed only seven seconds per winding. There were four of them, all told, in a snowy Massachusetts field.

The launch procedure was rudimentary. The alcohol burner built up pressure in the oxygen tank. The igniter was lit. Then the release was pulled to free the rocket.

Two and a Half Seconds

It was two-thirty in the afternoon. Goddard would tell what happened in his diary the next day, in a passage that is one of the founding texts of astronautics.

Even after the release was pulled, he wrote, the rocket did not rise at once, but the flame came out and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, then at express-train speed, curving over to the left and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate. There was something almost magical about the ascent, he went on: no louder noise, no bigger flame, as though the rocket were saying: “I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else.”

The flight lasted two and a half seconds. The rocket rose to forty-one feet and came down one hundred eighty-four feet from the launching frame. Its average speed, timed with the stopwatch, was about sixty miles an hour. It traced a kind of half circle: the lower half of the nozzle had burned unevenly before liftoff, which made it veer. At the start it weighed 10.45 pounds: 5.75 pounds of rocket, 3.7 pounds of liquid oxygen, and three-quarters of a pound of gasoline.

Esther, Goddard relates, said that at the moment of liftoff the rocket looked like a fairy, or an aesthetic dancer. Among the surprising things he noted the absence of smoke, the absence of a very loud roar, and the smallness of the flame.

Then he added a detail worthy of a physicist-poet, which he could have left out and chose to keep: the sky was clear for the most part, with large, fleecy white clouds; but late in the afternoon there was a large pink cloud in the west, above which the sun shone.

That Evening

The diary entry for March 16 itself is extraordinarily sober. He went to Auburn with Mr. Sachs in the morning. Esther and Mr. Roope came at one o’clock. He tried the rocket at two-thirty. It rose forty-one feet and went one hundred eighty-four feet, in two and a half seconds, after the lower half of the nozzle had burned off. He brought the equipment back to the laboratory. In the evening he read mechanics and the physics of the air, and wrote up the experiment.

That is all. The man who has just flown the first liquid-propellant rocket in the history of the world goes back to the laboratory, puts away the equipment, and spends the evening reading and writing. The next day he takes the time to tell the scene in detail, as if for himself. He has notified no newspaper. He will notify none.

In the account of March 17 he also notes that the laboratory anemometer was still turning just as lazily when he and Sachs got back at five-thirty. Since February the wind had forced two attempts to be called off. That day it had dropped.

“The Empty Frame”

In his report of May 5, 1926, to the Smithsonian, Goddard described the event with fitting precision. It was, he wrote, the first time a rocket operated by liquid propellants had traveled under its own power. He enclosed a photograph he titled The Empty Frame: the launching frame, deserted by the rocket that has just left. A photograph, he added, obtained after a long time. Since 1920 he had been working to make a liquid rocket leave its frame.

In his 1927 autobiography he would compare this flight with the Wright brothers’ first flight, on December 17, 1903, at Kitty Hawk: twelve seconds, a hundred twenty feet covered, ten feet of height. The Wrights’ flight had not seemed very impressive to its few witnesses either. But it had proved that a heavier-than-air machine could fly under its own power. The Auburn flight proved that a liquid-propellant rocket could do so.

The Smithsonian, however, did not consider the flight convincing enough to announce to the public. Two and a half seconds, forty-one feet: in the eyes of donors, that was little. There would be no “big story.” The Auburn flight would remain almost unknown until 1936, when Goddard described it in his second publication. Only after his death would March 16, 1926, become a famous date, and on July 13, 1960, a granite marker would be erected on Pakachoag Hill, where the frame had stood. Pakachoag, in the language of the local Native people, means a turning place.

The Second Flight

Goddard, for his part, had already moved on. He strengthened the rocket with four tubes, put baffles in the tanks to keep the liquids from sloshing, and reduced the amount of oxygen. Then he made a decision that contradicted his original intuition: he moved the combustion chamber down, below the tanks. Having the motor on top had not made the rocket more stable. Every rocket in the world since then has had its motor at the bottom.

On April 3, 1926, he was at the farm at six forty-five. The rocket rose after a moment of hesitation, flew for four and two-tenths seconds, and came down about fifty feet away. It was the second flight of a liquid-propellant rocket. A photograph of May 4 shows the first model with the motor at the base. That day Sachs released the rocket by accident; Goddard also notes, without further comment, that Sachs had forgotten the alcohol burner. Roope, at the transit, measured what he could.

After that the thrust was no longer sufficient. In May nothing flew. The little rocket had given what it could. To go higher, it would have to be bigger.

The Volunteers

The Auburn flight had not been announced, but Goddard’s reputation traveled without him. In March 1926 letters from volunteers for the trip to the Moon arrived from Berlin; from Ziegenrück, where a German student of political economy offered his services; from Helsingfors, where a twenty-year-old declared himself ready to risk his life; from Stockholm, where two young men applied. The German press spoke of fifty-two candidates for the lunar voyage. On January 9 the Russian Nikolai Rynin of Leningrad, who was preparing an encyclopedia of astronautics, had asked for his paper; on April 11 he wrote that he had found in it all the ideas Oberth had presented as new in 1923.

In Germany, Goddard noted in his May report, the subject was becoming almost a national affair. A novelist, Otto Willi Gail, had published Der Schuss ins All, “The Shot into Space,” which played, Goddard wrote, on racial feeling and presented the American contribution in so unfavorable a light that it would not be well received in the United States. The small physicist from Worcester, who had flown the first liquid rocket in the silence of a snowy field, watched from afar the birth of a collective passion of which he was both the inspiration and the forgotten man.

Sources: diary of R. H. Goddard (January–May 1926, including March 16 and 17, 1926); report to the Smithsonian of May 5, 1926; autobiography (1927); correspondence with the Smithsonian (March–June 1926); letters from N. Rynin (January–April 1926); photograph captions — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. II.

Chapter 18 · 1926 – 1928 The Big Rocket

On January 28, 1927, Robert Goddard lay awake for part of the night. The next day he was to test at Auburn the largest rocket he had ever built, and one thought haunted him: what if there was thrust and he could not release the rocket? He noted it in his diary. For two years this big rocket would cost him more sleepless nights, disappointments, and explosions than any other device in his life. The editors of his papers would speak of a mistake he deeply regretted.

“No More $500 Remittances”

It all started with a letter. On May 8, 1926, a few weeks after the Auburn flight, Charles Abbot wrote to Goddard that the Smithsonian now wanted a spectacular flight. Goddard replied that he would need 2,500 dollars and eight months to a year. Walcott obtained the rest of the Cottrell fund. On June 24 Abbot added a weighty sentence: the Smithsonian did not want to go on sending 500 dollars at a time. A result was needed. The editors of the papers believe the tone of this letter explains why Goddard then embarked on building a rocket twenty times larger than the one at Auburn.

On June 29, 1926, he sent a detailed plan in four stages: six months, then three, then two, then one. On July 1 the 2,500 dollars were granted, in installments of 500, with, Abbot wrote, the most enthusiastic hope of complete and spectacular success.

It was not the step-by-step man speaking in this plan, but a researcher pressed by his backers. Goddard knew, he had written it in 1925, that the bigger a rocket, the more efficient it is. He also knew that a big rocket multiplies the problems. He chose to skip a step.

Mrs. Carlson’s Windmill

The summer and fall of 1926 were devoted to construction. On June 6 Goddard gave Esther a driving lesson. On June 17 he saw Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden on a visit to Clark. In October he went with Esther to Schenectady, to General Electric, to inquire about welding. Sachs looked for leaks in the tanks by blowing cigarette smoke into them. On October 22 the couple went to see the actress Ruth Draper. On the 29th he noted that Esther had read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes aloud in the evening.

To launch a heavier rocket, a tower was needed. Goddard bought the tower of an old windmill from a Mrs. Carlson. It was taken down, then put back up in a ravine on his cousin Effie’s farm. On November 23 Abbot came to see the preparations. He was struck: it was beyond the luxury class, he said; and the simplicity was surprising.

In November and December Goddard exchanged a few letters with Magie, his former chief at Princeton. Magie admitted that no trace of him could be found in the records of 1912–1913, but that his work had been of a very high order. Goddard replied that everything he had done since had been worked out in theory while he was at Princeton. He gave up a fellowship to study abroad, because of the rockets and because of his father, whose health was declining.

On December 27 he read A Trip to Mars and reread part of The War of the Worlds. On the 29th he asked the Smithsonian to release nothing about his work: foreigners were trying to find out what he was doing.

Joe Allen’s Horse

In January 1927 the big rocket was assembled. It weighed about 150 pounds with its propellants. It had to be hauled to Auburn in midwinter. The car and trailer got stuck in the snow; a horse belonging to a man named Joe Allen pulled them out. On February 10 Charles Walcott, the Smithsonian Secretary who had granted the first subsidy in 1917, died.

Spring made things no better. In April the wind blew, and forest fires were feared. On April 16 Goddard left for the farm at five in the morning with a student, Sleeper. A photograph from that spring shows Sachs holding up at arm’s length the cone of an early parachute.

On May 3, 1927, the test took place, with the student Benner and Esther. The rocket produced a thrust of fifty pounds and more above its own weight, and several times more than two hundred pounds. But the oxygen ran out too soon, and after three minutes and five seconds the gasoline tank exploded. The most complex parts, Goddard found, were intact. The rocket had not left the ground.

A Summer of Reading

On May 28, 1927, Goddard noted a historical curiosity from his reading: incendiary rockets were said to have been used by the Chinese against troops in 1232. On June 2, 16, and 17 he made solar-energy experiments with a mirror and obtained an efficiency of about thirty percent; he would draw from them a patent for a solar vaporizer. On June 15 and 16 he read Wells’s In the Days of the Comet.

On June 6 he had read the German books on the rocket: Oberth, Valier, Hohmann, Gail. His judgment was bitter: in each of them, America’s contribution was belittled. A translator, Robert Lademann, had translated his 1919 paper into German; Goddard corrected the translation in 1927; the publisher Oldenbourg, Oberth’s publisher, would turn it down in January 1928.

On July 8 a twenty-two-year-old Filipino wrote that he wanted to be the first man to visit the Moon. From July 15 to 17 Goddard was visited by two physicists from the Carnegie Institution, Gregory Breit and Merle Tuve, who were studying the ionosphere with radio waves. J. A. Anderson of Mount Wilson wanted to send a quartz spectrograph to an altitude of four hundred miles to photograph the Sun’s ultraviolet spectrum. Goddard dreamed of a full program: study of the upper atmosphere, spectra, and even something of the interplanetary problem, too interesting, he wrote, to be ignored in America. A tour of Europe at this critical moment, he added, did not attract him at all.

On July 23 Abbot called him to order in a word: concentrate. The altitude flight first.

Back to a Medium Size

On July 20 the big rocket was tested again: the control cords tangled and the chamber was burned through. On August 31 the thrust was tremendous, up to three hundred pounds, then the top of the chamber burned. On September 3, 1927, Goddard made the sensible decision: he went back to a smaller model, four times larger than the 1926 one but five times smaller than the big rocket, made of simple parts that were easy to replace.

From October to December 1927 he made five tests of this medium model, less than eleven days apart. On October 26 the igniter exploded. On November 9 it burned. On the 21st the alcohol burner would not light because of the wind. On the 30th there was not enough heat. On December 6, at last, the pressure rose to thirty pounds and the thrust reached fifty pounds at the end, for a rocket weighing twenty-seven pounds empty. On December 10 Abbot sent 500 dollars.

On October 8 he had read Wells’s The Stone Age. On October 19, Anniversary Day, he had stopped at the cherry tree at six in the evening.

The Photograph Album

His father was ill. Nahum Goddard had cancer of the throat. On December 14, 1927, Robert postponed his sabbatical. On December 18 he went with Esther to Boston and photographed the places of his childhood: St. James’s Church, the old house, the Hugh O’Brien School, Mount Pleasant Avenue, Blue Hill Avenue. At Christmas he gave his father an album of these photographs.

On December 23 he varnished the little rocket of March–May 1926 to preserve it. It is now in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“A Most Unfortunate Series of Mishaps”

The year 1928 began as the previous one had ended. On January 10 a fire broke out at the farm; they had to wait for a man named Will to arrive with his horses. On January 12 the pressure rose to a hundred pounds and the thrust exceeded the rocket’s weight by twenty pounds, but the turntable that was to release it stayed locked: a cable was jammed. On January 27 the Air Reduction company of Boston delivered liquid air instead of oxygen. On February 6 misunderstood signals among the team made a tank explode. On February 16 he discovered that a new lot of steel had welds that broke in liquid oxygen. He spoke of a most unfortunate series of mishaps. He did, all the same, succeed in making the rocket spin on its axis while it was running.

On February 12, 1928, Abbot became Secretary of the Smithsonian, succeeding Walcott. Goddard congratulated him. He now had at the head of the institution a man who had believed in him since 1916.

At the end of March Henry Sachs accepted a post at a Navy arsenal. Abbot arranged for him to stay one more month. On March 29 a chamber burned. On April 2 Abbot sent 250 dollars taken from what he called the Smithsonian’s slender finances. On April 9 Clark raised Goddard’s salary to 4,000 dollars a year. In May: wind, leaks, an igniter burned through. On May 31 the oxygen tank exploded. But Sachs, in the end, gave up the Navy post and stayed.

Opel’s Car

Meanwhile in Germany the rocket was becoming a spectacle. On April 17, 1928, the American consul in Cologne sent the State Department a report on demonstrations of rocket vehicles. On April 11, at Rüsselsheim, the industrialist Fritz von Opel and the writer Max Valier had presented a car propelled by twelve powder rockets, driven by a man named Volkhart, which reached about sixty-two miles an hour in eight seconds. Opel announced a “penetration into the universe” within the year.

Goddard was asked for his opinion. On May 15 he replied with somewhat cool precision. The Opel car burned slow black powder; he himself had developed a similar powder with the Navy five years earlier. He did not believe gravity could be overcome with a powder rocket of reasonable mass. His small liquid model had already flown farther than the first airplane flight. But he acknowledged that the German car had a popular appeal his own devices lacked: a driver on board.

From June 13 to 18, 1928, Goddard and Esther took a road trip: Washington, where he showed Abbot the film of his tests; Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home; Princeton, where he saw Mrs. Brown and the Magies again; the Bear Mountain bridge over the Hudson. On June 21 the Smithsonian granted 1,500 dollars.

In June Esnault-Pelterie published in Paris a long study on the exploration of the upper atmosphere and interplanetary travel. Goddard noted errors in it and observed that General Ferrié in France credited Esnault-Pelterie with priority for the idea on the strength of a 1912 text, whereas he himself had written on the subject as early as 1907. On July 27 a young Berliner, Willy Ley, wrote that he was preparing a history of rockets and space travel, and that in Germany there reigned a confusion of contradictory and irresponsible views about him. In July Esnault-Pelterie invited him to compete for the astronautics prize he had founded; Goddard declined, since his work was unpublished, but he affirmed that interplanetary navigation was possible with means already available.

On August 3, 1928, Goddard had an idea that would solve one of his most stubborn problems: bringing the fuel into the chamber tangentially, as a swirling film that protected the wall from heat. This is what would later be called film cooling.

September 15

On September 15, 1928, he wrote in his diary that his father had died at ten minutes to one that night. The evening before, Nahum Goddard had still been at home, on the porch. Robert stayed with Esther until five in the morning. Then he drove Jennie into town. His father, who had seen him off at the station for Princeton, who had taken his patent to the attorneys in 1913, who had packed his machines one Sunday in 1918, who called him “the angel shooter,” would not see what came next.

Aldrin

On September 29, 1928, Goddard received a letter from Edwin E. Aldrin, a former Clark student who had become head of aviation at the Standard Oil Development Company. Aldrin was interested in his work. Goddard replied on October 3: he believed the rocket would be an even more important development than he had thought years before, which was saying a good deal. But hard-headed businessmen, he added, were convinced only by results. Edwin Aldrin’s son, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., known as “Buzz,” would become a NASA astronaut in 1963, and the second man to walk on the Moon, in July 1969.

The Crinoline

On that same September 29 Goddard tried a new model, which he nicknamed the “crinoline” because of its shape: eleven feet four inches, 28.5 pounds. The chamber burned, and the rocket rose only three or four feet. On October 16 he tried the tangential feed: the chamber and nozzle were not even red. On October 17 he noted that he had gone into town to meet E. and bought a piano. It was an exceptional piano, on which the pianist Olga Samaroff had played shortly before in Worcester, in the Goddards’ presence. On October 19 he went to the cherry tree. On the 20th the gasoline tank exploded.

In November he thought about stabilizing the rocket by gyroscope, with vanes acting both in the air and in the jet. And on December 26, 1928, at about three in the afternoon, before Esther and a student, Lawrence Mansur, the crinoline flew: 204.5 feet of distance, 3.2 seconds in the air, sixty miles an hour. It was the third flight of a liquid-propellant rocket in history. A photograph shows Goddard and Sachs after the flight.

From December 27 to 31 the couple was in New York for the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. They went to the theater: Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, The High Road, White Lilacs, and Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which Goddard rated with two exclamation marks. He lunched with Aldrin.

“He Stands Alone”

On January 3, 1929, he sent his report to the Smithsonian. A thrust had lasted fifty-five seconds, timed with a stopwatch. He had discovered how to make a much lighter chamber. And he expressed a new wish: to work in the deserts of the West. On January 5 he reread The War of the Worlds and Edison’s Conquest of Mars in the 1898 issues of the Boston Post he had kept.

On January 14 Abbot wrote a memorandum to justify a new grant of 10,000 dollars. In it he wrote a sentence that is the best summary of the situation in 1929: no German experimenter had yet achieved the steady combustion of liquid propellants; in this highly necessary development Dr. Goddard had entirely succeeded, and he stood alone.

On January 22 Goddard accepted 5,000 dollars from the Smithsonian. It was, he wrote, the old story: people believe only what they see. Abbot offered to publish his results in the Miscellaneous Collections and wrote to the president of the California Institute of Technology, Arthur A. Noyes, seeking 20,000 to 25,000 dollars that would allow work in California.

Sources: correspondence with C. G. Abbot and the Smithsonian (May 1926–January 1929); plan of June 29, 1926; diary 1926–1928; letters from W. F. Magie (late 1926); reply to the Cologne consul’s report (May 15, 1928); letters from W. Ley and R. Esnault-Pelterie (1928); letters from E. E. Aldrin and reply (September–October 1928); report of January 3, 1929; Abbot’s memorandum of January 14, 1929 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. II.

Chapter 19 · 1929 Nell

On July 17, 1929, shortly after two in the afternoon, a loud roar and a white flame rose from a metal tower set in a ravine on the Ward farm at Auburn. Nearby, people thought an airplane had just crashed. Two police ambulances set out to pick up the victims. A plane took off from the Grafton airfield to fly over the site. A dozen automobiles raised the dust on the country roads. There were no victims: there was only, around an old windmill tower, Professor Goddard, his team, and the remains of a rocket.

The Three-Step Plan

The year had begun under better auspices. On January 29, 1929, Goddard sent the Smithsonian a three-step plan: achieve stability in flight; build a rocket the size of the big rocket of 1927; then measure, at altitude, wind, pressure, temperature, and the propagation of radio waves. On January 31 Abbot granted 5,000 dollars.

The team grew. Albert W. Kisk, Esther’s brother, joined Goddard as an instrument maker; he would stay until 1941. A student, Lawrence C. Mansur, took part in the tests. On February 9 Goddard measured a gyroscope’s rotation speed by ear, from the sound it made: an octave above 1,024 vibrations per second. On March 15 he attended a lecture on relativity at President Atwood’s home.

In the spring a science writer, George W. Gray, was preparing an article for the Atlantic Monthly. On May 23 Goddard gave him a table of the efficiencies of the engines of the day: five percent for a locomotive, fifteen for an ocean liner, thirty to thirty-four for a Diesel engine. In April Abbot’s attempt to raise funds in California had failed: the scientists of Caltech and Mount Wilson could not use the money intended for the future two-hundred-inch telescope; the physicist Robert Millikan was looking into the matter.

On May 26 three students from Ekaterinoslav in the Soviet Union wrote asking to go on the first flight to the Moon; they apologized for their English, worse, they said, than their French. On June 21 the big rocket, loaded with a hundred pounds of liquids, gave three hundred pounds of thrust, then the oxygen tank gave way. The steel, Goddard found, was not as good as it had been three or four years earlier.

The Instrument Rocket

For July 17 Goddard had prepared a twelve-foot rocket weighing thirty-two pounds, launched from the sixty-foot windmill tower. For the first time it carried instruments: a thermometer, a barometer, and a camera. It was, according to Goddard, the first rocket, at least among liquid-propellant rockets, to carry recording instruments.

Everyone had a post. Roope was well behind the shelter, with the transit and the stopwatch. Esther held a Ciné-Kodak movie camera. Albert Kisk watched the pin cord. Sachs looked after the pressure tank and two cords. Lawrence Mansur watched the rocket. Goddard pulled the release cords.

“Look Out!”

The rocket left at two o’clock. Goddard pulled the cords, and kept pulling, convinced it had not gone, until someone shouted to look out. According to Roope’s measurements, the rocket left the tower after fourteen and a half seconds, reached the top of its path at seventeen seconds, and hit the ground at eighteen and a half. It rose twenty feet above the tower, tipped over, peaked at about ninety feet above the top of the tower, a hundred by Goddard’s estimate, and came down one hundred seventy-one feet from the tower. The flame was about twenty feet long. The average speed was fifty-five feet per second.

The camera and the barometer were found intact in the wreckage; they are now kept at the Roswell Museum. The lens glass was not even scratched. Esther’s film shows the liftoff. It does not show, however, the little scene that followed, which the editors of Goddard’s papers took care to record: the group drinking the rocket’s health in ginger ale. This was the middle of Prohibition.

The Countryside in Alarm

That was when the ambulances arrived. The noise and the white flame had made people think a plane had crashed. Behind the police came reporters from the Post and the Gazette. The next day the headlines spread across the pages: an experimental Goddard rocket explodes in the air; a terrific explosion as Clark’s Professor Goddard fires his “Moon rocket”; a woman thought the rocket was a crashing plane. The Boston Globe headline said the “Moon rocket” man’s test had alarmed the whole countryside.

Goddard issued a statement of calculated dryness: there had been no attempt to reach the Moon. In a text given to the Associated Press around July 20, he took the time to explain. An efficient rocket rested on three conditions: a conical nozzle, a small chamber fed continuously, and secondary rockets taking over one after another. It would make it possible to photograph the ultraviolet radiation of the Sun and the stars, which our atmosphere stops as surely, he said, as an iron plate. As for interplanetary travel, there could be no doubt about the soundness of the idea, but progress was made step by step. The recent test was only a first step.

Abbot, too, addressed the press on July 20. No project as wild as going to the Moon was contemplated, he declared. He listed the real aims of the project: to take air samples at altitude, measure temperature and pressure, place spectrographs above the ozone layer, around fifty miles up, and supply weather data for aviation. The Smithsonian had spent more than 12,000 dollars over twelve years on this research. Air, he said, was an obstacle to the rocket, not a necessity. He compared the test to the first flight of Samuel Langley’s model airplane over the Potomac on May 6, 1896, and to Lindbergh’s crossing of the Atlantic in 1927.

Nell

It was in these days of tumult that Goddard’s rocket got its name. In the middle of this wave of publicity, Lawrence Mansur came out with a line from an old popular melodrama: “They ain’t done right by our Nell.” From then on, and for years, the rocket would be called “Nell.” The name passed from one craft to the next. When, in 1935, Goddard shipped a rocket to the Smithsonian, his mechanic would remark that old Nellie was going on a trip. And in December 1940, in the darkest hours of his discouragement with the military, he would write to a friend that he kept all his faith in Nell, and that she would end up wearing a uniform of one kind or another.

The Fire Marshal

The incident did not end there. On July 25 an inspector, Molt, conducted an investigation for the Massachusetts State Fire Marshal. He concluded that there had been no danger and no explosion. But the Auburn farm was now besieged by reporters and sightseers. They measured the tower and carried off souvenirs. The neighbors were worried. On August 1 Goddard went to see Marshal Neal in Boston. He needed another site.

On July 18, the day after the flight, he had written Abbot a hopeful letter. Gyroscopic stabilizers weighing less than ten pounds were ready. With such automatic stabilization, very high flights now seemed a certainty. And America must be first in the development of the liquid-propellant rocket, despite, he wrote, the flood of suggestions from abroad.

On July 26 he was looking for a new site. He spotted one at the Camp Devens military reservation, twenty-five miles from Worcester, near a pond called Hell Pond: an old farm riddled by practice artillery shells. He was also thinking about defense against aircraft by a rocket guided by radio, by sound, or by reflected waves. If this country let the thing slip through its fingers, he wrote, leaving the sentence unfinished. He imagined floats to keep the liquids from sloshing in the tanks. On July 27 Abbot wrote to the Secretary of War to obtain the use of the ground.

On July 28 Goddard confided to Science Service his irritation at what he called persistent and systematic propaganda from abroad. The 400-dollar astronautics prize created by Esnault-Pelterie had just been awarded to a German, and the German rocket cars had, in his view, no practical or scientific value.

“Pleased with the Simplicity”

On August 7 Abbot came to Auburn to see the installation and said he was pleased with its simplicity. On August 22 Pathé newsreels shot a sound film about the rocket. On August 27 Goddard wrote a report on the conditions for the smallest possible mass of propellant to go to a planet: he described four stages, beginning with an airplane or dirigible powered by solar energy through mirrors, which would climb as high as possible before the rocket took over.

During the summer and fall he gathered all his experiment notes. They would later be transcribed into twenty-two, then twenty-seven volumes, kept at the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim Foundation, Clark, and the Roswell Museum.

Goddard did not know it yet, but the noisy flight of July 17, the one that forced him to leave Auburn, was going to change his life. For among the readers of the newspapers telling of the “Moon rocket” that had alarmed the countryside, there was, at Port Washington on Long Island, a woman who would read the article aloud to her husband and their guest. And their guest was Charles Lindbergh.

Sources: plan of January 29, 1929; diary 1929; report on the flight of July 17, 1929, and photograph captions; press clippings (July 18, 1929); statements by R. H. Goddard and C. G. Abbot to the Associated Press (about July 20, 1929); letter to Abbot (July 18, 1929); report by Inspector Molt (July 25, 1929); letter to Science Service (July 28, 1929); report of August 27, 1929; foreword by G. E. Pendray after M. Lomask, Seed Money (1964) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. I and II.

Chapter 20 · 1929 – 1930 Lindbergh

In July 1929, at Falaise, Harry Guggenheim’s great house at Port Washington on the north shore of Long Island, two men were discussing the future of aviation. The first was their host, Harry F. Guggenheim, a former naval aviator in the war and son of the copper magnate Daniel Guggenheim. The second was the most famous man in America: Charles A. Lindbergh, who had flown alone across the Atlantic from New York to Paris two years earlier. They were talking about the limits of the propeller airplane. In a corner of the room Mrs. Caroline Morton Guggenheim was reading the newspaper without taking part in the conversation. Suddenly she called out to the two of them to listen to this. And she read them the account of the rocket firing that, on July 17, had alarmed the Auburn countryside.

Harry Guggenheim then said that this might be their answer. And he suggested that Lindbergh go and talk to this Professor Goddard. The scene was told by the Guggenheims’ biographer, Milton Lomask, and repeated by G. Edward Pendray in the foreword to Goddard’s papers. It marks the turning point of his life.

The Guggenheim Family and Aviation

To understand what follows, one must know who the Guggenheims were. Daniel Guggenheim had built a considerable fortune in mining and refining metals. His son Harry had served in naval aviation in France in 1917–1918. Convinced of aviation’s future, they had created in 1925 the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aeronautics at New York University, then, in 1926, the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, endowed with three million dollars, which had funded engineering schools, air safety, and Lindbergh’s triumphal tour of the United States after his crossing. Lindbergh was a friend of the family. He was also technical adviser to the airlines, and he was looking for what would come after the airplane.

Camp Devens

Goddard, for his part, knew nothing of these conversations. In the fall of 1929 he was mainly looking for a place to fire his rockets. On October 8 he spoke to Harvard’s Bond Astronomical Club at the invitation of the astronomer Harlow Shapley. On October 9 Clark’s student paper published a portrait of him: he taught the elementary physics course himself; he was a great teacher and a great scientist, and he was, contrary to popular belief, indifferent to long flights to the Moon.

In Europe the press weighed in. On July 23, 1929, the Neues Wiener Journal in Vienna had published an article saying the Moon rocket had exploded and calling it a scientific bluff of the largest size. The author claimed that Goddard was in reality an expert in long-range guns and that his “Moon rocket” was only a screen; the real Moon rocket, he concluded, would rise not from America but from old Europe. On October 7 Goddard replied that a development of pure science should not become an instrument of international ill will.

On October 14 he explained to a New York Times reporter, E. E. Free, things he had never said in public. Only 43.5 pounds at the start, from a three-mile-high mountain, would suffice to send one pound to the Moon, whereas Esnault-Pelterie had announced five hundred to a thousand. The Opel car was not the equivalent of the Wright brothers’ flight. The Germans, thanks to the translation of his paper, had copied the angle of his nozzle and the idea of clusters of rockets. And above all, he had solved the problem of liquid oxygen, which the Germans were afraid to use. He had even been offered, he added, a partnership abroad. On October 19 he went to the cherry tree in the afternoon.

Between October 21 and 28 the War Department granted him a six-month permit to use ground at Camp Devens. The conditions were strict: fire only after rain or on snow, keep extinguishers on hand, post signs forbidding entry. The Auburn tower was taken down and put back up on the artillery range, near a pond called Hell Pond. A photograph from the winter of 1929–1930 shows the tower and the shelter in this desolate landscape.

The Telephone Call

On November 22, 1929, the telephone rang at the Goddards’. It was Charles Lindbergh. An MIT engineer, C. Fayette Taylor, had passed on Lindbergh’s interest in rockets. On the 23rd Lindbergh came to the Clark laboratory. Goddard showed him his apparatus, then took him home for coffee. He showed him, he relates in his autobiography, the film of the July 17 flight.

Goddard was forty-seven, Lindbergh twenty-seven. Goddard would write of him that he was a young man with a quick mind. In the years to come Lindbergh would be one of his most constant supporters.

On November 27 Lindbergh took him to Wilmington, Delaware, to see Henry du Pont, of the great industrial family. The meeting left Goddard with a decidedly unpleasant impression. Three engineers of the Du Pont company asked him increasingly precise questions. One of them let slip that knowing what he had done would save them a good deal of trouble. It was said that Opel was in the United States.

The return trip was made in Lindbergh’s two-seat plane. It was Robert Goddard’s first airplane ride. Henry du Pont had lent him his flying suit; without it, he wrote, he would have frozen. In his autobiography he would tell how Lindbergh took him up to 8,000 feet, then came down to fifty feet above the tops of the pines: a good test of his nerves. Lindbergh, for his part, believed that support for his research should come from someone interested in science, not from a company.

“A New World”

On December 2, 1929, Goddard sent Lindbergh an estimate: to climb high, a rocket with 1,500 pounds of thrust for one minute would be needed. On December 10 a conference brought together in Washington, at the home of John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution, some of the greatest names in American science. Lindbergh had flown in from New York in an hour and fifty-five minutes. There were Abbot of the Smithsonian; Marvin, chief of the Weather Bureau; Fleming, a specialist in terrestrial magnetism; Walter Adams and Harold Babcock of Mount Wilson.

Lindbergh explained that the airplane was approaching its speed limit, but that the scientific uses of the rocket should be developed first. Adams declared that a spectrum of the Sun taken above the ozone layer would double our knowledge. Merriam said the method would virtually open up a new world, and dreamed aloud of a photograph of the Earth taken from the distance of the Moon. Marvin estimated that 500,000 dollars would be needed to reach a hundred miles; Goddard thought 100,000 would suffice. The film of July 17 was shown. Lindbergh said he was sure he could find the money. On December 19 the Carnegie Institution gave 5,000 dollars.

Winter at Devens

On January 21, 1930, two Du Pont men came back to ask Goddard whether the rocket might one day replace the airplane for long journeys. He told them yes. On February 12 Lindbergh was held up on the West Coast. On March 3 Goddard replied to a collector of quotations that most researchers in pure science have no inspiration other than an intense interest in their work, and that public recognition leaves them more surprised and disconcerted than elated.

In March and April 1930 he made tests at Devens, often with Esther. He tested a model airplane whose propellers were driven by a rocket; on March 25 it looped the loop. On April 5 a steel propeller spun so fast that its blades were thrown more than forty-seven feet. A photograph from the spring of 1930, taken in an abandoned henhouse on the camp, shows the team: Goddard, Charles Mansur, Lawrence’s brother, Henry Sachs, and Albert Kisk. Charles Mansur would stay with Goddard to the end.

On March 29 he wrote to Merriam: the lead was at present in America, and he would not like to see it pass to another country through our inaction. Between April 8 and 12 a New York journalist, David Lasser, founded the American Interplanetary Society, which would later become the American Rocket Society. Goddard agreed to be an honorary member but declined to speak to it: he was, he wrote, the only one who had worked out the problem in detail and verified it by experiment. On April 18 he explained to the journalist Waldemar Kaempffert that Oberth had made only two tests, both failures, and that the film studio financing him had stopped doing so.

On April 24 he replied to the magazine Science and Invention by citing the astronomer Simon Newcomb, who at the beginning of the century had explained that a substance a hundred times stronger than steel would have to be discovered before a flying machine was possible. The known propellants, Goddard concluded, were sufficient for interplanetary travel. On May 10 he had raised the velocity of his gases from 4,000 to 5,000 or 6,000 feet per second; considered as a gas turbine, his rocket developed two hundred horsepower per pound of engine, against one horsepower per pound for the best aircraft engine.

On May 16 he told the Worcester Evening Gazette that he was not building a rocket meant to reach the Moon. On May 28 he wrote Abbot a letter of gratitude that summed up fourteen years of their relationship: he could not overestimate the value of Abbot’s support, at times when almost no one in the world saw any importance in the undertaking.

“Lindy Called”

On May 29, 1930, Goddard’s diary recorded the event with its usual economy of words: Lindy had called about Daniel Guggenheim; he had gone to dinner at the Hong Fong with E. Lindbergh had convinced Daniel Guggenheim. From June 5 to 9 Goddard was in New York with President Atwood and his wife, at Lindbergh’s and at the home of Colonel Henry Breckinridge, the Guggenheim family’s lawyer.

On June 12, 1930, Daniel Guggenheim offered 25,000 dollars a year for two years, and two more years if an advisory committee recommended it. It was several times more than Goddard had ever received in a year. The money was paid to Clark University, which granted Goddard leave to devote himself entirely to his research. The fund bore a solemn name: the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Measurement and Investigation of High Altitudes. Half of any patent profits would go to science. The advisory committee brought together Merriam, its chairman, Abbot, Adams, Atwood, Breckinridge, Fleming, Lindbergh, Marvin, and Millikan. On June 23 the check for 25,000 dollars arrived.

On June 24 Goddard copied into his diary a poem by Longfellow, Daybreak: a wind comes up out of the sea and bids the mists make room for it; it hails the ships and cries to the mariners to sail on, for the night is gone; then it hurries landward, crying, “Awake! it is the day.”

Sources: foreword by G. E. Pendray (after M. Lomask, Seed Money, 1964); Clark News (October 9, 1929); letters of R. H. Goddard (October 1929–May 1930); War Department permit (October 1929); diary (November 1929–June 1930); account of the conference of December 10, 1929; autobiography (1933 supplement); letter from D. Guggenheim (June 12, 1930) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. I and II. Poem “Daybreak” by H. W. Longfellow (public domain).

Chapter 21 · 1930 Roswell

On July 25, 1930, an automobile loaded with baggage approached Roswell, a small town in eastern New Mexico. At the wheel was Robert Goddard; beside him, Esther. They had crossed America from east to west. That evening Goddard described the last miles in his diary with a painter’s eye: seventy-five miles of prairie and desert before the town; the trees began about six miles out; pretty clouds, purple underneath; a sky blue down to the horizon in the clear part, and green at the horizon near the showers. Three days later he noted that they were trying their best to become New Mexicans.

Why Roswell

The choice of place had been thought through. Camp Devens had proved impractical in summer: one had to wait for rain or snow to fire, and the soldiers, Goddard wrote, had even stolen equipment he thought well hidden. With Lindbergh he had first considered the southern Great Plains. Then he consulted Charles F. Brooks, the Clark meteorologist, who recommended eastern New Mexico after studying the wind and dust patterns of the region.

On July 9 Clark University had issued a press release prepared, at Lindbergh’s request, by the agency of the publicist Ivy Lee. The rocket was presented as working on the principle of a gun firing gases instead of shot. It was compared with the Wright brothers’ first trials, which covered only a few feet. Abbot imagined a network of rocket stations at airports to map the upper-air weather every day. On July 14 Abbot proposed announcing each test the day before; Goddard did nothing of the kind. He wrote that he and Esther were leaving by car for the West the next morning. His address would be the Weather Bureau office in Roswell.

On July 22 his friend Thompson, of the Dahlgren proving ground, sent him a letter of encouragement tinged with humor: given the history of his work, he wrote, ordinary battles, the Marne or Bunker Hill, would be a kind of recreation for him.

Mescalero Ranch

On August 2, 1930, Goddard rented for two years, from a Miss Olds, a house a few miles from town known as Mescalero Ranch, for 115 dollars a month, on condition that he irrigate the grounds around the house. It was there that the Goddards would live throughout their years in New Mexico. They would buy the ranch in 1941.

The team arrived little by little. Albert Kisk and his wife Bea came first. On August 3 everyone picnicked under the pines by the river at Ruidoso, in the mountains. On August 10 Henry Sachs and his wife arrived and chose to live at the ranch with the Kisks. Charles Mansur took a room. Lawrence Mansur and his wife Ina arrived on August 29.

The country fascinated Goddard. On August 12 he watched lightning over the Rockies and August meteors with yellow trails, and noticed that the North Star stood much lower on the horizon than in Worcester. On August 14 he gave a talk at the town’s Rotary Club. On August 18 it was 105 degrees Fahrenheit. On August 26, at sunset, Esther called the great thunderheads on the horizon “magic mountains.” The next day Goddard noted dark blue clouds and a lemon-yellow break in them.

The Shop

A shop thirty feet by sixty was built three miles northeast of Roswell. It was a simple building in which the team would make with their own hands almost every part of the rockets. For the tests a more isolated site was needed. On September 25 they found, on Oscar White’s land, a depression called Eden Valley, about ten miles northwest of town. All of Goddard’s flights in New Mexico would take place there. Goddard’s employees remarked on the contrast between that name and Hell Pond at Devens.

The sixty-foot tower was set up there, with a twenty-foot sheet-iron screen to shield the rocket from sun and wind, and a control shelter fifty-five feet away. This tower is now preserved at the Roswell Museum. Liquid oxygen came from Amarillo, Texas, fifteen liters twice a week. On September 30 a hailstorm fell, with hailstones the size of pecans.

The Death of Daniel Guggenheim

Daniel Guggenheim died in the fall of 1930, a few months after granting the subsidy. Goddard’s papers contradict each other slightly on the date: September according to the foreword, October according to a note. On October 6 Goddard wrote to the family that the world of science, and aviation in particular, had suffered a great loss. His estate would honor the two years promised.

Letters from abroad kept arriving. On August 23 a Roman offered to become his partner for Italy. On August 29 the Okura company of Tokyo asked for reports. Goddard politely declined.

On October 8 Roswell celebrated its Cotton Carnival. Goddard rode in the parade by car to represent Massachusetts, with Esther, Al, and Bea. In the afternoon the couple attended the rodeo. On October 16 he suggested to Walter Adams at Mount Wilson that one might “listen” to the variations in starlight at the telescope by turning light into sound. Adams replied that at Mount Wilson, with a cell placed at the focus of the hundred-inch telescope, one could indeed hear the stars go by. On October 19 and 20 he proposed to the chemist G. N. Lewis a linear accelerator for protons; Ernest O. Lawrence of Berkeley replied on November 4 that he was already accelerating mercury ions that way. On October 19, Anniversary Day, he attended Lawrence Mansur’s housewarming: coffee and cake.

“The Real Work Is Prosaic”

On October 29, 1930, came the first static test at Roswell: the rocket, firmly tied down, produced a thrust of one hundred forty pounds. On November 5 Goddard made projections: to carry five pounds of instruments to thirty miles, a rocket of about a hundred pounds, a foot in diameter and seven feet long, would be needed.

Between November 11 and 17 President Atwood wrote to him that no Clark project had ever offered a man so fine an opportunity. Goddard replied with a restraint that says a great deal: the real work was of the usual kind, hard and rather prosaic.

On November 27, Thanksgiving Day, the whole team dined together. A toast was drunk: to our little Nell, may she become more and more “flighty,” a word meaning both fickle and given to flying. In the afternoon they played ball in the yard; in the evening, cards. On December 4, at the church supper, the Goddards met Mr. and Mrs. Coe, old residents of the region who had once employed a young man who became a legend of the West: Billy the Kid.

December 30, 1930

On December 30, 1930, at Eden Valley, Goddard attempted Nell’s first flight in New Mexico. The rocket was eleven feet long and weighed 33.5 pounds empty. The tanks were pressurized by a gas under pressure. It left the tower and climbed, Goddard said, straight as an arrow, for seven seconds. It reached an altitude of about two thousand feet and came down a thousand feet from the tower. From the film, its speed was estimated at about five hundred miles an hour. The parachute partly opened. Part of the rocket had been painted red to show whether it was spinning: it made one turn in eleven seconds.

Two thousand feet: more than twenty times higher than anything he had reached in Massachusetts. In the supplement he would add to his autobiography in 1933, Goddard would speak of this flight as a very thrilling high point of the year.

That same evening he and Esther went to the movies at the Princess Theatre in Roswell. The film showing was Billy the Kid.

“The Rocket Airship”

The success remained confidential, but rumor went around the world in its own way. In January 1931 the Okura company forwarded an article from the Osaka Mainichi, a major Japanese daily, dated December 15, 1930, announcing that the rocket airship was almost ready for the voyage to the Moon. Goddard replied simply that the article was too optimistic.

He now had what he had been asking for over fifteen years: money, time, a team, space, and sky. He was forty-eight. He would spend most of the next eleven years in this corner of the desert, building ever larger and more refined rockets, far from journalists, far from scientists, far from everything.

Sources: Clark University press release (July 9, 1930); letters of R. H. Goddard to C. G. Abbot (July 1930); letter from L. T. E. Thompson (July 22, 1930); diary (July–December 1930); letter to the Guggenheim family (October 6, 1930); correspondence with W. S. Adams and G. N. Lewis (October–November 1930); report to the Navy (July 19, 1933); autobiography (1933 supplement) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. II.

Chapter 22 · 1931 – 1932 The Gyroscope

On Sunday, May 10, 1931, Robert Goddard did not work. He took his paints and an easel out into the field, settled near the launching tower, and painted the landscape looking toward the Pecos River: desert poppies and purple flowers. In the evening the team dined on spaghetti, with Larry and Ina Mansur, Al and Bea Kisk, and a newcomer, Thure Ljungquist; they played cards. One of his paintings has survived: a view to the east from Mescalero Ranch, the Pecos, and the escarpment known as the Cap Rock, painted in May 1931.

The man painting that Sunday was solving one of the hardest problems in astronautics: how to make a rocket fly straight.

The Problem of Stability

A rising rocket is an unstable object. Its thrust comes from below; the slightest deviation, the slightest puff of wind, the slightest asymmetry in the flame makes it lean, and once it leans the thrust carries it off sideways. Arrows and fireworks rockets are stabilized by fins or a long stick, like a weather vane, but that works only if the craft is already moving fast, through air. At liftoff, slow and heavy with propellant, a rocket does not have enough speed for its fins to right it. And in the thin air of the upper atmosphere, fins are useless.

Goddard had always known this. In 1907 he had already proposed stabilizing airplanes with gyroscopes. A gyroscope is a top spinning very fast: its axis stubbornly keeps the same direction, whatever is done to its mounting. If a gyroscope is mounted in a rocket, it shows at every moment where the vertical is. It remained to connect that gyroscope to control surfaces able to correct the path. That would be the work of 1931 and 1932.

Expiring Patents

The year 1931 began with an administrative worry. The 1914 patents were about to expire, since an American patent then protected an invention for only seventeen years. On January 22 Goddard wrote a memorandum seeking their extension in the interest of national defense. He listed the military uses of the rocket: boosting airplanes at takeoff, antiaircraft defense with radio-guided rockets, and even an aerial torpedo that would home on enemy aircraft by the infrared radiation they reflect. The effort failed.

On January 25 Henry Sachs announced that he had accepted a post as instrument maker with the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the federal geodetic service; his wife did not want to stay in New Mexico. On February 11 the Sachses left for Washington. Goddard lost the mechanic who had built the Auburn rocket.

From February 14 to 20 he went to Washington with Esther. He inquired about beryllium, a very light metal that cost a hundred dollars a pound. He went to hear the Philadelphia Orchestra with the violinist Jascha Heifetz. On February 20 he presented his results to the advisory committee: Merriam, Abbot, Marvin, Lindbergh, Breckinridge, Fleming, Atwood. He showed the film of the December flight; he was asked to run it several times. The committee learned that Mrs. Daniel Guggenheim would continue the grant and that the fund would pay half the patent costs. On March 4 Goddard wrote to thank Mrs. Guggenheim: for many years, he explained, he had been an enthusiast on the subject but had been able to work on it only in his spare time.

Thure

On May 2, 1931, a new mechanic joined the team. His name was N. Thure Ljungquist; he came from Eagle Rock, California, and Al Kisk had recommended him. Ljungquist would stay with Goddard to the end. He would become head of his shop and one of the essential craftsmen of his rockets. Goddard’s papers note a detail that speaks of the times: in Roswell a single man could live well on less than fifteen dollars a week.

The spring was difficult. Liquid oxygen, delivered by the Linde company of Amarillo, arrived in poor condition: a liquid ninety-eight percent pure was needed. Goddard tried to buy a small liquid-oxygen plant; the Bureau of Standards judged the idea too costly. He tried liquid nitrogen to pressurize the tanks. No company, he discovered, would insure his employees against accidents: he was personally responsible.

On May 29 he wrote to G. Edward Pendray of the American Interplanetary Society to correct a point: his 1929 flight had indeed used continuous combustion of liquids. So many of his ideas, he added, had been copied abroad without the customary acknowledgment. On June 3 he was invited to the Boston premiere of Fritz Lang’s film Woman in the Moon, for which Hermann Oberth had been scientific adviser. He could not go.

On June 12 Florence Guggenheim, Daniel’s widow and executrix, sent the 25,000 dollars for the second year. On June 18 Atwood wrote that they were perhaps on the verge of some of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time. On June 9 Goddard had obtained a patent on propelling airplanes by a rocket turbine driving propellers; the New York Times would report it on September 27 as a new rocket plane for the stratosphere. On July 15, to students asking where rocketry was taught, he recommended mechanical engineering at Caltech or MIT.

The Flights of Fall 1931

On September 5, 1931, the gyroscope was ready. The fall saw a series of flights. On September 29 a rocket nine feet eleven inches long, weighing 87 pounds at the start, fitted with a streamlined casing and controlled from a distance, rose to less than two hundred feet and then skimmed five hundred feet over the ground. Its path, Goddard wrote in a phrase that has gone through every history of astronautics, was “like a fish swimming upward.” On October 13 a simpler rocket fitted with a parachute rose to more than 1,700 feet; it could be heard whistling loudly on the way down. On October 27 another reached 1,330 feet. On November 18 a rocket rose to about 2,000 feet and traveled half a mile.

On October 19, Anniversary Day, Goddard looked over his photographs. On December 15 he wrote his report. He had made ten static tests. His chambers ejected gases at 6,500 feet per second and produced two hundred fifty to three hundred pounds of thrust. Above all, he had solved a practical problem: launching was now done electrically, from the shelter a thousand feet from the tower, in less than nine seconds, where three men and ten cords had been needed before.

“A Large Institution”

On January 11, 1932, he wrote to Russell Hastings, a former student, a sentence that reveals an old wound: it would have been much better, in many ways, if he had received his degree from a large institution. The engineer from the Worcester Polytechnic, the doctor from small Clark University, knew that the scientists of Harvard or MIT did not quite regard him as one of their own.

On January 22 a producer of comic films, maker of All Aboard for the Moon and Hello, Mars!, proposed a collaboration. Goddard declined. On March 2 he answered a letter in a tone he must have used a hundred times: the rocket does not “kick against the air”; its thrust is in fact twenty-two percent greater in a vacuum.

Army Ordnance, for its part, tried to see his tests. Goddard refused to show his shop. A military report of May 2, 1932, noted with annoyance that no information of value could be obtained from Professor Goddard. The memory of Colonel Shinkle was not far away.

April 19, 1932

On April 19, 1932, at Eden Valley, Goddard flew the first gyroscopically stabilized rocket in history. It was ten feet nine and a half inches long and weighed only nineteen and a half pounds empty. The tanks were pressurized by liquid nitrogen. Eight vanes were controlled by the gyroscope: four small vanes dipped in the flame’s blast, and four in the airstream. The rocket had been painted so that one could see whether it was turning. It rose only one hundred thirty-five feet, in five seconds. But after the flight Goddard found that two of the vanes in the blast were hot: they had been pushed into the flame. The gyroscope had acted. The principle was demonstrated.

A photograph shows the team around the rocket: Ljungquist, Kisk, Lawrence and Charles Mansur. This small group of men, in a New Mexico desert, had just flown the first rocket stabilized by a gyroscope. The same principle, a gyroscope controlling vanes in the blast, would guide the German V-2s twelve years later.

The Letter to Wells

The next day, April 20, 1932, Goddard sat down to write a letter he had long wanted to write. It was addressed to H. G. Wells in London. He told him that in 1898, at sixteen, he had read The War of the Worlds, and that the spell was complete about a year later. He spoke to him of high-altitude research, the most fascinating problem there is. He did not know how many more years he would be able to work on it; he hoped, as long as he lived. For there could be no question of finishing: aiming at the stars, literally and figuratively, was a problem to occupy generations, so that however much progress was made, there was always “the thrill of just beginning.” Finally he thanked Wells for his optimism, the best antidote, he wrote, to the temptation to be depressed by the astonishing capacity of man and nature to spoil everything.

Wells replied on May 3, thanking him for his friendly letter: it was the sort of greeting they appreciated from people like him.

On that same April 20 Goddard also wrote to Rudyard Kipling. In New Mexico, he told him, they sometimes worked in 108 degrees Fahrenheit, but they could see, sixty miles off, cool mountains covered with tall pines. On April 21 he noted a calculation and a reflection. Less than forty pounds of a hydrogen-oxygen rocket would be needed to send one pound out of the Earth’s pull. And the history of aviation showed that the problem had not been to neutralize gravity, as had been believed, but to have a reliable gasoline engine. It would be the same with the rocket.

“Impossible”

The two years promised by Daniel Guggenheim were coming to an end. In two years Goddard had spent nearly fifty thousand dollars, about two thousand a month; liquid oxygen cost a dollar a liter. On May 25, 1932, the advisory committee, in the persons of Abbot, Atwood, Fleming, and Merriam, recommended continuing.

But America was sunk in the Great Depression. Fortunes were melting away. On June 2, 1932, a telegram brought the answer: Mrs. Guggenheim had referred the matter to her son Harry, who had said it was impossible. The question would be reconsidered in a year. On June 16 Colonel Breckinridge wrote to Goddard that he was a good sport to take such a disappointment with so much courage and philosophy.

The Buried Scrap

Between June 16 and 28, 1932, Goddard dismantled his installation. He scrapped the unusable parts. In the evening, on the porch, he burned papers. He buried the scrap. On June 18 it was 105 degrees. The piano was crated. The equipment was stored with a Roswell merchant, Mabie-Lowrey, thanks to a man named Dan Wilmot. Goddard noted with weary humor that moving out this way, in a limited time, in the hottest season of the year, was not a job to be recommended.

Lawrence Mansur had already resigned in May. Kisk, Ljungquist, and Charles Mansur each went their own way; they would come back to Roswell two years later.

From July 1 to 21, 1932, Goddard and Esther drove back to Massachusetts by the long way round. They passed through Socorro, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert. On July 3 they gazed at the Grand Canyon from Inspiration Point; Goddard noted the effect of looking down and seeing the haze of distance. In Pasadena he went up Mount Wilson with Abbot and visited Caltech, where he saw Millikan and the great aerodynamicist Theodore von Kármán, then Adams and Anderson. They stopped to see Ljungquist’s family, crossed San Francisco and Reno. They reached Worcester at three in the morning on July 20.

The desert dream seemed over. Robert Goddard, soon to be fifty, went back to teaching physics at Clark.

Sources: diary 1931–1932; memorandum on patent extension (January 22, 1931); minutes of the advisory committee meeting (February 20, 1931); letter to Mrs. D. Guggenheim (March 4, 1931); report of December 15, 1931; letter to R. Hastings (January 11, 1932); Ordnance report (May 2, 1932); letters to H. G. Wells and R. Kipling (April 20, 1932) and Wells’s reply (May 3, 1932); telegram of June 2, 1932; letter from H. Breckinridge (June 16, 1932); “Milestones” appendix — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. II and III.

Chapter 23 · 1932 – 1934 The Interlude

On Sunday, April 30, 1933, Robert Goddard and Esther walked around Boston and photographed his childhood home. That evening he wrote in his diary two reflections that are among the most personal he ever committed to paper. The first is a joke: the rocket is very human; it can rise to the highest positions only by ejecting enormous quantities of hot air. The second is more bitter. He cites the philosopher Emerson, according to whom the man who makes a better mousetrap will find the world beating a path to his door. Then he adds that, like many others, he had the misfortune of being neither an artist, nor a preacher, nor a maker of mousetraps.

Back at Maple Hill

In the fall of 1932 Goddard was back at Clark University, with his classes, his students, and the Maple Hill house at 1 Tallawanda Drive. Every day he noted the temperature and the weather in his diary, like a meteorologist without instruments. In August he had asked the Smithsonian’s Hodgkins Fund for 250 dollars to go on lightening the rocket; despite the Depression it was granted. On August 26 the Swiss legation wrote that it was searching in vain for a copy of his 1919 paper: it was out of print everywhere.

On August 31, 1932, there was a total eclipse of the Sun in New England. Goddard saw it at Fryeburg, Maine, through thin clouds, after racing, he noted, the cloud bank for eleven miles. On October 19 he went to the cherry tree: Anniversary Day.

On November 8 he replied to a German correspondent in Frankfurt, Werner Brügel, who had asked for a biography. Most conservative scientists, he wrote, were skeptical, and might remain so for a long time. He added that he had thought a great deal about sending rockets beyond the atmosphere, with instruments or with crews. Between November 1932 and January 1933 an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the library of the Soviet Committee on Inventions asked for his work. He politely declined: his work, he explained, had been interrupted by the Depression.

“All Fame Is Relative”

On March 21, 1933, he went to Harvard to hear the Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard describe his balloon ascents into the stratosphere, up to about ten miles. On March 26 he noted: all fame is relative; like everything else it lasts a longer or shorter time. On the 27th he read in the paper that an airplane had fallen on a house, and reflected that had this happened in the early days of aviation, people would have voted against aviation.

On May 1, 1933, Dr. Fisher, his Worcester physician, told him he would be cured if he had lived sensibly in the West. Goddard recorded it with biting irony: the doctor apparently believed the fifty-thousand-dollar grant had been given him to take a rest cure out West.

On May 8 he wrote to Lindbergh. He spoke of the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell, and of the rocket as an antiaircraft weapon, which would cost far less than the millions sunk into rigid airships. On May 21 he noted an article by the theatrical producer Daniel Frohman, then eighty: happiness comes from struggle, and one grows old for want of forgetting oneself. On May 27, after seeing Mutiny on the Bounty, he copied out a maxim: never worry about what you cannot change.

A Summer of Calls

Between June 19 and 21, 1933, he made the rounds of the institutions. Abbot had no grant to offer him. Fleming of the Carnegie Institution told him that radio echoes were being received from the upper atmosphere at up to four hundred miles. At the Navy he saw Admiral Ernest King; a board was interested in an “aerial torpedo.” He filed a patent on a new kind of jet engine in which flaps opened and closed to let in air in pulses; it would be issued on November 13, 1934, under the title Propulsion Apparatus. The editors of his papers would compare it to the engine of the German V-1, the first flying bomb. It was so hot in New York, he wrote, that if there had been a little salt and celery on him, he would have made a stew.

On June 24 he wrote to Mrs. Guggenheim. On July 15 it was Harry F. Guggenheim who answered: the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation was granting him 2,500 dollars to work at Clark. It was not much. But it was the beginning of a relationship that would last until his death.

The Report to the Navy

On July 19, 1933, Goddard submitted to the Navy a report on his Roswell work. He summed up the results: gases ejected at about 5,000 feet per second, a thrust of 227 pounds for twenty-one seconds, two hundred horsepower per pound of combustion chamber. He recalled the flight of December 30, 1930, straight as an arrow for several hundred feet, and that of April 1932, the first controlled by gyroscope. He proposed building a rocket of eighty pounds empty, carrying five hundred pounds of liquids, able to rise about a hundred miles. And he raised the idea of an aerial torpedo guided by radio, sound, or infrared.

On August 29 the Navy declined: too costly, and success “very remote.” Goddard wrote to Abbot that there would probably not be much interest in applications until something particularly spectacular had been done.

On August 10 he had answered a journalist, H. Gordon Garbedian, who was preparing a book. He recalled that in 1912 Esnault-Pelterie had concluded that the energy of radium would be needed to go into space, whereas his own 1919 paper had been the first to show that chemical energy was enough, provided successive rockets were used.

The Work at Clark

During these two years at Clark, Goddard never stopped working on his rockets in the university’s small shop. There he developed pressure-operated valves, a pilot-flame igniter, a single-lever starting control, a new type of bellows pump he called a “pulsometer,” and above all a small centrifugal pump turning at 30,000 revolutions per minute, driven by a tiny turbine. A test with liquid oxygen succeeded. All these parts would serve in the rockets of the following years.

In 1933–1934 he was also acting head of the mathematics department. On December 8, 1933, he went with Esther to see Little Women at the movies, and the next day noted a sunrise at seven, gray clouds, orange-red streaks.

“The Original Authority”

On January 30 and 31, 1934, he was in New York. He saw Breckinridge and Lindbergh and called on Harry Guggenheim. On March 8 his former Princeton professor E. F. Northrup called him the original and world authority on the subject of rockets.

On April 3, 1934, he wrote a “note for the autobiography” that casts new light on his illness of 1913. In June 1913, he relates, Dr. Lapham of the Rutland sanatorium had said he was surprised to see him so well, but had advised him to give up research and live outdoors as much as possible. Goddard had replied that there were things he could not help working on.

The Sunday Painter

From April 7 to May 5, 1934, Goddard took drawing and painting lessons with O. Victor Humann at the Worcester Art Museum. It was a Christmas present from Esther. He had long been a Sunday painter; several of his friends owned paintings by him, landscapes of New England and New Mexico. He finished a still life. On June 11 his student Albert Erickson received his doctorate; Goddard read on the porch a manual titled Elementary Principles of Landscape Painting.

He also noted sentences that had struck him. On May 15, one by a columnist, O. O. McIntyre, who described New Mexico as a world of alkali gray, sacred, profane, stern and yet exquisite, of haunting stillness. On June 6, a remark from an Ellery Queen detective novel: think about a thing long enough, and the solution will eventually spring forth.

Dinner at Port Washington

On July 6 and 7, 1934, Goddard dined at Port Washington with Harry Guggenheim and his mother, along with Colonel Lindbergh and his wife Anne. He spent the night there. The next day he breakfasted with Lindbergh and Guggenheim. On July 11 the foundation granted him 18,000 dollars for a year of “free flight” tests. Erickson, for his part, gave him a paint box and a folding easel; Goddard would cherish them.

On August 8 Esther described the Roswell shop they were about to return to, in words her husband copied into his diary: a gray building on a plain, surrounded by dead trees, next to an abandoned tennis court, but at the same time a House of Dreams. On August 28 the Worcester Telegram announced that the rocket was to climb twice as high as the stratosphere balloons. On September 4 Goddard wrote that Mrs. Goddard and he were leaving for the West in a day or two.

Sources: diary 1932–1934; letter to W. Brügel (November 8, 1932); letter to C. A. Lindbergh (May 8, 1933); correspondence with H. F. Guggenheim (June–July 1933); report to the Navy (July 19, 1933) and reply (August 29, 1933); letter to H. G. Garbedian (August 10, 1933); reports on the Clark work (1933–1934); note for the autobiography (April 3, 1934); Worcester Telegram (August 28, 1934) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. II.

Chapter 24 · 1934 – 1935 Like a Long Fish

On March 28, 1935, at Eden Valley, a rocket some fifteen feet long left the launching tower and climbed. Each time it strayed from the vertical, a gyroscope worked vanes that brought it back into line. It swung this way from side to side of the vertical, Robert Goddard wrote, like a long fish swimming. It rose to nearly a mile, about 4,800 feet, then dove and buried itself in the ground more than two miles from the tower. Its average speed had been 550 miles an hour. Several times in succession, over several hundred feet, the gyroscope had corrected its course perfectly.

The Return

The Goddards had reached Roswell on September 13, 1934, at ten-fifty at night. After Raton, at the New Mexico line, Goddard had noted pale blue mountains to the west, like two skies, a near one and a far one, most bewitching. On September 15 and 16 Colonel Lindbergh and his wife passed through Roswell. On the 16th Goddard flew with Lindbergh around the launching tower, and they landed out there; Esther also took a turn with him. He would later tell a little boy that, seen from the plane with Lindbergh, the country looked like a floor.

The team was back: Thure Ljungquist, Albert Kisk, and Charles Mansur. A photograph from those days shows them replacing on the shop wall the 1932 calendar, left hanging since their departure, with the one for 1934. Goddard dusted off the ruler he had left on the workbench in June 1932. The machines and tools were inventoried: one hundred eighty-six kinds. The flight tower had been stripped of everything but its framework.

On September 17 Abbot wrote him a letter that would become a rule of conduct for him: let no side road, however promising, divert you from this indispensable goal. The goal was a high, guided flight.

“You Would Have Died Long Ago”

On September 23, 1934, a Roswell physician, Dr. Beeson, examined Goddard. His diagnosis was made to strike home: you obviously had a bad time once; something happened, or you would have died long ago. The Beesons would become friends of the couple.

On September 25 Goddard wrote to his former student Albert Erickson a letter of unusual frankness. He had tried, he told him, to train him as he himself had been trained, according to the prewar German ideal of research; but times had changed, and a certain showiness, a lack of rigorous detail, were the order of the day. He also told him about the trip: they had come by way of the Chicago World’s Fair, at four hundred miles a day.

The Goddards’ personal finances were tight. During his leave Clark did not pay its share of his pension contribution. Since there was only one bank in Roswell, it was Esther who signed the household’s personal checks.

The Country

Goddard grew attached to New Mexico. On October 7, 1934, he and Esther went to the Mescalero Indian Reservation, watched a rodeo and Indian dances, and dined at the Bonnell ranch. On October 14 he sketched in his diary the Capitan mountain at sunset, apricot colored. On October 19 he wrote: Anniversary Day, thirty-five years ago.

On December 22 he copied a passage from Charles Kingsley’s novel Westward Ho!: battles are fought not as they ought to be, but as they can be. On January 5, 1935, a student from California who had hitchhiked visited the shop. On January 15 Esther came to the tests. On January 20 they went to throw old cartridges into the Bottomless Lakes near Roswell.

On February 1 he explained to a correspondent why he had chosen Roswell: an even climate, few cloudy days, little wind, little rain, level ground. And he added that he had found Roswell an attractive place and its people helpful and pleasant. On February 3 and 4 he watched a partial solar eclipse through a small hole punched in an envelope; in the evening he noticed that the stars twinkled red, green, and blue, and that the earthshine on the Moon was blue-green.

On February 16, 1935, he answered a ten-year-old boy, David Smith, who had written to him. He confessed that at his age he had been quite “crazy” about the subject, and feared he still was. He described Roswell to him: on Saturdays the main street was full of cowboys in big hats and leather chaps.

The A Series

The work of 1934–1935 was methodical. Goddard called his tests the “A series”: fourteen tests between September 14, 1934, and October 29, 1935, with rockets thirteen and a half to fifteen feet long, weighing fifty-eight to eighty-five pounds empty, fitted with a gyroscope and a parachute. Seven of them would fly.

On February 16, 1935, test A3 began well: the rocket climbed straight, with an acceleration of about twice gravity, then the combustion chamber burned. On February 18 Goddard drew from his failures a lesson he stated clearly: it had been hopeless to try to do two or three things at once. From now on he would advance one step at a time, changing only one element from one test to the next.

On February 19 a “Junior Rocket Society” of Crown Point, Indiana, wrote that their science teacher said what they wanted to do was impossible. Goddard knew the refrain.

A Meteor

On March 8, 1935, test A4 used a pendulum stabilizer. The streamlined rocket rose to about a thousand feet, then tipped over to the horizontal and sped along at full power. Goddard estimated its speed at about seven hundred miles an hour, that is, faster than sound. It looked more like a meteor crossing the sky, he wrote, than anything else. It came down a mile and a quarter from the tower, at eleven thousand feet. The biographical calendar compiled by Esther Goddard would record this date as that of the first flight of a rocket faster than sound.

On March 12 he noted that Father Time was keeping his foot pressed on the accelerator. On March 15 he watched a mockingbird that every morning tried out a new short song until it seemed satisfied, as the listener certainly was.

Then came March 28, and the long fish. On March 30 a dust storm swept over the region: brown clouds like prairie fires, twilight darkness in broad daylight. The year 1935 would be that of the great dust storms of the Southwest, the time of the Dust Bowl.

On April 1 Goddard heard Abbot speak on the radio, over a Fort Worth station. He wrote to him at once: he had followed his advice of the previous fall, to concentrate on guided flight. Without it, he might have worked all year with little to show. In April a Berkeley student offered to work for nothing, even peeling potatoes for Mrs. Goddard; he declined.

Port Washington

From April 25 to 29, 1935, he was in the East. In Washington he saw Merriam, who smiled when Goddard told him he could reach forty to fifty miles, and spoke to him of “cooperation” with other researchers. On April 27 he lunched at Port Washington with the Lindberghs and the Guggenheims. Lindbergh told him that stabilization was what took years. Goddard explained that he would publish nothing until he had important results. About the groups pressing him to cooperate and share his results, Lindbergh told him he did not have to, and that there was nothing to be gained by it.

On May 31 test A8 reached 7,500 feet: the rocket, Goddard wrote, swung “gloriously” from side to side of the vertical.

July 12, 1935

On July 12 Goddard left at half past four in the morning with Esther and the team. Test A10 was the finest of the series. Propulsion lasted fourteen seconds, and the rocket was stabilized throughout. Over the first thousand feet it strayed no more than forty feet from the vertical. It rose to about a mile and a quarter, 6,600 feet. For the first time it went off with the wind instead of turning into it, as all earlier rockets had done. The parachute opened but was torn away, despite its quarter-inch steel cables. In the shelter they found black widows and scorpions.

On August 3 and 4 the Goddards spent the weekend with the Beesons at Ruidoso, before a fire, then went to El Paso, to the market at Juárez across the Mexican border, and attended a bullfight. The editors of his papers note that eleven years later, at the foot of the Organ Mountains they crossed then, the United States Army would establish the White Sands range, where the V-2s captured in Germany would be launched, and then the first American rockets.

In August and September a young man from Pasadena, John W. Parsons, wrote to him about powders. He belonged to the small group of Caltech students and amateurs who were beginning to take an interest in rockets, and of whom Goddard would hear a great deal.

Before the Patrons

From September 22 to 25, 1935, Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim came to Roswell to see a flight. For Goddard it was the chance to show his two protectors what he had accomplished. Fate decided otherwise. On the first try the igniter fell out too soon. On the second the combustion chamber burned through. No rocket left the tower. Lindbergh took photographs; there was target shooting at Artesia, a nearby town. The press release issued after the visit announced more than thirty flights since 1929, speeds of seven hundred miles an hour, and continued funding.

On September 27 a popular radio program, Time Marches On, dramatized his work. He and Esther listened by the fireplace. On October 4 a broadcaster exclaimed on the air at the idea of twenty thousand dollars for fireworks.

On October 14 Lindbergh wrote Goddard a letter he would treasure. The project, he said, was being carried on with unusual efficiency and intelligence, and success was a matter of time rather than of possibility. Then he added a sentence about Esther: he was sure Mrs. Goddard deserved more credit than she would ever take for the success of the project.

On October 29 test A14, the last of the series, succeeded: the rocket corrected itself in two perpendicular planes and rose to about three-quarters of a mile, four thousand feet; on landing it threw up before it a wave of earth like a wave of water. Goddard wrote that he had not yet forgiven fate for making the tests fail in front of his patrons.

“Ole Nellie”

At the end of October Goddard shipped one of his rockets to the Smithsonian, with an instruction: it was to be exhibited only at his request, or, after his death, at the request of Guggenheim and Lindbergh. On the day it left, Thure Ljungquist watched it being crated and remarked that old Nellie was going on a trip. On November 2 Goddard noted that he and Esther had watched the one o’clock train go by, with Nellie in it.

Sources: diary (September 1934–November 1935); letters from C. G. Abbot (September 17, 1934), to A. Erickson (September 25, 1934), to D. Smith (February 16, 1935), to Abbot (April 1, 1935), from C. A. Lindbergh (October 14, 1935); press release of September 1935; “Milestones” appendix; Esther C. Goddard’s calendar — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. II and III.

Chapter 25 · 1935 – 1936 The Visitor from Pasadena

On August 30, 1936, a young man arrived in Roswell. His name was Frank Malina. He was a graduate student in aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, preparing a thesis on rockets. It was the great physicist Robert Millikan, head of Caltech, who had sent him to see Goddard. The Goddards took him to dinner at the Nickson Hotel in town, then Goddard showed him the shop and the launching tower. But Malina wanted more: he pressed Goddard to give him his results, particularly on combustion chambers. Goddard refused. On September 1 he wrote Millikan a courteous and final letter: he could not, naturally, hand over the results of many years of investigation, still incomplete, to serve a student’s thesis.

This meeting, which historians would often tell as the symbol of Goddard’s secretiveness, takes on its full meaning only when set back in the year that preceded it.

St. Louis

On December 21, 1935, Goddard deposited with the Smithsonian eight sworn statements from witnesses of his early tests. It was being claimed abroad, he explained, that the first liquid-propellant motor dated from 1930. He wanted to prove that his own had worked well before that.

On December 27 he learned that Charles Lindbergh was leaving the United States with his family to settle in England. The Lindberghs were fleeing the pressure of a press that had harassed them since the kidnapping and murder of their first child in 1932 and the sensational trial that followed. Goddard said he was deeply saddened.

On December 31, 1935, he presented his work in St. Louis, at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and showed his film. He was asked whether he could send rockets to fifty miles. He replied that he would rather not say. Abbot broke in: why not a hundred miles, as easily as fifty? Goddard agreed. President Atwood declared that he had accomplished what he had been working on for so long. The newspapers spoke of a “mechanical brain,” a gyroscope no bigger than a large watch. It was learned that the rocket was twelve feet long and nine inches in diameter, that it weighed eighty-five pounds empty and carried sixty pounds of fuel, and that its motor developed two hundred four horsepower per pound. A scientist, Dr. Gregg, came up after the session to tell him he had had no idea Goddard was so far along.

“Liquid-propellant Rocket Development”

On March 16, 1936, ten years to the day after the Auburn flight, the Smithsonian published Goddard’s second major text: Liquid-propellant Rocket Development. The proofs of the paper had been lost in the mail, or opened; Goddard suspected his mail was being read.

The text was short, sober, illustrated with photographs. It told for the first time the story of his liquid propellants: the tests of 1920 to 1922 with liquid oxygen and various fuels, gasoline, propane, ether; he noted that liquid methane would probably be the best easily handled combination. He described the pump-fed motor tried on the stand on November 1, 1923, and the Auburn flight of 1926, its 184 feet, its two and a half seconds, its sixty miles an hour. He presented his 5.75-inch combustion chamber, which weighed five pounds and produced 289 pounds of thrust for more than twenty seconds, over a thousand horsepower. He described the flight of December 30, 1930, the thousand-foot cable connecting the tower to the shelter, the recording telescope set up three thousand feet away to follow the flights. And he told of the stabilized flights of 1935, whose first few hundred feet, he wrote, recalled a fish swimming vertically. He ended by thanking Lindbergh and Abbot.

On March 14 Abbot had sent the paper to Charles Evans Hughes, Chief Justice of the United States and Chancellor of the Smithsonian, speaking of experiments that would make history. On March 16 the Associated Press reported Goddard’s position: crewed ships were impossible for the present, but sending instruments was practical.

The next day, March 17, a midshipman at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Robert C. Truax, wrote that he was beside himself with impatience. Goddard would meet him again five years later as a Navy officer in charge of jet propulsion.

Rags in His Ears

On March 10, 1936, a San Francisco lawyer telephoned Goddard about an old patent. In 1912, at Clark, Goddard had invented an oscillator using an electron tube, a device that produces high-frequency electric currents, and had patented it. That patent now interested a great many people, because it could be used to challenge the patents of Lee De Forest, inventor of the triode tube, on which the big radio companies relied. A small Iowa radio firm, Collins Radio, was using it to defend itself against them; a “Goddard tube” was even being mass-produced. The lawyer shouted into the telephone the names of his clients, the Heinz and Kaufman canning brands. Goddard understood only the word “pickles.” Esther, who witnessed the scene, noticed that he had bits of rag in his ears: he had put them there to protect himself from the noise of the aluminum diaphragms he was bursting in his experiments.

In April the great RCA company sent a professor, Mackeown, to try to have the invention declared “impracticable.” Goddard refused. On April 26 the young head of Collins Radio, Arthur Collins, dined at his home. He would say of Goddard that he was ahead of his time because of a kind of detachment of mind from immediately practical concerns. In 1954 he would recall that Goddard wanted nothing in return, and that he had had to insist before Goddard would accept five hundred dollars. The suit was settled for a token dollar, and it opened RCA’s and AT&T’s licenses to the whole radio industry.

“A Record Altitude Flight”

On April 6, 1936, Lindbergh wrote from Sevenoaks, Kent, where he had settled. He thought a record altitude flight would raise the morale of everyone supporting the project. On April 17 Goddard noted that Roswell taxi drivers tipped off reporters when they brought visitors to his place. On April 26 and 27 the famous reporter Ernie Pyle, who was traveling across America for the Scripps-Howard papers, asked to do a story. Goddard politely declined. He did, however, sign a contract with the Linde company for the supply of liquid oxygen at a dollar a liter.

On May 11, 1936, the Guggenheim foundation renewed its grant. The same day a new series of tests began, the L series: thirty tests, running until August 1938, with clustered motors, a catapult, gimbal steering, and tanks wound with steel wire. On June 15 an “American Institute for Rocket Research” in Chicago proposed a joint “great experiment.” Goddard declined. On July 16 a static test lasted thirty-two seconds, the longest ever achieved; on July 31 the chamber burned just as the rocket left the tower. On August 12 he explained to a journalist that all his rockets were propelled by their own power, and recalled three dates: 1920, the first liquid motor able to lift a load; March 16, 1926; April 19, 1932.

Malina

These were the rockets Frank Malina came to see at the end of August. On August 30 and 31 the Goddards received him courteously: dinner at the Nickson, a tour of the shop, the tower. Goddard showed him his installations but did not give him his results on combustion chambers. On October 1 Malina wrote to thank Goddard and his wife for their hospitality.

On September 10 Millikan replied to Goddard’s letter: one could, he wrote, refrain from telling everything and still exchange ideas. Goddard did not give way.

His point of view must be understood. He had been working on this problem for more than twenty-five years. He had seen Colonel Shinkle try to have his laboratory seized in 1918, the press ridicule him in 1920, Du Pont engineers ask him overly precise questions in 1929, and the Germans publish as new ideas he had patented in 1914. His results were unpublished; his patents did not cover everything. And he was funded by a private foundation that asked him for results, not collaborations. Lindbergh himself had told him there was nothing to be gained by sharing.

But one must also see what this refusal would cost him. Malina, back in Pasadena, would found with a few fellow students, among them John Parsons, the rocket research group of Caltech’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, under Theodore von Kármán. In 1944 that group would become the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And it was this group, not Goddard, that would receive the U.S. Army’s funding for jet propulsion. Goddard, isolated in his desert, would see others overtake him with the means the government had refused him.

“Unspectacular”

On September 7, 1936, he wrote to Lindbergh a sentence that sums up his way of working: he did not think there had been a year in all his research in which he had accomplished so many important things, but all of an unspectacular nature.

In September Esther’s mother came to visit; her father had died in August 1935. On September 27 Goddard received the writer T. S. Stribling, winner of the 1932 Pulitzer Prize. On the 29th he wrote to him that a world-famous physicist visiting his laboratory had told him he did not believe rockets would work in a vacuum. The same day he obtained a patent for a rocket airplane designed to carry passengers. And he wrote to H. G. Wells, who was about to turn seventy, wishing that the most interesting part of his career might still lie ahead of him.

Sources: diary 1935–1936; deposit of affidavits with the Smithsonian (December 21, 1935); reports of the AAAS session (December 31, 1935); R. H. Goddard, “Liquid-propellant Rocket Development,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 95, no. 3, 1936; letters from A. Collins (1936 and 1954), from C. A. Lindbergh (April 6, 1936), to R. A. Millikan (September 1, 1936) and reply (September 10, 1936), to Lindbergh (September 7, 1936), to T. S. Stribling and H. G. Wells (September 29, 1936); “Milestones” appendix — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. II and III.

Chapter 26 · 1936 – 1937 The Highest Flight

On March 26, 1937, at Eden Valley, a windsock fluttered at the top of the launching tower. Rocket L13, fitted with movable air vanes controlled by the gyroscope, left the tower and climbed fast. Throughout the twenty-two and three-tenths seconds of its propulsion it corrected itself constantly. It rose, and rose again, into a sky veiled by the haze the dust storms of the previous days had left behind. Goddard estimated its altitude at between eight thousand and nine thousand feet, unable to be more precise because of the haze. The parachute opened, but its shroud lines gave way. It would be the highest flight of Robert Goddard’s entire life.

The Four Chambers

The fall of 1936 was spent looking for more power. On October 3 test L6 began well: the rocket rose straight for two hundred feet, then the combustion chamber burned. Goddard then had an idea: instead of one big chamber, use four small ones. On November 7 a rocket with four clustered motors flew, to about two hundred feet. He also tried different gasolines.

On November 8 President Atwood and his wife came to visit the ranch. The conversation turned to reproaches. At Clark, Atwood explained, some people were criticizing their professor’s prolonged absence: if he succeeded, it was said, he would leave Clark. Goddard replied that the project was in fact a university project, and that industry would not take an interest in it for a long time. On February 20, 1937, Atwood would write to him that he had in a sense sacrificed the teaching standard of the physics department for him and his research. The tension would only grow in the years that followed.

In January and February 1937 Goddard moved to rockets nine inches in diameter, lighter and easier to build. On March 4 he filed a patent on a cooling jacket for the combustion chamber, in which one of the propellants circulates before burning: so-called regenerative cooling, used in nearly all the great modern rocket engines. The editors of his papers would note that this patent was widely infringed after the Second World War.

“Morning in the Desert”

On February 6, 1937, he wrote in his diary what is perhaps the most beautiful sentence he left about the desert: morning in the desert, when the impossible seems not only possible but easy.

On March 26 came the highest flight. On Sunday, March 28, the Goddards went rattlesnake hunting with the Beesons. They found arrowheads and pottery near an old Indian trading post. But it was too cold, barely forty degrees Fahrenheit.

Lindbergh and the Three Steps

On April 14 and 15, 1937, Lindbergh, visiting the United States, discussed the next steps with Goddard. He suggested thinking in three stages: first a rocket that climbs higher than sounding balloons; then methods of observation; finally regular observations. On May 11 the Guggenheim foundation granted 20,000 dollars for the year 1937–1938. Lindbergh and Guggenheim both advised Goddard to take a vacation.

On May 19, at sunset, a rocket fitted with retractable vanes rose almost vertically, within two or three degrees, to about 3,250 feet. For the first time the parachute worked perfectly and brought the rocket back intact. Goddard photographed it with a telephoto lens from the shelter.

“Freedom from the Air”

From May 21 to early June Goddard and Esther traveled in the East. In Washington General Sunderland, Chief of Coast Artillery, was interested in rocket-propelled flying targets for training gunners. In New York, on May 26, Goddard saw Clarence Hickman again, his companion of 1918, at Bell Laboratories. He spent a night at Falaise, Harry Guggenheim’s home.

On June 5 Clark University celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Lindbergh had sent a message, which President Atwood read. Just as the airplane had given man freedom from the Earth, the message said, the rocket offered him freedom from the air. And the rocket, Lindbergh added, was now in that period of discovery when the coastlines are not yet charted. Goddard had to stand and acknowledge the audience. On June 7 he went to the Blue Hill meteorological observatory with Charles Brooks, then heard a concert by the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Always Doing Too Much

On July 3, 1937, he described his setup to the New York Times: Mescalero Ranch, fifteen acres, three miles northeast of Roswell; the tower, set up on an eighty-thousand-acre ranch; a team of four men; thirty to forty flights; a maximum altitude of about a mile and a half; a vertical speed of two to three hundred miles an hour. He had been interested in high altitudes, he recalled, for about twenty-eight years.

On July 12, 1937, Dr. Fisher wrote to Esther. The letter was grave. The X-ray of June 10 showed fibrosis of the left lung, and beneath that fibrosis the tuberculosis had become more active again. A cavity was still there, unchanged. He always does too much, the doctor wrote. Goddard must take his temperature three or four times a day. A little rest now, he concluded, might be his salvation.

Goddard was fifty-four. The illness of 1913, which he thought he had beaten, had come back. He did not slow down.

“No More Risk than the Wrights”

On July 28 rocket L16 flew with a barograph on board, an instrument that records pressure, and therefore altitude. For the first time it used steering by a movable tailpiece: the whole rear part of the rocket pivoted, like a steerable nozzle. On August 4 Thure Ljungquist killed a three-foot rattlesnake in the ranch driveway. On August 7 Charles Mansur married Miss Bond.

On August 21 Goddard answered a Times reporter who asked him about crewed flights. A human cargo, he said, could be sent aboard at no more risk than the Wrights had run. But he avoided, he added, speculations so wild that they had hindered rather than helped progress. That same summer his friend G. Edward Pendray published in the magazine Astronautics a profile titled “Rocketry’s Number One Man”; it would appear in May 1938 in Scientific American.

On August 26 test L17 used a catapult: a system of concrete counterweights pulled the rocket up the tower three times faster than the weights fell. Launched this way, it corrected itself vigorously seven times in flight.

Germany

Lindbergh, from England, traveled in Europe and visited Germany, where the Nazi regime showed him its aviation. In September and November 1937 he wrote to Goddard. In Germany, he said, nothing had been said to him about rockets; but he had heard rumors of German rocket projectiles with ranges of several miles. He added that he would feel safer in a country that had developed offensive rocket projectiles.

Goddard replied by recalling his war work of 1918 and the way the Navy had dropped his projects for reasons of economy under President Coolidge. He mentioned the German Reinhold Tiling, killed by the explosion of a forty-pound powder charge, and concluded that the field of liquid rockets still seemed virgin territory. We know today that this was wrong: since 1932 the German army had been funding, at Kummersdorf near Berlin, a young engineer named Wernher von Braun, and in May 1937 his team had moved to Peenemünde, on the Baltic. Goddard did not know it, any more than anyone in America did.

On October 8 he wrote for Lindbergh a long account of his work during the First World War. From October 14 to 19 Malina and another Caltech student, A. M. O. Smith, asked him for data for their calculations; he politely declined. On October 17 and 18 he spent two nights at the tower: two wood rats were lodging with Thure, and he glimpsed a coyote and a badger.

Christmas in Santa Fe

On November 22, 1937, Goddard asked the National Aeronautic Association, the body that certified aviation records in the United States, to send an observer to measure the altitude of his flights officially. On November 23 he and Esther bought a Pontiac. On December 11 he sent the Smithsonian a report on an idea going back to 1910: a method of propulsion by reflected gases, detonations whose gases would be thrown backward by a conical reflector.

From December 24 to 26, 1937, the Goddards spent Christmas in Santa Fe. They stayed at La Fonda, where a Mexican orchestra played by the fireplace. They went to mass at the Cathedral of St. Francis. And the next day they walked four miles through the snow toward Frijoles Canyon, where the ruins of ancient Indian villages cut into the cliff can be seen.

Sources: diary 1936–1937; letter from W. W. Atwood (February 20, 1937); patent “Cooling-jacket Construction” (No. 2,122,521); letters from C. A. Lindbergh (April, September, November 1937); Lindbergh’s message to the Clark fiftieth anniversary (June 5, 1937); letter from Dr. Fisher to E. C. Goddard (July 12, 1937); interviews with the New York Times (July 3 and August 21, 1937); correspondence with the NAA (November 1937); report on propulsion by reflected gases (December 11, 1937); “Milestones” appendix; editors’ note on Peenemünde (vol. III) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. II and III.

Chapter 27 · 1938 The Barograph and the Tornado

On April 20, 1938, at a quarter to nine in the morning, three officers of the New Mexico Military Institute stood near a sheet-iron shelter a thousand feet from the Eden Valley launching tower. They formed the official committee of the National Aeronautic Association, charged with certifying a rocket’s altitude. Inside the rocket, sealed by their own hands, a barograph was recording the pressure. At the signal, one of them, Major John E. Smith, heard a roar like a hundred boiler safety valves letting go at once. The rocket rose, corrected itself, leaned in the wind. Then, at the top of its flight, nothing happened. The observers, Smith would write, were all but pleading with the parachute to open. It did not open.

“The Most Important Objective”

The year had begun with high-pressure tests. On January 11, 1938, static test L24 pushed chamber pressure to about 470 pounds per square inch. On the 13th Goddard ran a ball bearing immersed in liquid oxygen at five thousand revolutions per minute. He was already thinking of pumps.

On January 19 two letters arrived the same day. The first came from George W. Lewis, director of research of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the NACA, forerunner of NASA: he offered to test the shapes of Goddard’s rockets in the high-speed wind tunnels of the Langley laboratory. The second came from Lindbergh. An officially verified flight, he wrote, was the most important objective Goddard could have at present; such a flight would be universally accepted, would have a great effect on everyone’s morale, and would make it easier to finance future research.

On January 24 Goddard set out for Lewis the logic of his work. His motors produced about four hundred pounds of thrust; he had tested eight-hundred-pound motors on the stand. He had first steered his rockets with vanes in the flame’s blast; then, to stabilize them after the motor cut off, he had added air vanes, first fixed, then retractable. He had also tried a more elegant method, the “movable tailpiece,” in which the whole rear of the rocket pivoted to direct the thrust. On January 31 he noted that he had read some Benchley, the humorist, in the evening.

The Crossroads

On February 7, 1938, Goddard sent Guggenheim and Lindbergh his annual report. It was a dense document, illustrated with photographs, summing up a year of work: movable vanes, retractable vanes, a parachute released automatically when the rocket tilted ninety degrees from its gyroscope, the rubber shock mounts Lindbergh had suggested to protect the gyroscope from vibration, the movable tailpiece, the concrete-counterweight catapult, the tanks wound with piano wire. He slipped in a prophetic remark: piano wire withstands more than 400,000 pounds per square inch, but fibers with a strength of over a million had just been produced; one day tanks might be made of wound fibers. That is exactly what rocket builders would do decades later with glass and carbon fibers.

He also spoke of the rocket turbine, an engine in which the rocket’s gases would spin a turbine driving propellers. And he concluded that development had reached a crossroads. One could go on with pressure-fed rockets; but there was, he wrote, no shortcut to great altitudes. To climb really high, pumps and light tanks would be needed. Finally, given the state of the world, he said he was ready to help see military applications realized as soon as possible.

On February 8 Atwood wrote that he had to renew appointments at Clark for the following year and could not guarantee the post of the young physicist replacing Goddard, Jorgensen, without knowing what Goddard intended to do. He added that he had heard nothing about his work for so long that he wondered what was going on.

The MIT Students

On March 1 the students who published MIT’s Tech Engineering News asked him for an article. On March 17 Goddard sent them Some Aspects of Rocket Engineering, about twelve hundred words, on one condition: that it not be illustrated with photographs of other experimenters’ rocket explosions, or with medieval devices. He was tired of seeing his work mixed up with other people’s fantasies.

On Sunday, March 6, he was at the shop at six in the morning. Test L26, with Esther present, rose very fast, but a safety device cut off the oxygen too soon: four or five hundred feet. On March 17 test L27 rose to about four thousand feet, but the cast-iron fitting connecting the parachute to the rocket broke. On March 20 Goddard gave a talk on science and religion at the Sunday school of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Roswell, then went to the service with Esther. His notes for that talk have not been found.

On March 25 Lindbergh cabled from England: he had read the report; he was much impressed by the year’s accomplishments. In a following letter he advised making the official flight first, then resuming research. Conditions in the United States, he added, were so unsettled that one could not count on the future.

The Military Institute Committee

Arranging an official flight was not so simple. The National Aeronautic Association, which certified aviators’ records, had never measured a rocket’s altitude. William Enyart, its secretary, consulted the Bureau of Standards, which doubted that its standard barographs would survive the accelerations. Goddard took responsibility for their use. To avoid bringing an observer from Kansas City and keeping him waiting on the winds, a local committee of three was formed: Colonel D. C. Pearson, superintendent of the New Mexico Military Institute in Roswell; Major John E. Smith, head of the physics department; and Captain Howard H. Alden, head of the mathematics department.

On April 7 Harry Guggenheim asked Goddard whether he could make a flight that summer, what altitude it would reach, and at what speed. On April 18 Goddard sent him his program for the following year: pumps, a more efficient chamber, rockets eighteen inches in diameter. He also pointed out that an article by Malina and Smith of Caltech in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences had just confirmed his own earlier calculations: they predicted that a three-stage rocket could climb to more than five million feet, at eleven thousand miles an hour.

April 20, 1938

On April 20 the committee arrived at the tower at eight o’clock. With Pearson, Smith, and Alden was Esther. The barograph was sealed, then suspended by strips of inner tube in a compartment of the rocket, which was eighteen feet long. Major Smith climbed the tower with Alden and two mechanics to apply the seal himself. Goddard took his place at the shelter telescope, the electrical controls within reach. Esther stood a little behind, camera in hand.

Major Smith’s account is one of the most vivid in all of Goddard’s correspondence. At the signal, he relates, a great burst of flame and smoke shot out at the foot of the tower, with that roar of a hundred boiler valves. Then the doctor released the rocket. It rose slowly at first, then could be seen accelerating rapidly. It did not go straight up but swung from side to side, answering the gyroscope’s commands. When the fuel ran out it followed a path like that of a ball thrown very high and very far, and seemed to travel almost horizontally for a long time. Every eye waited for the parachute. It did not open. The rocket dove toward the ground. The impact was heard a little later, like a heavy charge of dynamite.

Everyone crossed the plain to the wreck. No one touched the debris before Goddard arrived. The rocket had dug a hole fourteen inches deep. The barograph was crushed to half an inch thick; its paper was torn, and the gasoline left in the tank had wiped out the smoked trace. Captain Alden paced off the distance to the tower: about a mile and a third. The ascent had lasted 23.3 seconds, the flight 44 seconds. The instruments gave an altitude of 3,860 to 4,570 feet; the committee, by eye, estimated it at a mile and a half. Goddard would settle on 4,215 feet. He thought the parachute had failed because the barograph, which proved bulkier than expected, had had to be moved, and an electrical wire had been disturbed.

“At the Mercy of Fate”

On May 13 Harry Guggenheim wrote of his disappointment. He had hoped for much from this demonstration, at relatively low speeds and relatively modest altitudes. Was this test particularly unlucky, he asked, or was development still at so early a stage that one was more or less at the mercy of fate?

Goddard replied on May 23. We are still very much at the mercy of fate, he admitted, but not as much as in the early days. The five flights preceding that of April 20 had all released the parachute at the right moment. His troubles came not from the principles but from small details of construction. Almost everything in the rocket had to be specially designed and built, with a search for lightness pushed much further than in any other application. Every part was checked, the whole rocket was tested in the shop, then in the tower before each flight. There always remained the possibility of a flaw, a weak point, a speck of dust in a valve. And he added a rare admission: he had his heart in his throat before every test.

On May 19 he had written to Lewis that one of his rockets had once dived at about seven hundred miles an hour; but in vertical ascent, against gravity, they did not exceed three hundred miles an hour. A rocket without fins, he explained to the NACA, is like an arrow weighted with lead at the front and with no feathers: less stable than a feathered arrow, it still flies straight.

Hickman Declines

On May 21 Goddard wrote to Clarence Hickman at Bell Laboratories. The next year’s work, if funded, would consist in developing a large pump-fed rocket with light tanks, capable of real range. His three mechanics were excellent and had been working with him since 1930. But the design and checking of the whole construction, he wrote, were more than a one-man job. He offered him a year’s leave to join him, for five thousand dollars. On May 31 Hickman replied that he would very much like to work with him again, that he would enjoy the climate and the work could not be more fascinating, but that he had just been put in charge of a new group at Bell Laboratories and could not leave.

On Sunday, May 22, Goddard sketched in his diary a multistage rocket of his own invention: turbines and propellers in the dense air, the pure rocket in the thin air, and beyond that, successive detonations in a reflecting cone. On May 26 he drew from it a memorandum on a rocket using three types of propulsion. On May 23 the Associated Press science writer, Howard Blakeslee, and his wife had come to Roswell.

On May 26 came a new test before the committee, with a seventeen-minute barograph: a gust laid the rocket over as soon as it left the tower, and it came down six hundred feet away.

June 15

On June 4 Atwood announced at Clark’s commencement that Goddard would continue his work the following year; Goddard had not authorized him to do so. On June 10 the Guggenheim foundation again granted 20,000 dollars.

On June 14 the team and Colonel Pearson waited all day at the tower: the wind was too strong. On June 15 they went back at four in the morning. Still too much wind. Charles Mansur stayed alone at the tower in the afternoon. At a quarter past three a tornado struck Eden Valley. Charles was putting the cover on the lower part of the rocket. He barely had time to run. He heard a roar, saw a cloud of dust, and found himself pinned against a pipe supporting a guy wire. When the rest of the team arrived at half past four, the tower was nothing but a heap of twisted rods and angle irons. The truck and trailer, parked thirty feet away, were intact. Charles had killed a small rattlesnake under the trailer just before they arrived.

The next day the wreckage was dismantled and everything brought back to the shop except the sheet iron and the catapult weights. At the foot of the tower the men killed a tarantula. By June 20 they were putting up the first twenty-foot section of a new tower. On the 21st the concrete was poured; a truck from the Roswell Sand and Gravel Company came from Camp Berrendo; at the foot of the tower the men killed a scorpion. On the 22nd Goddard went with Esther to water the concrete and cover it with earth so it would not dry too fast.

On June 17 he had written Harry Guggenheim a letter of thanks in an unusual tone. He thanked him for his patience in the face of discouraging delays. He had long realized, he wrote, how fortunate he was to have the backing of someone who understood the difficulties of a new technique, but he had not been able to say so without its seeming tied to a request for money. The best way to show his gratitude, he concluded, was to give his best to the work.

August 9, 1938

On July 27 the test before the committee, attended by Marjorie Alden, the captain’s wife, who also taught mathematics at the Institute, came to nothing: the chamber exploded on ignition. On August 9 Goddard and the team left the shop at half past four in the morning. Esther and the Aldens arrived at a quarter past five. At half past six the rocket went. It hesitated for a short distance, then climbed straight, about five degrees from the vertical. The parachute opened at the top of the flight. The rocket came down four-tenths of a mile away, the nose cone half a mile. After the test Marjorie Alden told Goddard she thought he had something there. Then, every five minutes or so for a while, she kept saying “Oh.” Her knees, she said, had been shaking at the end of the flight.

The official altitude for August 9 would be a disappointment. The Bureau of Standards announced a height Goddard would find “disappointing”: 3,294 feet according to the barograph, when the recording telescope gave 4,920 feet and the observers estimated it much higher. Goddard’s papers in fact contain a different figure, 6,565 feet, in a letter from the Association dated September 8, 1938; it is not possible to settle the matter without the original report, which the editors did not publish. Be that as it may, Goddard would say in 1945 that this was the first flight of a liquid-propellant rocket officially measured by the National Aeronautic Association, with gyroscopic steering during propulsion and during free ascent, and a parachute released at the peak.

Sources: diary 1938; letters from G. W. Lewis and C. A. Lindbergh (January 19, 1938); annual report of February 7, 1938; letter from W. W. Atwood (February 8, 1938); correspondence with the National Aeronautic Association (March–September 1938); reports by R. H. Goddard, Colonel D. C. Pearson, Major J. E. Smith, and Captain H. H. Alden on the test of April 20, 1938; letters from H. F. Guggenheim (May 13, 1938) and reply (May 23, 1938); correspondence with C. N. Hickman (May 1938); letter of June 17, 1938; letter to C. A. Lindbergh (December 29, 1938); statement for Clark University (April 26, 1945); “Milestones” appendix — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 28 · 1938 – 1939 Before Europe Exploded

On September 2, 1938, a tourist bus ran along the Rhine on the border between Switzerland and Germany. Among the passengers, a fifty-five-year-old American professor and his wife looked at the far bank. That evening Robert Goddard noted in his diary that Germany had seemed peaceful, but in a strange way ominous. The next day, crossing the Vosges, he saw a first German pillbox by the road, shell craters, concrete casemates on the mountain, a military cemetery. The Goddards had first thought of Hawaii, where there was no more room. Goddard had then proposed Europe: he wanted, he said, to see it before it exploded.

The Ten-Year Program

On July 8, 1938, Lindbergh had written to Goddard from Illiec, a small island in Brittany where he had settled. He asked him to think about the long-term future: what would he like to accomplish with the rocket over, say, the next ten years? He thought the first practical use of liquid rockets might be military, for example sending flares to high altitude at night to help fighter planes repel a bombing raid. European military men, he wrote, were becoming more and more interested in rockets. Shouldn’t closer contact be established with American Ordnance?

On July 13 Goddard replied to another correspondent, Colonel L. A. Codd, editor of the journal Army Ordnance, who wanted him to write a preface for an article on military rockets by a reserve officer, Major James R. Randolph. He declined: he did not consider himself an authority on tactics, and he disagreed with several of the author’s statements. He took the opportunity to set history straight. In 1918, he recalled, the War Department had employed him under the supervision of a committee made up of General Squier, Dr. Stratton, and Dr. Walcott; his powder rockets, demonstrated at Aberdeen before representatives of the Army and Navy, had solved several of the problems Randolph still believed open; and his reports had remained in the War Department’s confidential files. He thought, like Randolph, that such weapons should be developed in peacetime rather than in the rush of a war.

On July 14 he turned down a photo story by Life magazine: he preferred his results to appear in recognized scientific journals. On July 23 he wrote to Lindbergh. He had sought the quickest solutions to each problem, to get flights as soon as possible, and so had never pushed any solution to perfection. He agreed that the first practical use would be military. But the military, he wrote, did not like to call on civilians, or to give them funds, and they were very skeptical of a novelty like this one. General Sunderland himself saw the rocket only as a means of towing targets for antiaircraft gunnery. The editors of his papers would add a note here: by that date Nazi Germany had already carried its secret military rocket research to a high degree of development, and had been working at Peenemünde since May 1937.

On August 15, in Worcester, Goddard finished the text Lindbergh had asked for: an “Outline of a Ten-year Program on Rocket Development.” First, perfect guidance and the parachute until their operation was fully reproducible. Then apply pumps and light tanks, and produce a high-efficiency combustion chamber. Next, depending on the aim, develop for meteorology a stabilization without vanes and the rocket turbine; for the Army, a quick igniter, powder rockets, and liquid fuels storable at ordinary temperature. He reviewed the propellants: the most energetic combination would be ozone and hydrogen, but the most practical was liquid oxygen and liquid methane, found almost pure in some natural gas wells. For rockets that could be stored a long time, liquid fuels at ordinary temperature and nitrates would be needed. And to carry out this program he asked for at least one assistant physicist, and from time to time young enthusiasts from the engineering schools.

The Normandie

On August 11 the Goddards left Roswell. On the 13th Goddard woke up on the train dreaming that Esther was nudging him to prepare a lecture: it was the sleeping-car porter trying to wake him at seven. In Worcester, on the 15th, he showed his attorney Hawley the gyroscope film, and gave him a demonstration with a revolving stool and a bicycle wheel to explain a patent on steering rockets by gyroscope.

On August 17, 1938, they sailed from New York on the Normandie, the French liner, one of the most beautiful in the world. Goddard watched the Aquitania depart and saw the Statue of Liberty; the air was hazy, the buildings looked very tall and very far away. Their cabin was four decks below the promenade deck, so close to the water that they heard it like surf. On the 19th he noted that the waiter was always worried because they did not eat enough, and that an Englishman had taken roast beef after watermelon.

Paris

On August 22 they saw Southampton through the porthole. At the entrance to the Channel the water was green and the clouds a reddish purple-gray. They landed at Le Havre and took the train. The French countryside struck him as pretty and “cute,” as if it had not changed in years. In Paris they stayed at the Hôtel Ambassador, dined at the Printanière restaurant, and in the evening went to the Folies Bergère, which Goddard punctuated with an exclamation mark.

Over the following days they took the American Express excursions: the Sainte-Chapelle, the Panthéon, Notre-Dame, then the Madeleine, the Invalides, Sacré-Cœur. He preferred the morning tour. The Vendôme column impressed him, and the Place de la Bastille, he wrote with humor, by what was not there. On the 24th they went to Versailles and saw Otello at the Opéra in the evening. On the 25th they left for Chartres.

Chartres would be the high point of the trip. Goddard admired the cathedral’s facade, then the interior; the stone carvings behind and around the altar, each cut from a single block, seemed extraordinary to him. A few months later, on January 26, 1939, he would write to the cathedral’s keeper, Étienne Houvet, asking where to find a color reproduction of a window that had particularly struck him: the one with the deepest blue of all, with a purple cup near the top. The cathedral, he told him, had impressed him deeply, and his visit had been the finest experience of the whole trip.

On August 26 he toured the Louvre with a French guide, a very good one, had a Dubonnet at the Café de la Paix with Esther, and dined at the Café de la Régence on sole and crêpes Suzette. On the 27th he visited the war exhibition at the Invalides while Esther went to see a painting exhibition at the Luxembourg. The French, he noted, had a gracious way of living: the café terraces, no one hurrying you for the bill, the wide avenues, the trees.

Switzerland

On August 28 they left by bus for a tour of Switzerland. They saw old castles and ruins on the hilltops; in the Jura, several layers of mist at different levels, with the highest hills indistinct, gave an impression of great distance. In Geneva, on the 29th, they visited the League of Nations palace. Goddard did not like it: the modern style, he wrote, had nothing gracious about it, in color, design, or form; it was angular, awkward, obvious. The League of Nations building struck him as somehow depressing. A year later Europe would be at war.

At Chamonix he went up by cable car, in two stages, to 10,500 feet, and glimpsed the summit of Mont Blanc. On August 30 he went down onto the Mer de Glace and sat on it for a while. On the 31st, in Bern, he watched the clock strike eleven and was amused by the bears in the pit: one of them danced when he moved up and down. In Lucerne, on September 1, he shopped with Esther, crossed the lake, and in the evening went to see the floodlit Lion of Lucerne. On September 2 came the falls of the Rhine, a brilliant white in the sun, and the German bank, peaceful and ominous.

Faraday

On September 4 they crossed the Channel to Folkestone; the chalk cliffs appeared as they approached. In London they stayed at the Strand Palace and dined at Simpson’s, just across the street. London struck him as a very, very large Boston; the hotel was like New York, only quieter. On the 5th he saw a banker and a patent firm. On the 6th he visited the Science Museum with Esther, whose very complete collections included many original historic pieces. Before an experimental apparatus made by Michael Faraday, the great nineteenth-century English physicist, Goddard was moved: just think, Faraday’s own hands had actually touched it!

He had written to Lindbergh from Paris on August 26 to send him the ten-year program and photographs, and to suggest meeting. Nothing in his papers indicates that the meeting took place.

On September 7 they boarded the Normandie again at Southampton. During the crossing Goddard read a Sperry company patent and wrote to Hawley. He noted with humor that one sees little of the ocean on a voyage: one stays on the enclosed deck; for the price of a four-day crossing one could look at it all summer from a house in Maine. On September 12, in New York, they checked into the Hotel Commodore, went to Schrafft’s for chicken patties and real coffee, and found on their return that the management had put a vase of red roses in their room. It was explained to them that this was the custom for newlyweds. Goddard noted that he had kept his travel resolution: to sit, sit, and sit some more.

“You Have Done Everything You Said”

On September 15 he dined at Harry Guggenheim’s, on the porch. Guggenheim had an idea for speeding things up: farm out certain problems to outside laboratories, so that the results could be brought together and a flight made within a year or two. There was talk, according to certain reports, of liquid air being used by the Germans in bombs. And Guggenheim told Goddard something Goddard noted with pleasure: he had done everything he had said he would do.

On September 16, from his office, Guggenheim telephoned Millikan and Hunsaker of MIT; his associate Collins contacted pump manufacturers. Goddard met engineers from Ingersoll-Rand and Dr. Carl Fromm of Worthington Pump, who judged the cost of a development prohibitive for his company. On the 17th, at New York University, Professor Klemin told him that the way the problems of this research had been handled and solved would make an important chapter in the history of science, and that he would say so behind his back too. On Sunday the 18th Goddard met at Guggenheim’s Theodore von Kármán and Clark Millikan, Robert’s son, both from Caltech.

On September 20, in Washington, William Enyart of the National Aeronautic Association, introducing him to the Association’s president, told him that the record of his flight would one day be a historic document. On September 22 the Goddards were back in Roswell. Al Kisk was waiting for them at the station.

The Shell Man

On October 13, 1938, an engineer from the Shell oil company, sent by Jimmy Doolittle, the famous aviator who had become a Shell executive, came to visit the Roswell installation. His report, dated October 25, is a valuable testimony because it describes Goddard’s laboratory as seen by an outsider. A small shop on the northeast side of town, where three mechanics made everything, from the smallest part to the complete rocket. A sixty-foot tower about ten miles to the northwest, set on a concrete foundation that received the jet of flame and deflected it ninety degrees through a concrete flue. Three observation posts: a concrete pit at fifty feet, a metal shelter at a hundred fifty feet, another at a thousand feet. Goddard, the engineer wrote, attacked the problems one at a time, and as soon as a solution was found, not necessarily the best, he moved on to the next; his idea was to get a rocket that worked, and to perfect it later. The report ends with an unexpected reverie for an oil engineer: a flight from New York to Paris in less than an hour, and, who knows, with the Moon only a quarter of a million miles away…

Sources: letters from C. A. Lindbergh (July 8, 1938) and replies (July 23 and August 26, 1938); letters to Colonel L. A. Codd (July 13, 1938) and to H. F. Guggenheim (July 14, 1938); “Outline of a Ten-year Program on Rocket Development” (August 15, 1938); travel diary (August 11–September 22, 1938); letter to É. Houvet (January 26, 1939); report by a Shell engineer (October 25, 1938) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 29 · 1938 – 1939 The Pumps

On November 10, 1938, in the middle of a working day at the Roswell shop, Robert Goddard wrote in his diary a sentence unrelated to his tests: the cherry tree was down; he would have to carry on alone. A hurricane had swept New England in September, and the old cherry tree at Maple Hill, the tree of October 19, 1899, had not survived. The editors of his papers simply add in a note that the tree that had meant so much in his life had been brought down by a hurricane in the fall of 1938. The next day Goddard went back to his pumps.

The Heart of the Rocket

Since 1914 Goddard had known that the real rocket, the one that would climb very high, would have pumps. A pressure-fed rocket must have thick, heavy tanks able to withstand the pressure that pushes the liquids into the chamber. If a high chamber pressure is wanted, for better efficiency, the tanks must be heavier still. With pumps, on the contrary, the tanks can stay at low pressure, thin and light; it is the pumps, small and fast, that raise the liquids to high pressure just before the chamber. But a pump for liquid oxygen is a formidable object: it must turn at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute, in a liquid at minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit, without leaking, without seizing, and weigh almost nothing.

On November 1, 1938, Goddard reported to Harry Guggenheim that he had tested four pumps built before the vacation. One of them had almost exactly the characteristics sought: it delivered ten gallons a minute at seven hundred fifty pounds of pressure, with no leakage and no heating of its bearings. It weighed a pound and three-quarters; the whole unit, with its bearings, its two-stage turbine, and its mountings, weighed only four pounds. He had asked Los Angeles pump manufacturers: their multistage pumps would weigh several hundred pounds and could not pump liquid oxygen anyway. The Bureau of Standards had no information on pumping liquid oxygen at high pressure.

Guggenheim wanted to farm out certain problems to other laboratories to save time. Goddard looked into it. At MIT Hunsaker explained that it took a year and four thousand dollars to have a problem studied by a thesis student. At New York University Professor Klemin estimated a year and fifteen hundred dollars for the study of a gas generator to drive the turbines. According to a recent publication, Caltech was working on small, heavy chambers, without liquid oxygen. On December 5 he wrote politely to von Kármán that he was giving up the cooperation discussed in September: the factors of the problem were so interrelated that it was practically impossible to have them studied separately. In his quarterly report of December 15 he wrote that the surest way to speed the work was to increase the number of men and machines in his own shop. More than six hundred series of measurements had been made on the pumps. Two collaborations did come about: the NACA would wind-tunnel test models of his future eighteen-inch rocket, and the Shell company, thanks to Doolittle, would supply him with a special fuel free of charge.

On December 3 he answered the seven hundred students of Lansdowne High School in Pennsylvania, who had sent him their Christmas greetings. He had never, he wrote, wished a merry Christmas to so many people at once, and he doubted he would receive a gift as welcome as the knowledge of their interest in his work. On December 27 he copied a line from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe: there is no reason to abandon a valiant enterprise, for the difficulties that make it hard also make it glorious.

The Bang

On January 6, 1939, Goddard tried for the first time a motor fed by his pumps, on the stand at the tower. Nothing happened for a while after the igniter was fired, then the flame started with a “bang.” It was short, white, and very loud for three or four seconds. The igniter, bent, was thrown twenty-six feet. Thure Ljungquist reported that the shelter a hundred forty feet away shook so much he could no longer read the thrust gauge through his binoculars. On January 24 came a second test: a broad white flame flecked with white points, for ten to fifteen seconds.

On January 16 Atwood wrote to him again. Clark’s dean considered that the situation of the physics department was not creditable to the college, and that this long makeshift arrangement was an injustice. Goddard had to make a decision. On January 20 Goddard replied that his leave could not be regarded as a mere absence from all educational activity. He constantly received letters from young people who, thanks to his work, had taken up advanced studies. An engineer from the Curtiss-Wright company had even just declared that the future of aviation lay in jet propulsion.

On January 31 he commented for Abbot on two articles by Malina. They confirmed his own calculations, which, he recalled, Abbot himself had once checked. He recalled that Malina, who had come to Roswell two and a half years earlier, had all but insisted on obtaining all his information, especially on combustion chambers, and that he naturally could not give anyone the results of nearly twenty years of work before publishing them. He added that he had always believed in the military usefulness of the 1918 powder rockets, and that this work could be taken up again at Roswell without attracting attention.

The Glide Bomb

On January 31 Lester Barlow of the Glenn L. Martin aircraft company of Baltimore asked whether he would consult on liquid-propellant power units. On February 16 he explained: he was working on gliders carrying four-thousand-pound bombs, released from very high altitude; if the airplane could, thanks to a rocket, get away in a few seconds at the moment of release, direct hits with large bombs would become a reality. On February 21 Goddard replied that this was a “natural” application of rocket propulsion, and that piloted horizontal flight would be much simpler than automatic vertical flight. But an agreement on his patents would have to come first.

On March 4 the situation at Clark obliged him to make the trip east. On the 5th, on the train past Chicago, he noticed the gray-brown woods, the gray trains and bridges, the smoke: a pretty study in gray, modern. On the 6th, in Canada, a pale blue sky, yellow-green hills, rush marshes the color of Naples yellow, crimson stems of bushes, and a few horizontal streaks of deep blue ice. On the 7th he saw Atwood from half past nine to eleven, dined at his home, and spoke in the afternoon before the university Senate and the science faculty. Mrs. Atwood invited him to stay with them. On the 8th he spoke to the physics club. On the 9th he went to see the Tallawanda Drive house: the ash in front, the catalpa, and the big cherry tree out back seemed to be the only large trees the hurricane had brought down. He saw Dean Little, who acknowledged the importance of appointing a professor of mathematics; such an appointment would remove his objections to Goddard’s leave.

On March 10, in New York, he lunched with Harry Guggenheim on fish chowder. Guggenheim had already guaranteed the salary of Goddard’s replacement in physics; he advised him to work three more months as planned, then tackle the efficiency of the combustion chambers, and to buy the new lathe he needed. On Sunday, March 12, Goddard was at the Dahlgren proving ground in Virginia, with his former Clark colleague L. T. E. Thompson. They talked before a wood fire, and Thompson was interested in a rocket-accelerated bomb able to pierce ships’ decks. Goddard remembered that he had had a bomb of this kind, with diluted black powder, ready for full-scale tests in 1922. On the 13th, in Washington, Lewis told him that the NACA was considering liquid hydrogen as a fuel. On March 17 he wrote to Thompson that this made his own choice of liquid oxygen seem truly conservative.

In his report of March 25 Goddard wrote for the first time that problems of national defense were beginning to arise, in aviation as in ordnance, that required efficient liquid-rocket propulsion for their solution.

Lindbergh at the Ranch

On Sunday, April 23, 1939, the Goddards went out with the Beesons and Esther’s mother to look for “Pecos Valley diamonds,” small quartz crystals found in the region, then hunted snakes near a creek and had lunch by the roadside in a canyon. On April 26 Goddard wrote to the National Geographic, which had asked him for photographs: he sent two, but asked to know what other pictures would be published, for he had seen too many articles in which his flights appeared next to medieval devices and other experimenters’ rocket explosions.

On May 8 two Linde engineers came to see his pumps. On the 9th Howard Blakeslee of the Associated Press lunched at the ranch. On the 10th it was Herbert Nichols of the Christian Science Monitor. And at half past three Charles Lindbergh arrived. They talked on the porch, went to the shop, walked with Esther down to the Rio Berrendo, had dinner, and spent the evening talking about letters received from abroad, the work plan, the pump tests. Goddard showed him the film. On the 11th he drove him to the airport. Lindbergh took off at nine, flew over the Eden Valley tower, then came back over the airport, dropped to twenty feet above the fence, and climbed away at forty-five degrees.

On May 17 Goddard wrote to sum up their conversation. If, as Lindbergh had reason to believe, rocket propulsion was being developed for military purposes in Europe, we should, he wrote, by all means turn our efforts in that direction, without delay. Undertaking it only as an emergency project would raise costs and reduce the chances of success. He saw three paths: a long-range projectile, a rocket turbine for airplanes, a light artillery rocket. On May 16 he had replied to the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences, which had submitted a list of books on rocket flight, that none was at an engineer’s level; the best, in his view, was a German book, Raketenflugtechnik.

The Gas Generator

The pumps worked, but they had to be driven. Goddard had first tried to drive them with oxygen evaporated in a jacket around the chamber, then with gases bled from the chamber itself. Neither solution was satisfactory. In the spring of 1939 he developed what he called an “internal-combustion boiler for liquid oxygen”: a small chamber in which a little gasoline was burned in the liquid oxygen to produce a hot gas that turned the turbines. Between March 24 and April 28, eleven tests behind the shop. The last was perfect: the pressure rose to one hundred eighty pounds and stayed there. The final generator weighed twenty-four ounces, was seventeen inches long, and delivered about ninety horsepower.

On May 18 it was mounted on the test rocket. For the first time the power was there from the start. It was even too great: the pressure rose so fast that the chamber split open. But the instruments had time to record a thrust of 776 pounds, the highest ever obtained with a pump model. On June 14 Roswell broke its official heat record: 107 degrees Fahrenheit. That day the chamber exploded.

On June 26 Lindbergh wrote that he had been to see Gilbert Grosvenor at the National Geographic, who would be glad to publish an article on his work. On July 15 Goddard described an impressionist sky in his diary: feathery green cottonwoods, a pale green sky, cumulus clouds of washed-out orange, a band of deep sea blue. On July 20 Harry Guggenheim and his wife flew in from Albuquerque. Goddard showed them the shop and the tower. The novelist Paul Horgan dropped by after dinner. On the 21st they went fishing on the Indian reservation at Ruidoso. On the 22nd the Guggenheims left; Goddard noted that he had heard the August crickets. On July 31 a telegram told him the grant had been renewed for a year.

War

On August 4, 1939, the rocket ran for the first time entirely on its own, with its own gas generator: seven hundred pounds of thrust for twenty seconds. The heat of the jet melted the pebbles in the concrete deflector. On August 14 Guggenheim sent him a New York Times article on the Englishman Frank Whittle’s jet engine; Goddard replied that Whittle’s patent had been cited against one of his own applications, and that this work might help awaken interest in jet propulsion in America.

On August 19 the Goddards left on vacation for the East. On the 21st, in Worcester, Esther had the dining-room furniture taken from the old house, and Goddard brought back a log from the cherry tree. On August 31, on Mrs. Peterson’s radio, he heard an announcer stationed at Waterloo Station in London during the evacuation of schoolchildren; the children could be heard, and a teacher from a poor district spoke into the microphone. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Goddard noted that radios were giving the war news all along Wachusett Street.

On September 6 Guggenheim took him to the New York World’s Fair. In the “Time and Space” pavilion, which presented a voyage by spaceship, a commentator declared that as long as their mighty engines were running, they were safe. Esther agreed that this was certainly true. A fly passed in front of the projector just as the Moon was being shown, and a man behind them said there was life up there! On the 7th Goddard represented Clark at the meeting of the Geophysical Union in Washington, lunched with Abbot, and met the heads of the National Geographic, who proposed an article of eight to nine thousand words, signed by him and prepared with one of their writers.

On September 19, at the shop, Thure Ljungquist looked at the rocket parts laid out and said there was a year’s work there on the floor and on the bench; those who said Rome was not built in a day were right. On October 19 Goddard noted: Anniversary Day, the fortieth. On October 29 he spent Sunday at the home of the painter Peter Hurd in San Patricio and sketched the hills to the east.

On December 2, 1939, the new flight rocket, fully assembled, made its static test with a full load: one hundred fifty pounds of liquid oxygen, one hundred twenty pounds of gasoline. It produced its thrust for forty seconds, the longest test of its life. Chamber pressure held at 349 pounds, varying by no more than a pound. Maximum thrust reached 785 pounds. After the test the chamber was in perfect condition. For Goddard it was the signal: the pump-fed rocket was ready to fly.

Sources: diary (November 1938–December 1939); letters to H. F. Guggenheim (November 1 and December 15, 1938); letter to T. von Kármán (December 5, 1938); quarterly reports (December 1938–December 1939); correspondence with W. W. Atwood (January 1939); letter to C. G. Abbot (January 31, 1939); correspondence with L. P. Barlow (January–February 1939); letters to L. T. E. Thompson (March 17, 1939) and to C. A. Lindbergh (May 17, 1939); letter from Lindbergh (June 26, 1939); telegram of July 31, 1939 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 30 · 1940 The Quarter-Ton Rocket

In February 1940, at Eden Valley, a rocket twenty-four feet long and eighteen inches in diameter waited in its tower for ten days. It was the finest Robert Goddard had ever built: streamlined, fitted with pumps, turbines, a gas generator, a gyroscope, and two parachutes. His patrons, Harry Guggenheim and his wife, had come from New York to see it fly. Two envoys from the National Geographic, a writer and a photographer, were there to record the event. And for ten days the weather was no weather for launching a rocket: two snowstorms, ice everywhere.

The Robot

The P rocket, as Goddard called it after his test series, was a device of new complexity. He would himself describe it as a kind of automatic engine, or robot. Without its casings it measured eighteen feet ten inches; it was so rigid that it could be held horizontally by both ends without bending. Its motor weighed six and a half pounds and produced six to seven hundred pounds of thrust. Its pumps, turbines, and gas generator together weighed only about thirty pounds. Its aluminum tanks were large enough to carry twice the present load. Two small liquid-nitrogen tanks, housed at the bottom of the oxygen tank, maintained the pressure. Everything shut off automatically when the oxygen was exhausted.

On February 21, to help the National Geographic writer convey the power of the craft, Goddard proposed a comparison: the rocket weighed a little under two hundred forty pounds and developed at liftoff a jet power of 2,300 horsepower, about that of a freight locomotive pulling fifty loaded cars and weighing 285,000 pounds. Filled, with its two hundred fifty pounds of propellants, it weighed about a quarter of a ton. That is the name he would give it: the quarter-ton rocket.

The National Geographic Envoys

The article project had been agreed in September 1939. On January 23, 1940, Gilbert Grosvenor announced the arrival of McFall Kerbey, a writer with a solid scientific background, and B. Anthony Stewart, one of the magazine’s photographers. On January 29 Goddard went to pick them up in town. They photographed the shop, then the tower. Stewart’s photographs are among the finest we have of Goddard: we see him in the control shelter a thousand feet from the tower, his eye at the telescope that let him read the gauges, the firing, release, and cutoff keys lined up on a shelf; we see him with Charles Mansur in front of the mechanism that was to release the nose cone and the parachute; we see the rocket without its casing on its assembly stand.

On February 2, in the snow, Goddard went to meet the Guggenheims at the airport. They dined with Kerbey and Stewart. On February 3 photographs were taken of the National Aeronautic Association committee. On the 4th, at six in the morning, the team filled the gasoline tank for a test; the wind rose at noon; everything was emptied. On the 5th it rained and the temperature was forty degrees Fahrenheit; the tarpaulin was taken off to warm the rocket during the quarter hour of sun. On the 6th, at six, everyone was at the tower: the Guggenheims, Colonel Pearson, the committee, the National Geographic envoys. The tanks were filled; the nitrogen tank had to be purged twice; at a quarter past ten the test was attempted. The lever of the second shock absorber stuck: it had rusted. On the 8th it rained, then snowed in big flakes.

On February 9 the team knocked the ice off the tower with hammers, set up the controls, and attempted test P15 at about a quarter past twelve. The oxygen pump burst. Ice, or frozen moisture, had probably plugged the oxygen orifice in the chamber; the pressure had risen all at once. The flame had been yellowish, and the noise less loud than usual. The oxygen pump’s turbine had broken off and vanished. At two o’clock Goddard drove the Guggenheims to the airport. Then he went home to bed until six.

“Not with Flowers, but with Dollars”

The visit was nonetheless not a complete failure. Before leaving, Harry Guggenheim had promised Goddard that the foundation would guarantee the salary of his replacement at Clark, the young physicist Martin, for the following year: 2,500 dollars. On February 10 Goddard wrote to Atwood, quoting Guggenheim’s remark: the foundation was saying it not with flowers but with dollars. He added a confidence: the Navy had approached him about important work for it, which depended on results obtained at Roswell.

On February 12 and 13 Kerbey worked with Goddard in his office on the article and the photo captions. On March 24 Goddard would write to him that the manuscript was first-rate work, but that it would be better to wait for a successful flight to finish it. The article would never appear.

On February 17 Goddard wrote to Lindbergh that he was almost glad Lindbergh had not come. During those ten days the rocket had stayed in the tower. They were repairing it, and adding twenty feet to the tower so that it would be better guided at liftoff, sheltered from the spring winds. On February 27 Lindbergh replied with an aviator’s understanding: anyone who had lived through the early years of aviation, as Harry Guggenheim had, fully understood the limitations and whims of the weather. And the photograph of the eighteen-inch rocket, he added, gave the impression of a very formidable and highly developed instrument.

The Robot and the Stars

On March 4 Goddard sent his quarterly report to Guggenheim. In it he answered several questions the Guggenheims had asked during their stay. Mrs. Guggenheim had asked what could be expected once high-pressure flights succeeded. Goddard acknowledged that there was a limit to the altitude the present model could reach. To go farther a larger rocket would be needed, like a motorboat whose range depends on its size. Or the principle of multiple rockets would have to be applied, a series of ever smaller rockets, which he had explained as early as his 1919 paper. But he had made no experiments of that kind, he added: obviously a single rocket had to work well before a series could be attempted.

On March 9 Abbot forwarded a letter from Brescia, Italy, which spoke frankly of interplanetary navigation. Goddard returned the letter with a few remarks. Since the author spoke of interplanetary navigation without blushing, he wrote, he might be allowed to do the same. If the subject ever came to be considered seriously, solar energy beyond the atmosphere would be very important; it would have to be used to produce beams of electrically charged particles, jets of electrified gas. It seemed to him that work along these lines would be done some day, for interest in the subject refused to die, despite the disapproval of certain authorities. But it would not be scientifically respectable until a rocket had gone very high in the atmosphere, or beyond. And it was to that goal, he concluded, that he was devoting all his energy.

The same day he replied to the air attaché of the Royal Italian Embassy, who asked for the composition of his explosives and his patent numbers, that his rockets used liquid oxygen and gasoline, and that his work was still at the experimental stage.

“No Short Cut”

On March 14 Guggenheim confirmed that the foundation would guarantee Martin’s salary. On March 18 the photographer Stewart came back from Washington for another attempt. On March 21, at six, the team left for the tower. At a quarter to ten test P16 began; gas could be heard escaping; the pressure was low and pulsing; finally both turbine manifolds burst, very cold and made brittle. A safety valve was still hissing after the test. Stewart left for the East on the El Paso bus.

On March 24, Easter Sunday, Goddard went with Esther to St. Andrew’s Church. He copied out the first line of the hymn sung that day: the strife is o’er, the battle done, the Lord is risen. On the 25th he wrote to Guggenheim: all these tests had shown conclusively that there was no short cut between static tests and flights. He would therefore return to his usual method: a few static tests of the complete flight model before each new flight attempt.

“All Our Troubles Have Been Small Troubles”

On March 29 Guggenheim came back to an idea dear to him: Goddard should have an assistant, a man with a strong sense of practical mechanics, who would simplify procedures and take charge of construction and flights while Goddard devoted himself to theoretical developments. On April 7 Goddard replied that such a man would be very useful, but would probably not be attracted by a small salary. His greatest need, he said, was help in supervising and conducting the tests. And he added a remark that sums up the whole difficulty of rocket engineering: since they had been built, nothing essential had had to be changed in the pumps, turbines, and gas generator; all their troubles had been small troubles. But a small trouble, he wrote, can spoil a test just as much as a fundamental one.

On April 7 he watched an eclipse of the Sun: almost the whole disk covered on the left side, for about half an hour. On April 12 test P17 gave a fine flame for about thirty seconds, then the chamber burned through at the nozzle; the rocket was thrown sideways, out of its guides; the ignition switch, forgotten, had not been turned off. Esther’s mother, who was hanging out the wash, heard the test: it sounded, she said, as if it were just behind the garage. On April 26 test P18 worked: the thrust indicator light, white when the rocket just lifted its weight and red when the thrust exceeded it by two hundred pounds, went from white to red in about a second; then the oxygen tubes burned after a quarter of a minute.

“Better than No Results at All”

On April 27, 1940, Goddard wrote Abbot a letter in which bitterness showed through for the first time. He wanted to know to what extent the Army and Navy were developing rockets and jet propulsion. He wondered whether these questions were simply being handed to some joint committee, or whether research was really being carried out at Caltech. It did not seem to him that the problem could be attacked effectively while leaving aside the results he had obtained in twenty years. And he added, with sad irony: he readily admitted that he had not yet broken any world distance record; but the results he had obtained were certainly better than no results at all.

On April 30 Abbot replied that the Army and Navy were very secretive, and that he doubted he could learn what was being done in California; but he had told General Arnold and Admiral Towers, the heads of Army and Navy aviation, about the music-stand experiment, the Aberdeen demonstration of the recoilless gun, and they had seemed very interested in the possibility of a recoilless gun for aircraft.

On May 9 Goddard wrote for his friend Thompson in the Navy a memorandum on a rocket to accelerate armor-piercing bombs, comparing a liquid rocket with a single-charge rocket of liquid oxygen and carbon. On May 15 test P19 ended badly: the nozzle burned through in three places, and the turbine gases tore off the casings. On May 17 he took the train east. On May 10 Germany had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.

Sources: diary (January–May 1940); quarterly reports (December 1939 and March 4, 1940); correspondence with the National Geographic (January–March 1940); letters to W. W. Atwood (February 10, 1940), to C. A. Lindbergh (February 17, 1940) and reply (February 27, 1940), to M. Kerbey (February 21 and March 24, 1940), to C. G. Abbot (March 9 and April 27, 1940) and reply (April 30, 1940); correspondence with H. F. Guggenheim (March–April 1940); memorandum for L. T. E. Thompson (May 9, 1940); captions to B. A. Stewart’s photographs — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 31 · 1940 Nobody Listens

On Tuesday, May 28, 1940, at half past eight in the morning, Robert Goddard entered the Munitions Building in Washington and presented himself at the office of General Henry H. Arnold, chief of the United States Army Air Corps. In Europe the German army had just broken through the French front; at Dunkirk British troops were evacuating the continent. Harry Guggenheim had arranged this meeting to offer the government, free of charge, for the duration of the emergency, the Roswell shop, equipment, and team. Goddard brought twenty-five years of experience and the film of his flights. He would leave with a single request: to study a rocket to help fighter planes take off.

The May Trip

Goddard had left Roswell on May 17. On Sunday the 19th his stepmother Jennie met him at the Worcester station; his former colleague Roope took him home, where they listened to a radio speech by Lindbergh and talked until one in the morning. He traveled through a “white Sunday”: throughout New York State and western Massachusetts the apple, pear, and cherry trees were in bloom. On the 20th he saw Atwood. On the 22nd he was at the Guggenheims’ in Port Washington; he talked with Mrs. Guggenheim in the library, Harry arrived late, and there were heavy showers in the night. On the 23rd he visited with Esther Mille Fleurs, Mrs. Daniel Guggenheim’s house, a place with a French air, with terraces over the sea, yellow tulips, and a garden of blue forget-me-nots.

On May 25 he was at Dahlgren with Thompson. In the evening they went to a cocktail party at the home of Commander William S. Parsons, a naval ordnance specialist, in the presence of the Navy’s Chief of Ordnance, Admiral Furlong. The editors of Goddard’s papers would note that five years later Parsons would be the officer who armed the atomic bomb on its way to Hiroshima.

The Meeting

On May 28 General Arnold was away. Goddard talked first with Army and Navy representatives in General Brett’s office: Captain C. A. Ross of the Air Corps, Commander F. W. Pennoyer of the Navy, and others. The Navy man said the Navy would be ready to pay, because it was interested in propulsion for very high-speed aircraft. Harry Guggenheim, delayed by bad weather at the New York airport, arrived later. He declared that the foundation would be glad to turn the shop over to war work for the duration of the conflict and to resume research afterward. General Brett finally arrived. He suggested that Goddard propose a project for boosting airplanes at takeoff and during the climb. In the afternoon Goddard showed the film of his flights to Captain Ross and other officers.

The memorandum Goddard would later write about this meeting is severe. Apart from the possible use for airplanes, there was, he wrote, no particular interest in rockets or rocket propulsion. The Army Ordnance representative stated that he did not consider rockets could be useful to artillery, and that if any development work were to be done, it should be the improvement of trench mortars.

A few days later he would write to Hickman what the officers had told him to his face: he had not talked enough. And to prove it, they had told him that the Air Corps had already given funds, through the National Research Council, to the California Institute of Technology for work on jet propulsion. The officers were even surprised to see the films of his flights, which he had nonetheless been making for years.

Home by Sea

On May 29 the Goddards sailed from New York on the Seminole, a liner bound for Miami and Houston. On June 1 the stop at Miami lasted five hours; they toured the city by bus and saw pink flamingos at the racetrack; as they left, the city appeared on the horizon like a fairy city of ivory far off on a green sea. On June 3, at the captain’s dinner, a quiz was held between six ladies and six gentlemen. Esther won for the ladies, and General David P. Barrows, former president of the University of California, for the gentlemen; they shook hands while the orchestra played. Esther received a bouquet of gladioli, radishes, and a chocolate bar. On June 4, on the train to El Paso, General Barrows told Goddard that the Germans were poorly led and their planes poorly built. On June 5 the Goddards were back in Roswell.

“Go to It”

That same day Clarence Hickman wrote to him from New York. As an American patriot, he said, he felt it his duty to draw the government’s attention to the possibilities of their 1918 rockets. He was firmly convinced that if the French and British had had rockets developed along the lines they had followed, the situation would be very different today. Advances in metals would make their rockets far better. Heaven and earth must be moved, he wrote, to get this work started. He asked Goddard’s permission to act.

On June 9 Goddard replied, telling him to go to it, with his blessing. Then he told him about the Washington meeting. His best efforts on behalf of powder rockets had come to nothing. He admitted that he had been filled with disgust to find that no intensive fundamental work seemed possible, and suspected he had been hard to live with since his return. He had never had, he wrote, any gift for salesmanship of any kind; Hickman did. If he managed to sell the idea, even in part, he would have Goddard’s eternal gratitude.

That same June 9 Goddard wrote to General Arnold and to Senator David I. Walsh of Massachusetts. He could not help feeling, he wrote to Arnold, that twenty years of experience, the flights achieved, and the general acceptance of jet propulsion as something of real importance would justify undertaking the project on a much larger scale. To the senator he explained that he probably had more experience of the problem than anyone in the country, and that he had obtained, to his knowledge, the only officially recorded flights of a liquid rocket. On June 7 he had written to Abbot that the National Research Council had entrusted jet propulsion to Caltech without even consulting him; he saw in it the sign of a force that would have to be overcome before work on an adequate scale could begin.

On June 11 static test P20, watched by Esther and her mother, lasted forty-three and a half seconds; the rocket shut itself off. The same day Goddard sent General Arnold his report on a takeoff-assist rocket for the P-36A and P-12E fighters: a thousand pounds of thrust for one or two minutes, two chambers placed on either side of the fuselage, droppable by parachute after use. He advised setting up a liquid-oxygen plant: the one at El Paso, more than two hundred miles away, did not run continuously.

“For Your Peace of Mind”

On June 17 a young Air Corps lieutenant, Homer A. Boushey, wrote to him from Scott Field, Illinois. An engineering graduate of Stanford and a pilot for six years, he had read the 1919 report in 1933 at Langley Field. He wanted to submit an invention to him. On June 28 Boushey dined at the ranch and spent the evening with Goddard. He would become one of his most ardent champions in the Army.

On June 19 Goddard wrote to Guggenheim that his best man, Thure Ljungquist, had received an offer in California and would leave unless a decision was made before July 1. On June 21 Guggenheim replied: for his peace of mind and that of his team, he could assure him that if they did not reach an agreement with the government, the foundation would carry on the work for one more year.

On June 24 General Brett informed him that his calculations had been forwarded to Wright Field, the Air Corps test center in Ohio. He added that the Navy had expressed the view that the Air Corps alone should carry out this research, to avoid duplication.

“The Time Left Is Terribly Short”

On July 10 Atwood asked his faculty what Clark could do for national defense. Goddard approved the creation of a reserve officers’ training corps and compulsory military training for students. The time left to us to arm on a large scale, he wrote, was terribly short. The rocket, he recalled, was essentially a projectile fired without recoil; it could be directed toward aircraft by radio, or by the noise of the aircraft itself; and jet propulsion would be needed if airplanes were to fly much faster and much higher. Then he added a warning: two years after the publication of his 1919 paper a similar text had appeared in Germany, followed by many books and a great many experiments. Since the coming of National Socialism almost nothing more had been published. It did not seem reasonable to him to think that so promising a field of research had been abandoned by Germany.

On July 11 Jimmy Doolittle wrote that he had taken leave from Shell to return to service in the Air Corps. The same day the National Research Council of Canada asked him for information. On July 19 Lindbergh hoped that the country’s sudden awakening to its military unpreparedness would change attitudes toward his research. On July 26 Hickman told him he had just been appointed by Vannevar Bush to head a section of the new National Defense Research Committee dealing with powder rockets.

On July 27, at General Brett’s request, Goddard sent three costed plans for developing a takeoff-assist rocket. The most ambitious assumed fifteen more men, a liquid-oxygen plant, an enlarged shop, and 93,500 dollars the first year; the most modest, 25,000 dollars, about his present budget. He ended with a sentence that speaks volumes: no one had more respect than he for liquid oxygen and gasoline, and he would not venture to attempt this work on a smaller scale.

Lightning and the First Flight

On August 1 test P22 gave a flame that pulsed and then weakened; it was stopped. Tony Ornelas had replaced Mauricio Bustamente as handyman. On August 7 Tony spent the night at the tower. During the night of the 7th a thunderstorm broke: lightning struck the tower, with the rocket inside. Tony, sitting in the truck seventy-five feet away, saw a flame at the top of the guy wire and heard a noise so loud he thought the rocket had exploded. It was intact. On the 8th, on the way to the tower, the team got stuck in the mud for an hour and a half near the Pine Lodge road; the wind prevented the test.

On August 9, 1940, the team left the shop at half past four with Esther. The Aldens arrived at six. They waited for the dew and humidity to clear. At about eight test P23 began. The red light followed the white within a second; after two seconds of red light the rocket was released. It rose rather slowly out of the tower, at twenty-four miles an hour, then leaned over almost at once, with no tendency to right itself; its blast vanes, despite a force 2.3 times greater than those of the nine-inch models, had too little effect at that speed. It tipped over in the air, dove toward the ground, and came down almost flat about four hundred feet away. The tanks burst, the liquids mixed and caught fire; there was a strong concussion.

It was the first flight of a pump-fed rocket. It was short, it ended badly, but it showed that the pumps, the turbines, and the gas generator worked in flight. Not the slightest change, Goddard would note, in the appearance, intensity, and sound of the flame, even when the rocket was flying tilted. This power unit, weighing only about thirty pounds without the tanks, produced a jet of about 2,800 horsepower.

On August 11 and 12 the Goddards took two days of rest at Ruidoso. Crossing Hondo they ran into a hailstorm: the hailstones, the size of small peas, piled up in drifts from which one could have made snowballs. They dined at the “College Inn” on chicken served in the basket; Goddard felt there, he wrote, like a mouse in a wastebasket. The following pages are missing from the digital copy of the archives we consulted; the account resumes on August 29, in Washington.

“I Did Not Need Your Sales Talk”

From August 29 to September 13, 1940, Goddard made the rounds of the government offices. On August 29 Major Chidlaw of the Air Corps gave him to understand that no grant had been made and none would be; he advised him to give “a good sales talk” at Wright Field. On August 31, in Philadelphia, Goddard went to the Fels Planetarium to see a show called “Rocket Trip to the Moon” and the eclipse of April 15, 2033. On September 3, in New York, he saw Harry Guggenheim at the headquarters of Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign, where Guggenheim headed the aviation division. Guggenheim took him to lunch at the Yale Club, gave him one of his big cigars, and left him to finish it in the lounge. When he asked whether the cigar was good, Goddard replied that the world was full of flowers and birds of paradise.

On September 4, in Washington, he met the powder specialist Tenney Davis of MIT and showed his films to Hickman and to the Caltech physicist Charles Lauritsen. He called on Admiral Furlong, who seemed willing to consider the broad program of powder and liquid rockets that Thompson and Goddard proposed. On September 6 Furlong brought Goddard together with Richard Tolman and James Conant, two of the leaders of the National Defense Research Committee, and Admiral Bowen. Tolman asked him what he thought of Malina’s work. Goddard replied that it was fifteen years behind his own, but that Malina had done very good work for the time he had spent on it. The same day Vannevar Bush appointed him a consultant to the committee.

On September 7, at Wright Field, he waited an hour and a half before being seen by a civilian employee, then by a lieutenant who told him that jet propulsion seemed for the moment out of favor, because they had had a lot of bad luck with it. On September 9 he finally saw Major Kemmer, head of the experimental division, and his staff. They explained that they needed takeoff assistance because airfields might be shortened by enemy bombing; that what he had might do; and, implicitly, that he should expect no funds.

On September 26 General Brett’s official letter arrived: the Air Corps was deeply interested in his research, but did not feel justified at this time in committing funds to fundamental research on jet propulsion. When his experiments had reached the point where a device could be mounted on an airplane and evaluated, the Army would gladly consider new proposals. In other words: let him do the work at his own expense, and they would see afterward.

On October 1 Goddard wrote Hickman a letter in which anger and sadness mingled. No one at Wright Field had asked him for a single plan; he had had to wait an hour and a half to see a civilian. Yet the Air Corps was funding Caltech and a certain Meyers, who had not yet flown a rocket under its own power. It looked, he wrote, as if someone had convinced them that his results were not practical. And he ended: he hoped Hickman would not think he was simply soured; but after trying to do good work for years, and actually achieving flights before anyone else, it was discouraging to have it implied that nothing worthwhile had been accomplished.

Sources: diary (May–September 1940); R. H. Goddard’s memorandum on the meeting of May 28, 1940 (written January 3, 1945); letters from C. N. Hickman (June 5 and July 26, 1940) and replies (June 9 and October 1, 1940); letters to C. G. Abbot (June 7, 1940), to General Arnold and Senator Walsh (June 9 and 11, 1940), to W. W. Atwood (July 10, 1940); correspondence with H. A. Boushey, H. F. Guggenheim, G. H. Brett (June–September 1940); report of December 23, 1940, on the flight of August 9 — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 32 · 1940 – 1941 The Last Flights

On October 10, 1941, at about five in the afternoon, at Eden Valley, Robert Goddard pressed the release key of his rocket. He had waited all afternoon for the wind to drop. Combustion had started unevenly, then, as he put it, the flame had “taken hold”; the white and red lights had come on quickly; the can had been dropped. The rocket lifted about a foot. But the lines feeding it from the ground did not come away; the lever that was to free them had bent and jammed. Goddard pressed the cutoff keys. The flame went out. The gasoline pump had burned out under the strain. The editors of his papers would add a note of a few words: this was Robert Goddard’s last flight attempt in New Mexico.

“I Dislike All Vegetables”

In the fall of 1940, despite the Army’s refusals, life went on at Mescalero Ranch. On September 30 Goddard wrote a long letter to Harold Tuson, his high school classmate and lifelong friend, who had stayed in Worcester. It is one of the rare letters in his correspondence in which he talks about himself without talking about rockets.

Their vacation, he related, had been eventful. They had spent two days in a cabin eighty miles from Roswell, by a mountain stream, but learned that one of his men in California had just had emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer; they went home to worry. The man recovered. Then they spent four days at the great Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial at Gallup and took many photographs and color films. The dancers, the rhythm, and the chanting, he wrote, took one quite out of ordinary existence. He found it strange that Tuson had had such a hard winter; in New Mexico one looked forward to winter, clear and cool, and he himself welcomed a few clouds, because the sunshine sometimes became a little monotonous.

He spoke of his health with humor. He took vitamin capsules now and then. The best thing, he wrote, was to eat plenty of vegetables; he disliked them all except potatoes, but he made himself eat them. Summer was easier, because they could be replaced by fruit, which nearby California made especially good: pears, peaches, apples, melons, nectarines, plums, tangerines, and strawberries almost all year. In winter there was frozen fish, sometimes as good as in Boston, but not always. And he recalled a Worcester memory: the seats above the clock at concerts, where he felt at ease only when he knew his family would be sitting there.

Consultant

In October 1940 the military situation brightened a little. On October 7 Homer Boushey, promoted to captain, was assigned to Wright Field as head of the jet propulsion project. Hickman reported that he was “one hundred percent” for Goddard, and wanted his help because Goddard was, he said, the only one who knew how to keep a chamber from burning. On October 14 Goddard was elected a member of the Roswell Rotary Club. On October 24 he was appointed a consultant to Section H of Division A of the National Defense Research Committee, unpaid and part time.

On November 3 he replied to the science writer Herbert Nichols of the Christian Science Monitor, who had called him “secretive”: he did not consider himself particularly secretive. His attitude was that of many cautious scientists. His task was to make a rocket rise to a great altitude; until that was done, he avoided public statements that might prove premature. But the subject had such popular appeal that clubs and amateur societies had sprung up all over the world, none of which he had ever joined, and his position had been interpreted as a refusal to play the game.

On November 4 Admiral Furlong invited him to take part in the powder-rocket program the Navy was launching at Indian Head, with Hickman and the Army officer L. A. Skinner, for twenty dollars a day, full time or as a consultant. On November 19, in New York, Goddard and Harry Guggenheim decided that it would be unwise to interrupt the liquid-rocket program: it was in this new field, they thought, that he would be most useful. Goddard would remain a consultant on powders.

From December 1 to 9 he made another trip east, with a head cold. On the 4th he went to Indian Head with Hickman and Captain Skinner, saw the tests, then spent the night at Thompson’s at Dahlgren, where they talked until two in the morning. On the 5th he lunched at Captain Dowell’s with Commander Parsons, then attended an airplane demonstration. The airplane could not take off.

“Without Bitterness Toward Anyone”

On December 11, 1940, he answered Boushey, who had offered to look for other funding, from Lindbergh or others. Goddard declined: Harry Guggenheim had been, and remained, a most generous patron, and it would be unfair to seek money elsewhere without his consent. He therefore had no other course than to continue research on the sounding rocket, without bitterness toward anyone. And he added: he kept the greatest faith in Nell, and was sure she would end up wearing a uniform of one kind or another. They had both, he wrote, given their best that summer and fall, only to reach a dead end. Boushey, he concluded, had earned the right always to find his door open.

On December 27 Hickman told him about the Navy’s drop tests of rocket bombs: he had never doubted the device would work, but he had not expected so impressive a spectacle. At the end of his 1940 diary Goddard copied a sentence from Rudyard Kipling’s memoir, Something of Myself: when your daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously; drift, wait, and obey.

The Ranch Bought

In early 1941 the Goddards bought Mescalero Ranch, which they had been renting since 1930, and had major work done on the house and garden in the spring. On January 12 they went to St. Andrew’s to hear a sermon by the Reverend Frederick B. Howden. The editors of his papers would note that Howden, chaplain of the Roswell National Guard, would leave with it for the Pacific in August 1941, and would die in 1943 in a prison camp in the Philippines.

The team changed. Albert Kisk, Esther’s brother, with Goddard for about twelve years, was to leave in the spring: he had suffered from hay fever for four summers. To replace him Goddard hired a precision machinist, A. P. Freund, who had run the shop of the Iowa medical school for fifteen years, and a young man from Roswell, Lowell Randall, as an apprentice. Guggenheim had insisted that he take on an engineer. After a long search Goddard hired, on two months’ trial, J. A. Folse, an engineer then living in Miami, who had designed exhibits for the Chicago science museum. Folse at first said he did not see how he could be useful, since Goddard had already done ninety percent of the work. Goddard replied that the remaining ten percent was of vital importance: it was reliability, and that was an engineer’s business. Folse started on March 3.

On March 7 Goddard wrote to Thompson that he still seemed to be alone in his enthusiasm for liquid rockets, but that he had a feeling the day was approaching when many would want to jump on the bandwagon. On March 17 he wrote to Atwood, who had told him of grumbling at Clark: the Navy had offered him work, describing him as the outstanding authority on jet propulsion; he hoped his letter would not seem boastful, for the demands of this problem would always prevent him from taking that attitude. On April 5 Clark granted him another year’s leave.

May 8, 1941

On April 21 he complained to an author who wanted to publish one of his photographs: he had seen rival experimenters use his flight photos to illustrate their own work, when they had never themselves flown a rocket. On April 28 Wright Field asked him for a demonstration of his seven-hundred-pound motor. On April 29 he replied to the teacher of a young enthusiast in Salem that if the child had been bitten by the jet-propulsion bug so young, he was unlikely to recover.

On April 30 Esther and the Aldens came to the tower; the wind blew until half past four, then a heavy shower caught them on the way home. On May 1 there had been hail at the tower, and the wind had been strong enough to move the trailer. On the 6th and 7th, more wind. On May 8, 1941, the team left the shop at five. At nine-thirty-seven rocket P31 left the tower. It rose straight for several tower lengths, about two hundred feet, then tilted abruptly and moved away. The new electrical circuit worked: it cut off the motor and released the nose cone with the barograph, then the main parachute, just after the rocket became horizontal. The parachute had barely come out when the rocket hit the ground, flat, which limited the damage. It was the second flight of a pump-fed rocket. Goddard thought the problem came from the sloshing of the liquids in the large tanks, much heavier than those of the nine-inch rockets.

On May 11 he wrote to Guggenheim that if the pump pressure could be raised, the rocket would leave the tower fast enough no longer to fear the wind; they would not be quite so much at the mercy of fate.

“I Wonder Who Is Helping Whom”

In June 1941, in Washington, George Lewis of the NACA confided something to him: the German planes shot down over England had, in the trailing edge of each wing behind the engine, a housing that had clearly held a rocket for assisted takeoff and climb. Lewis recommended to him, as a part-time engineer, a young ensign in the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics in charge of jet propulsion: Robert C. Truax, the same man who, as a midshipman at Annapolis in 1936, had written that he was beside himself with impatience. On June 21 Goddard wrote to Guggenheim a sentence that sums up the situation: he wondered who was helping whom. The Army and Navy were offering him their engineering help, and at the same time coming to ask for his; since neither had worked on liquid rockets, what they needed was fundamental research.

On July 11 Boushey, Captain Moyers, and an engineer, Loedding, flew in from Wright Field at eight in the morning to attend a demonstration. At two in the afternoon the wind ahead of a thunderstorm raised the dust; the squib of the oxygen valve broke; the dust kept the levers from working; the emergency valve cut off the gasoline. On July 14 Boushey wrote from the plane taking him back to Ohio: on landing at Amarillo, the right wheel of their aircraft, supposedly fully developed, had shattered. Perhaps, he added, Nell would not get stage fright for him, since he was almost an old friend of the family. On July 17 he came back with Esther to the tower: test P33 lasted thirty-four seconds, with an average thrust of more than eight hundred twenty-five pounds. That evening Boushey wrote from El Paso that Goddard had no idea of the thrill Nell had given him.

On July 14 Admiral John H. Towers, Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics, offered Goddard the post of consulting engineer to the Navy at twenty-five dollars a day. On July 25 Goddard submitted proposals to the Army and Navy and asked Guggenheim to telephone General Arnold and Admiral Towers. Boushey had advised him to stress four points: they had the only liquid rockets in the United States, and perhaps in the world, since it was not known whether Germany had any; several flights had been certified by the National Aeronautic Association; an Air Corps representative had witnessed a test; and the shop, with its machines, worth forty thousand dollars, was offered to the government along with four skilled mechanics. An officer had confided to him that the institution the Air Corps was funding generously for jet propulsion was ten years behind his results. England, he added, was now asking the United States for help with liquid-rocket propulsion.

On August 3 he took stock for Guggenheim. Building one of these big rockets completely now took more than three months. He regretted, he wrote, that obtaining a spectacular altitude had taken so long, and that so many new devices had had to be invented, so many new problems faced.

“Governed by Science”

On August 10 test P34 failed because of a defective porcelain in the gas generator’s spark plug. Lieutenant C. F. Fischer of the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics arrived in Roswell that same evening. Goddard took him out on the porch, showed him the films of the flights and pump tests, and the next day the shop and the tower. On August 13 he proposed to deliver to the Navy within six months, for 18,000 dollars, a pump-fed motor of eight hundred pounds of thrust for thirty seconds, adapted to aircraft, then an improved version of sixteen hundred pounds.

On August 16 he replied to a correspondent from Lawrence, Kansas, who had written to him about the future of science and humanity. Like him, and like H. G. Wells, Goddard wrote, he hoped the human race would one day be governed by science; to go on with our present policies, made of chance and error, could be disastrous.

On Sunday, August 17, flight test P35 began with the usual ignition explosion, which threw the igniter as far as the fence; the oxygen cut off at once, and the casings blew off. On August 25 Fischer announced that the Navy had accepted the one-year program. He thanked Goddard for the superb portrait of his Nell he had sent him, and wrote that no one was better prepared than he to bring this new child into the world. On August 31 Boushey announced that the Air Corps too was preparing a contract.

On October 7 Harry Guggenheim asked that the foundation’s position be set down in black and white in the contracts: it had offered the government, free of charge, all the facilities and all the experience accumulated over eleven years, and the foundation in no case wished to profit from its contribution to national defense. Three days later, on October 10, 1941, Goddard made the last flight attempt of his life.

On October 11 the team dismantled the eighteen-inch rocket to reuse its parts or store it. On October 13 Goddard wrote to the National Geographic writer: he had been drawn, he said, into the whirlpool of national defense that seemed to be engulfing them all, and he had to suspend flight tests, most probably for a year. The National Geographic article, lacking the great altitude flight that was to crown it, would never appear. Nell, as he had predicted, was going to wear a uniform.

Sources: diary (October 1940–October 1941); letters to H. Tuson (September 30, 1940), to H. B. Nichols (November 3, 1940), to H. A. Boushey (December 11, 1940), to L. T. E. Thompson (March 7, 1941), to W. W. Atwood (March 17, 1941), to H. F. Guggenheim (March–October 1941); letters from R. W. Furlong (November 4, 1940), from C. N. Hickman (December 27, 1940), from H. A. Boushey (July–August 1941), from J. H. Towers (July 14, 1941), from C. F. Fischer (August 25, 1941); report of March 4, 1941; proposal to the Navy (August 13, 1941); letter to M. Kerbey (October 13, 1941) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 33 · 1941 – 1942 Pearl Harbor, then Annapolis

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, at Mescalero Ranch, Robert Goddard was listening to the radio. Japan had just attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. During the day an order arrived: all government suppliers in the Southwest were to have their premises guarded around the clock. That evening Thure Ljungquist came to spend the night at the shop. All the others would take their turn on guard, Goddard included, until a night watchman, Mr. Day, was hired on December 31. Four days earlier, on December 3, Goddard had made the first test of his motor lying horizontal, as it would be under an airplane: six seconds of thrust, and afterward a chamber in perfect condition.

A Square Peg in a Round Hole

Since September 1941 Goddard had been working for two clients at once. The Navy had ordered from him a liquid-propellant takeoff-assist motor for its flying boats; the Air Corps, a power unit of eight hundred pounds of thrust for twenty seconds, weighing at most three hundred pounds empty, for 13,000 dollars. The contracts, however, were slow to be signed. On October 7 Harry Guggenheim had advanced him 7,000 dollars from the foundation so that he could begin. On October 28 the Navy put the deadline off to January 1, 1942.

On December 1, when the Navy contract finally arrived, Goddard wrote to Lieutenant Fischer that it was a square peg in a round hole. The text was designed for a company selling goods to the government at a profit; he was trying to solve a research problem, without profit. Since September 12 he had set up a test stand, rearranged the shop so that a larger team could work there, bought stock, and had parts made. He had spent nearly 9,000 dollars of the foundation’s money and 4,500 dollars on his own promissory notes. He could go no further without being sure of reimbursement. He would like, he wrote, to devote all his worries to the motor instead of sharing them with financial questions.

In November the shop had been enlarged by half to accommodate the government work. The old oil stove had been replaced. On November 22 Thure salvaged the engine and part of the chassis of a 1928 Chevrolet. Goddard wanted to try injecting oxygen into the carburetor of an ordinary engine to give it a boost of power. On the 25th the test succeeded: the engine went from a slow idle to a fast speed, as if the accelerator had been pressed. The idea would become a patent in 1949.

On December 11 Harry Guggenheim wrote that his trip south had been interrupted by the news of war. On his way back north he had stopped in Washington to offer his services, in any capacity, to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Aeronautics. A naval aviator of 1917, he would put on the Navy uniform again.

The Pearl Harbor Hull

On December 23 the Navy shipped to Roswell the stern section of the hull of a PBY, the big Catalina patrol flying boat, to serve as a full-scale mockup. On December 24 Goddard sent the Navy his first monthly report and the signed contract. The editors of his papers would later note a mystery: the copies Goddard kept of his thirty-four reports to the Navy disappeared from his files at Curtiss-Wright two months after his death; and twelve of them cannot be found in the Navy’s own archives.

On January 10, 1942, he wrote to Hickman, who was ill: he ought to rest at regular intervals. And he invited him to New Mexico for a week: he could guarantee that his own headaches were different from Hickman’s, and there was almost always brilliant sunshine; a few days sitting in the sun would do him good.

On February 5 he replied to a young experimenter who complained that many of his tests had failed. It is not easy, he wrote, to tell successful experiments from failed ones: most work that finally succeeds is the fruit of a series of unsuccessful trials in which the difficulties are eliminated one by one.

On February 9 he asked Clark to extend his leave. His work was now a confidential engineering project for the government. He did not know how long it would last. But he was convinced that what he was doing was important for defense, and he considered it his duty, like thousands of others, to do what he could, whatever the personal inconvenience. On February 16 Atwood granted the leave but warned him as a friend: there was a good deal of discontent in the university, and on the board of trustees, about the way the physics department was being run. Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with his wishes, he suggested, to join an institution of pure research?

On February 19 the PBY hull section arrived in Roswell. The Aldens, Howard and Marjorie, who had served as official witnesses at the 1938 flights, volunteered to plot the test curves; Goddard accepted gratefully. On February 21 he wrote to Harry Guggenheim that the hull, judging by the bullet holes, had evidently come from Pearl Harbor. Nothing, he added, would give him more satisfaction than to see it contribute to the inevitable reply.

The same day he answered Atwood. He accepted the leave and promised to say in January 1943 whether he would return to Clark. The question was not simple, he wrote: he too would soon be approaching retirement age. Clark was his alma mater, and Worcester his city; it was a wrench, even now, to contemplate breaking his ties with the university. That same day he also wrote to the meteorologist William Wenstrom, who had sent him his book Weather and the Ocean of Air with kind words about his work: those words had given him a sense of perspective he rarely had. It was like a hard climb, in which one is so busy with what lies directly under one’s hands that one is surprised, on looking back, to find oneself so high.

The Takeoff Motor

The work advanced. On March 14, 1942, test No. 10 involved a variable-thrust takeoff unit. On March 26 Major Dane and the engineer Loedding came from Wright Field to see the installation. On April 1 Goddard agreed, to speed things up, to switch from pumps to a simpler system of high-pressure tanks. On April 13 a new mechanic, Albert Campbell, started. On April 18 Lieutenant Fischer flew in; the next day Goddard drove him to the Aldens’ and to the airport, and they dined at the Nickson with the “Club of Ten” and their guests. On April 27 Goddard, fifty-nine, registered at city hall for the draft, like all Americans of his age.

On May 21 the Navy announced that it would exercise the option provided in the contract: the second phase of the work would be done at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis, Maryland. On May 27 a test gave eight hundred pounds of thrust for fourteen seconds. On June 14 another, seven hundred fifty pounds for twenty-one and a half seconds. On June 27, 1942, test No. 27 gave an average thrust of eight hundred pounds for twenty-two seconds. The ten-pound chamber was intact, without melting or erosion. Velocity efficiency reached 44.1 percent, the highest Goddard had ever obtained. All the conditions of the Army contract were met.

Departure

On June 29 the transfer order arrived. Goddard wrote to Fischer that it was the best news he had had in a long time: he would feel far more useful working with those who were to use the motor. The team began packing at once. That evening Captain and Mrs. Bishop came to rent the house. Goddard and Esther went into town for ice cream.

On July 2 he gave the Roswell Daily Record a deliberately vague announcement: Dr. Goddard and his staff were leaving for the East to undertake special work; they hoped to return to Roswell in a few months; Dr. and Mrs. Goddard regretted leaving, even temporarily, a place where they had been shown so much kindness. He informed the Roswell draft board that his men were following him at the Navy’s request: N. T. Ljungquist, C. W. Mansur, A. P. Freund, Glenn E. Loughner, A. S. Campbell, Lowell Randall, George F. Bode, and Howard Alden, who would later obtain leave from the Military Institute to join the team full time.

On July 4, 1942, Independence Day, Goddard and Esther left Roswell by car at a quarter past one and drove as far as Amarillo. On July 9 they arrived at the gate of the Annapolis station, where they had to wait for an alert to end. Goddard saw a test of the Caltech acid motor there. That same evening, at Fischer’s request, he took the night train to Philadelphia, where he was awakened at ten past three in a blacked-out station; he visited the Navy Yard, then went to New York to see a test, then to Providence, to the torpedo station. On July 12 he met Esther again at Annapolis, on a bench in front of the hotel, and went to see his men, settled in a trailer camp. On the 13th they moved into a house on the hill. On the 14th and 15th the two freight cars of equipment from Roswell were unloaded. On the 16th the machines were installed.

Annapolis

On July 17 Goddard congratulated Harry Guggenheim on his commission in the Navy, with the rank of lieutenant commander. On July 27 the test stand was set up. On July 30 came the first test at Annapolis, before Fischer and Commander Margraff. From then on tests followed almost every day, and Goddard’s diary grew more laconic. The editors of his papers would speak of an impression of haste and pressure, and of paperwork that kept growing.

On August 4 he wrote to his attorney Hawley, on vacation in Vermont, that he would like a couple of breaths of the good Putney air: Maryland’s humidity, which one could cut with a knife, was guaranteed, he wrote, parodying an advertisement, not for years, not for life, but forever.

In August the Curtiss-Wright company, one of the largest American aircraft manufacturers, proposed through M. B. Bleecker that he become its consultant and grant it, after the war, an exclusive license on all his jet-propulsion patents. On August 20 Goddard made a test before Bureau of Aeronautics people, then attended a conference on liquid oxygen in Washington. On August 25 a test of a chamber with twelve oxygen orifices pushed the thrust close to twelve hundred pounds before the nozzle burned through; Lowell Randall called it a magnificent failure. On August 31 Fischer himself worked the control buttons during an eight-hundred-pound test and exclaimed that it was marvelous, truly marvelous.

On September 4, passing through Worcester, Goddard stopped at the Tallawanda Drive house. No one was there. He walked around the garden and ate three russet apples. On September 6 he sketched in his diary two Worcester cupolas, that of the Sloan stable and that of the Ellis house on Main Street; they have since been destroyed.

Sources: diary (October 1941–September 1942); contracts and correspondence with the Navy and the Air Corps (September 1941–June 1942); letters to H. F. Guggenheim (October 1941–July 1942), to C. F. Fischer (December 1, 1941, June 29, 1942), to C. N. Hickman (January 10, 1942), to W. W. Atwood (February 9 and 21, 1942) and reply (February 16, 1942), to W. H. Wenstrom (February 21, 1942), to C. T. Hawley (August 4, 1942); announcement in the Roswell Daily Record (July 2, 1942); letter to the draft board (July 2, 1942) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 34 · 1942 – 1943 On the Severn

On September 23, 1942, on the Severn River off Annapolis, a big U.S. Navy PBY flying boat gathered speed on the water. In its hull, at the rear, Robert Goddard’s liquid-propellant rocket motor had been installed. Goddard himself was aboard the crash boat following the flying boat. On the sixth test of the day, fifteen seconds of thrust were enough: the flying boat took off. On the seventh it took off again, but at the same instant the combustion chamber split open. The shock broke the liquid-oxygen line, and oxygen under pressure spread through the hull. Everything that could burn caught fire: the insulation of the electrical wires, the control box, the fabric of the tail. The fire was put out with carbon-dioxide extinguishers. So ended the first tests of liquid-rocket assisted takeoff of a PBY flying boat.

The Report of September 23

That same evening Goddard wrote a detailed report, which he had three of his men sign: Lowell Randall, Charles Mansur, and George Bode. The document is exemplary in its honesty. It goes through the seven tests one by one. On the first, the motor shut itself off in less than five seconds: a stainless-steel sheet placed above the chamber had heated up. On the second, the flying boat moved at about five knots, and witnesses saw it accelerate clearly during the fifteen seconds of thrust. On the third, the flying boat taxied on the water and the motor ran well. On the fourth, at takeoff speed, the plug closing the nozzle was torn off by the water, and the igniter with it. On the fifth, the motor started and cut off almost at once: Lieutenant Fischer and the station crew thought the safety thermostat, perhaps wetted by spray, had tripped falsely, and they decided to remove it in order to continue. On the sixth, the flying boat took off. On the seventh, the flame showed an excess of oxygen for more than five seconds, then the chamber gave way at the very moment of takeoff.

Goddard drew the lessons unsparingly. The thermostat that had been removed would have stopped the motor in time. The radio link planned between the crash boat and the motor operator aboard, Gunner Gore, had never worked; had it worked, Randall, who was watching the flame from the boat, could have had the test stopped as soon as the suspicious flame appeared. He recommended nine measures, the first of which was a rule: no safety device must be removed before a test. He wanted a thermometer in front of the operator, a carbon-dioxide extinguishing system, an oxygen line of stainless steel that would not become brittle in the cold, a metal tail rather than fabric, and a complete overhaul of the motor every five tests at most.

Since September 22 all his patent applications relating to combustion and jet propulsion had been placed under secrecy orders by the Commissioner of Patents.

Reaction Motors

On September 15 Goddard had gone with Fischer and his wife to New Jersey to visit the shop of Reaction Motors, a small company founded the year before by members of the American Rocket Society, among them Lovell Lawrence and John Shesta. They dined together. These young men, who had started as amateurs, would soon be the first American manufacturers of liquid rocket motors. Goddard would often meet them again.

On October 14 Colonel Dane, the engineer Loedding, and two other Air Corps representatives came to Annapolis to see the test that was to fulfill the Army contract: seven hundred fifty pounds of thrust for twenty seconds. On the 15th the Goddards moved to another house. On the 17th a test reached 1,265 pounds of thrust; on the 20th, between 1,500 and 1,600 pounds. On October 22 a British captain, Lubeck, attended a test. It was decided to reorganize the project, and an engineer, Dr. W. C. House, became its head.

On October 7 Goddard thanked Mrs. Daniel Guggenheim for sending him a book on the history of the Guggenheim fund for aeronautics. He had never really grasped, he wrote, how far that fund had turned modest beginnings into an important industry, nor how much the development of aeronautics owed to her son Harry. It was a satisfaction and an honor, he added, to have been one of those whom Daniel Guggenheim had directly helped.

The Patents

Throughout the war one question poisoned Goddard’s life: his patents. The Navy wanted a two-year contract giving it the right to use all his jet-propulsion patents in return for a royalty. But a clause of the contract allowed it to have them manufactured by any firm it chose. Bleecker of Curtiss-Wright pointed out to him that, under those conditions, the firms that had manufactured his inventions during the war would be in a strong position after the war, whatever his rights. Small companies had already begun to infringe his patents, and he would need, Goddard wrote to Hawley on September 11, a protector strong enough to fight after the war.

He specified that all royalties received during the war would be paid to the Guggenheim foundation, to fund high-altitude research after the war, probably in New Mexico. That might seem altruistic, he wrote; but he was not altruistic enough to let pirates infringe his patents in peace after the war. And he added a rueful reflection: he had thought all the headaches would come from working out the ideas and getting them through the Patent Office; he was finding that the biggest came when one tried to sell them afterward.

On October 29, on Harry Guggenheim’s advice, he engaged a Washington attorney, Clarence M. Fisher, of the firm of Pennie, Davis, Marvin and Edmonds. They spent nearly four hours with the Navy representatives. The negotiations would last throughout the Annapolis period. On December 9 Vannevar Bush appointed him a consultant to Division 3 of the National Defense Research Committee.

Christmas 1942

On December 24, 1942, Goddard stopped work at about half past one. He took a nap, spent the afternoon in the living room, then the evening by the fire with the Aldens. On the radio he heard Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge, the miser of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. On the 25th he opened the presents under the tree: a leather briefcase, a book about Paul Revere, the hero of the Revolution, a bottle of Teacher’s whisky, a card, candy. He read the book about Paul Revere by the fire. Esther and the Aldens went for a walk in the afternoon. The Finches, neighbors, came for turkey. They talked in the living room until eleven. A good day, he noted. On the 26th a test with a four-inch nozzle gave 2,750 pounds of thrust.

Nitric Acid

On January 2, 1943, a nitric-acid motor exploded at the station. On January 4 Goddard sent Lieutenant Warfel, who had succeeded Fischer, an unambiguous note. He refused to take responsibility for this accident, or for any other nitric-acid accident. The spontaneous ignition of nitric acid and aniline, and their toxicity, constituted in his view a danger that did not exist with liquid oxygen and gasoline. Acid motors should at least have the same safety devices he had recommended for his oxygen motors. Yet it was this combination, nitric acid and aniline, that the Navy wanted to develop, because it could be stored a long time without evaporating.

On January 15, 1943, the new contract with the Navy was signed. Goddard was named technical director of a laboratory until June 1943, with the possibility of extension to 1944 or 1945. The contract was retroactive to September 1, 1942. A friend at the Bureau of Aeronautics had told him jokingly that if it was not signed soon, they would have to take up a collection for him. Goddard explained to Guggenheim that it was only because he had finished the first contract ahead of time that he had been able to keep the shop running without a contract. He was allowed to work as a consultant up to ten days a month.

“The Feeling of Being Part of the University”

Relations with Clark deteriorated. On January 23 Atwood claimed the university equipment that was at Annapolis in the Navy’s service; he saw an injustice in it. Goddard carefully distinguished the equipment lent by the Smithsonian, the equipment the Guggenheim foundation had bought for his research, and what he had taken from the physics department in 1930. On April 16 Atwood wrote that he must no longer expect to exercise any responsibility in the administration of the mathematics or physics departments during his absence; the men on the spot must have responsibility and authority for their courses.

Goddard understood that his resignation was wanted. On April 21 he offered it. He did so with regret, he wrote, for the feeling of being part of the university had always been a source of inspiration to him. He thanked Atwood and the trustees for the interest they had so long taken in the scientific ground he was trying to clear; without it, no financial aid could have been used effectively. He hoped that in time the progress of meteorology and jet propulsion would show the value of the results the university had made possible.

On April 27 Atwood replied that he was shocked: he had not asked for his resignation; if that were ever to happen, it would be by decision of the trustees. The letter of April 16 had been recommended to him by the academic council. On May 3 Goddard apologized for his misunderstanding and resumed his status as a professor on leave. The trustees asked that the foundation or the Navy buy Clark’s equipment; in July the foundation would pay 4,600 dollars.

On May 1 a professor at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Charles M. Allen, wrote to return the handshake Goddard had sent him by letter: any man, he said, who goes forward without following the crowd had his respect.

The Lost Voice

In February 1943 Goddard wrote for the Navy an eighty-one-page summary of his research on powder rockets. On February 24 he stayed in bed all day. On Sunday, April 4, he went to Washington with Esther to see the cherry blossoms, then to his old friend Harold Stimson’s, who took them to a place he had nicknamed Cupid’s Grove, on the Potomac. On April 17 and 21 he stayed in bed with a cold; he read a biography of the physicist Willard Gibbs and a history of the early days of aviation in America. On May 23 he went to the Naval Academy chapel with Esther and his stepmother Jennie, and visited the crypt of John Paul Jones, the naval hero of the War of Independence.

The work did not stop. In April small combustion chambers cooled by water injection gave gas velocities of 8,100, then 9,700 feet per second; on April 27, after thirty-two tests in one day, 12,500 feet per second for the oxygen-plus-gasoline combination. On June 1 Commander Warfel saw a new type of rotating pump and declared it a darned good idea even if it did not work. On June 9 Goddard copied a sentence from a book he had just read, Experiment Perilous: one never really solves a problem; one ends by turning away from it and leaving it where it is.

On June 23, 1943, he signed the deed by which he assigned to the Guggenheim foundation half his rights in his rocket patents. Then he went to Baltimore with Esther and was examined by Dr. Austrian, a tuberculosis specialist. They dined at Miller Brothers, near the Lord Baltimore Hotel, and went to the circus. On June 26 the Navy extended his contract to June 30, 1944.

On June 28 he wrote to his friend Tuson that apart from the flu they had had a fairly good winter. But this flu, he related with humor, after settling in every part of his body except his feet, had finally lodged in his vocal cords, which had given him a rather chronic laryngitis. The doctor had told him, in substance, to keep quiet, that is, to talk as little as possible for a while. That was easier said than done.

Sources: report on the PBY assisted-takeoff tests (September 23, 1942); diary (September 1942–June 1943); secrecy order of the Judge Advocate General of the Navy (September 22, 1942); letters to C. T. Hawley (September 11, 1942), to Mrs. D. Guggenheim (October 7, 1942); note to Lieutenant J. S. Warfel (January 4, 1943); correspondence with C. M. Fisher, M. B. Bleecker, H. F. Guggenheim (1942–1943); correspondence with W. W. Atwood (January–May 1943); letter from C. M. Allen (May 1, 1943); letter to H. Tuson (June 28, 1943) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 35 · 1943 – 1944 The Last Migration

At the end of October 1943, in the rented house on Chesapeake Bay, Robert Goddard was writing almost every evening. His diary notes simply that he wrote on notes. On November 1 he finished a long text of seventy-two pages titled The Ultimate in Jet Propulsion. In it he gathered the reflections of a lifetime on the distant future of the rocket, of space travel, and of humanity. He considered, calmly, that the Earth might one day become uninhabitable, when the Sun grows cold, and that humanity would then have to emigrate to other stars. He was sixty-one, and since the spring he had nearly lost his voice.

Tydings-on-the-Bay

On June 28, 1943, Goddard described to his friend Tuson the country where he now lived. It was the first time, he wrote, that they had spent a whole year in what might be called the South, below the famous Mason-Dixon line. Even in midwinter the honeysuckle stayed green, and the holly was as green as the laurel they knew, with red berries on some trees. In the spring they had watched the parade of flowers go by: the pink blossoms of peach and cherry in April, then apple and pear; then dogwood, almost everywhere white in the woods and sometimes pink; then iris and mountain laurel; locust trees with pale yellow flowers; roses covering the house fronts and running along the banks. Some days, when the honeysuckle was in bloom, it was like being in a perfume shop where half the bottles had been broken. Just now it was tiger lilies and hollyhocks. He did not know whether the parade was over, but it had been quite an experience to watch it pass.

They were not used to so many birds. In the desert the robins stayed a week, then left for the mountains when it began to get hot; here they nested near the house with the catbirds. The Goddards were renting a house seven and a half miles from Annapolis, on a road through the woods, in a place called Tydings-on-the-Bay. It was cooler than in town and very pleasant, though a little lonely in winter, when only one or two families remained. The house stood a hundred feet from the shore, on top of a forty-foot bank; on clear days one could see the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay. The best time, he wrote, was evening, when lighthouses could be seen in various places and, if it was calm, one could hear the bell buoy, which sounded like a church bell on a distant hill. There were many small pleasure sailboats, and all the big ships going to or from Baltimore.

They worked, like almost everyone, forty-eight hours a week. Goddard missed the Saturday afternoons of Roswell: that half day, he said, had been enough to put him in shape to rest completely on Sunday; now everything had to be done in a single day. And he concluded, about birthdays, that the best thing was to ignore them: they took care of themselves anyway.

“I Believe I Am Needed”

On June 30, 1943, Goddard went to Baltimore with Esther to consult a throat specialist, Dr. Slack. The doctor told him not to speak at all, to rest his voice completely. On July 8 a test of a chamber open to the air gave a blue flame; Howard Alden exclaimed that it was the most promising thing yet. On July 20 Goddard signed in Washington, with Esther and his stepmother, the license and consulting contracts with Curtiss-Wright.

On August 2 Atwood wrote to him: Goddard’s replacement in physics had received another offer and wanted to accept it; a good teacher could not be kept without prospects. The trustees authorized him to invite Goddard to resume his post. Could he come back on September 13? He must reply by telegram before Thursday. On August 4 Goddard telegraphed: he thought he should stay with the Navy, as he believed he was needed; he therefore resigned, with regret, to help Atwood meet the emergency. The next day he confirmed by letter. He resigned his professorship of physics at Clark University. He was approaching retirement age. And he doubted he could teach as early as September: a cold in the spring had settled in his larynx, and a specialist had told him not to speak above a whisper for about two months.

On August 11 Atwood replied warmly. It had been a great pleasure to have him as a colleague, and his relations with him and Mrs. Goddard would always remind him of some of the pleasantest days of his life. His research, he wrote, had been an inspiration to him. He wished him every success in what had become his life’s work as a scientist, investigator, and experimenter. The same day Goddard went back to Dr. Slack, who was reasonably optimistic. To celebrate, he bought himself some oil paints. On August 12, at five in the morning, he watched three Perseid meteors go by. On September 3 he noted that he had sung at breakfast that morning.

The Boxes in the Cellar

From September 19 to 26, 1943, he made a last trip to Worcester. He had his boxes stored in the cellar and attic of the Tallawanda Drive house, together with the 1926 launching frame. At Clark he collected the jet apparatus he had been working on in 1932–1934. On the 21st he had tea at the Atwoods’ and watched the retreat ceremony of Clark’s military students. Then he allowed himself a few days of vacation in New York with Esther: the Radio City show, For Whom the Bell Tolls, a Tarzan film, Arsenic and Old Lace, Rosalinda. At Tiffany’s he chose a watch for Fischer. At the Museum of Modern Art he noticed a blue painting of the stratosphere, which he judged very good.

On November 2 his old colleague Roope wrote from Clark that he was carefully keeping what Goddard had left in the laboratory: photographic plates, his fishing rod, an air rifle in the cellar, and his grandfather’s bell, whose rim bore a mysterious slot. Goddard replied that he did not know why the slot had been made, unless perhaps to give the bell a slightly harsh tone that would be more easily recognized. Roope also asked for a photograph of him to hang in the laboratory: his students and he often had occasion to talk about Goddard and rockets.

“Research Is Ninety-Nine Percent Failure”

On Sunday, October 24, he listened on the radio to Charles Kettering, the great inventor of General Motors, and noted his words: research is ninety-nine percent failure; there usually has to be a period of intelligent failures; it takes labor and patience; few people would have crossed the ocean if they could have got off in the middle of a storm; once solved, the problem will seem simple. On October 19 he had noted: Anniversary Day.

On December 6 he replied to the WPI alumni association with a humor that concealed some pride. Mark Twain, he recalled, said he never answered letters for six months, by which time he no longer needed to answer them. Thus Time magazine reported that week that the great physicist Irving Langmuir of General Electric was contemplating speeds of five thousand miles an hour in a vacuum tube between New York and San Francisco. This suggested, Goddard wrote, an interesting problem in dates of publication: 1943 minus 1909 equals thirty-four years. It was in 1909 that Scientific American had published his train in a vacuum tube.

The Ultimate in Jet Propulsion

The text of the fall of 1943 was never published in full. The editors of his papers kept only its concluding pages, supplemented by a few passages from his 1918 manuscript, The Last Migration. They are astonishing pages from the pen of an engineer who spent his days adjusting liquid-oxygen pumps.

Goddard explains in them that the most extreme speeds would be obtained by solar energy rather than chemical energy, unless the energy of atomic disintegration became available and controllable. He adds that this assumption might not be warranted. If intra-atomic energy could be released, he wrote, transportation would become comparatively simple, and a large body could be sent out of the solar system, which would protect its contents from meteors. Living beings could then be carried, light and heat being supplied by radioactivity.

He imagined what would follow. One day our race would have to face this problem, when the Sun grows colder, even if, by means of jet propulsion, we managed to move closer to it. The most desirable destination would be a planet near a large sun, or several, where the temperature would be like the Earth’s but the cooling slower, in a region of the sky where the stars are crowded, so that any further migration would be easier. Because of the dangers of meteors, expeditions would have to be sent to all the regions of the Milky Way where new stars are thickly clustered. And with each expedition, as much as possible of all human knowledge should be carried, in as light, condensed, and indestructible a form as possible, so that the new civilization could begin where the old one left off.

To cross the immensities between the galaxies, he imagined a craft launched at very high speed from a base near one of the most distant planets, such as Neptune. The craft would cool to the temperature of space, and its contents would remain motionless and inanimate, except perhaps for an automatic pilot to correct the course and avoid meteors. After intervals so long that a kind of radioactive alarm clock would be needed, the craft would be warmed, the crew revived, and bearings taken. The most uncertain point, he acknowledged, was keeping the crew alive at very low temperature; it was known that protoplasm can remain inanimate for very long periods and withstand intense cold if it is in the granular state. Perhaps suitable beings would have to be evolved over many generations; or granular protoplasm could be sent out of the solar system that would in time produce human beings by evolution.

One can read these pages as science fiction. Goddard wrote them as an engineer taking inventory of the problems. He concluded that the question, however academic it might seem, was nonetheless real. Twenty-five years earlier, in 1918, he had slipped the manuscript of The Last Migration into an envelope marked “Special Formulae for Silvering Mirrors,” deposited in a friend’s safe, with an inner envelope that was to be read only by an optimist.

Christmas 1943

On December 19 he helped Esther make glögg, the Swedish Christmas mulled wine. On the 21st and 22nd he stayed on the couch with a chest cold. On the 24th he worked until half past two, then went to the service at St. Anne’s Church in Annapolis and spent the evening with neighbors, the Nafes. On the 25th he opened his presents, smoked a cigar, and took gifts to the Aldens; the Finches came to dinner; there was a fire in the fireplace and they listened to the radio. On the 27th he sent Harry Guggenheim a check for 10,000 dollars: he was repaying the loan the foundation had made him in 1941 to begin the government work at Roswell.

On February 4, 1944, Homer Boushey, now a colonel, told Goddard that he had seen Harry Guggenheim and told him that Goddard was nothing less than a genius “of a super-special sort.” Guggenheim, he added, agreed.

Quail at Mercer Field

On March 13, 1944, Goddard went to see Harry Guggenheim at Mercer Field, near Trenton, New Jersey, where Guggenheim was stationed. They dined on quail in his quarters, talked at length, and Goddard spent the night there. The next morning Guggenheim flew him to Washington in a Lockheed transport, in an hour, to talk to an admiral about a jet glider project that Boushey wanted to fly to set an altitude record. Then Goddard took the train to Baltimore and went to Dr. Slack’s.

On March 15 he stayed in bed in the morning. The bay at seven looked beautiful to him: blue-gray, with a dark band near the horizon, and a pearly pinkish-gray sky. He wrote to Boushey that he wondered what chance there was that “our friends,” who had high connections in both services, would interfere or try to take over the project.

On March 30 Thure Ljungquist spoke of leaving. March 31 was Esther’s birthday; Goddard gave her a card and an umbrella. He noted that it was an off day. On April 28 he talked to the men about the management of the shop; according to the editors of his papers, he probably told them that Thure was staying on as shop foreman. On Sunday, April 9, he had gone to St. Anne’s Church, then to Bladensburg to see the Sachses; Henry Sachs, his mechanic of 1924, back from a career in government service, was going to join him at Annapolis. With Esther he visited the National Gallery in Washington, where a Monet struck him as very good, and they dined on swordfish at Hogate’s, on the waterfront.

“Hold On to Your Hat”

On April 13 he sent Curtiss-Wright the list of his most important patents and patent applications. He then counted seventy-nine. He classified them: operation and control of rockets; combustion chambers of all kinds, cooled by a tangential film, by sprays, by porous walls; rotating chambers; chambers with reflected detonations; resonance “air-heat” engines; propeller turbines; takeoff acceleration and landing braking; gyroscopic steering. A truly efficient combustion chamber, he acknowledged, had not yet been produced. The editors of his papers would note that two patents on this list, filed in 1942 under the title Control Mechanism for Rocket Apparatus, would play a decisive role in the 1960 settlement with the government.

On May 9 he sent Hawley the description of a transportation system in vacuum tubes, the one from his 1906 story. It was perhaps a little ahead of its time, he wrote, and Hawley had better hold on to his hat if he read much of it. He had so many urgent, very urgent, and merely urgent things that he had had no time to make presentable drawings.

On June 6, 1944, at seven in the morning, he listened to the D-Day radio program, the Allied landing in Normandy, with the ringing of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. On June 7 a vice president of Curtiss-Wright, Robert Earle, was surprised, reading his expense account, that he had spent so little on meals. Goddard replied on June 10 that nothing made one skip meals more than train delays that forced changes in a matter of seconds; he also admitted that years of teaching had accustomed him to living on short rations and left him a novice in the art of filling out an expense account. He promised to mend his ways.

Sources: letters to H. Tuson (June 28, 1943), to W. W. Atwood (telegram of August 4 and letter of August 5, 1943) and reply (August 11, 1943); diary (June 1943–June 1944); correspondence with P. M. Roope (November 1943); letter to H. Taylor (December 6, 1943); “The Ultimate in Jet Propulsion” (1943, published extracts) and “The Last Migration” (January 14, 1918); letters from H. A. Boushey (February 4, 1944), to Boushey (March 15, 1944), to B. Seeley (April 13, 1944), to C. T. Hawley (May 9, 1944), to R. L. Earle (June 10, 1944); autobiography (1927) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. I and III.

Chapter 36 · 1944 – 1945 The V-2

On December 28, 1944, at Mercer Field, New Jersey, Robert Goddard handed Commander Harry Guggenheim, his patron turned naval officer, a table in two columns. On one side, the German V-2 rocket, which had been falling on England since September. On the other, the rocket he had developed in New Mexico from 1930 to 1941. Propellants: liquid oxygen and alcohol; liquid oxygen and gasoline. Feed: centrifugal pumps; centrifugal pumps. Pump drive: a turbine; a turbine. Turbine drive: a small rocket motor burning hydrogen peroxide; a small rocket motor burning gasoline and oxygen. Arrangement, from front to rear: fuel tank, oxygen tank, pumps, turbines and their drive, motor; the same. Stabilization: a pilot gyroscope; a pilot gyroscope. Steering: vanes; air vanes and blast vanes. Motor cooling: an inner layer of fuel; an inner layer of fuel. With the sheet he gave Guggenheim an inscribed photograph of his 1941 rocket.

The Flying Bombs

On June 13, 1944, a week after the Normandy landings, Germany launched its first V-1 flying bombs at London. They were small pilotless airplanes driven by a jet engine of a particular kind, a pulse jet: at the front a grid of flaps opened and closed dozens of times a second to let in air; gasoline was injected and ignited, and the gases escaped through a long tailpipe.

On July 16 Vernon McLaskey, who had worked briefly for him at Annapolis, wrote from a Navy training station: he had just read the description of the German flying bomb in the papers; hadn’t they been pretty close to the right track with the air-shutter idea? On July 19 Goddard replied that the air shutters on the German bomb were interesting indeed, and pretty close. On August 24 he wrote to John N. Wheeler of the North American Newspaper Alliance, who had sent him articles on the V-1 and V-2: the article on the V-2 was largely speculation, and discussing it would touch on confidential matters. One point, however, could be raised: the V-1 engine closely resembled his patent No. 1,980,266, issued in 1934: shutter valves in a fixed grill, fuel injection orifices in that grill, a combustion chamber, a spark plug, a nozzle. He added that it might be better not to say he was the one who had pointed this out, since he was engaged in confidential work; but the patent was in no way secret: anyone could have read it for the past ten years.

On March 1, 1945, his colleague of 1918, Henry C. Parker, by then a patent attorney in Washington, would write that while searching the jet-propulsion patents he had been astounded, to say the least, to find that the Nazis had apparently copied the ideas of his patent in their robot bomb. Since the United States was now making these bombs too, Goddard would be entitled, in his view, to handsome royalties. It was a shame, he added, that Goddard had not been able to interest the government in the device before the Germans took it over. On March 6 Goddard replied that he too felt his patent was close to the V-1; but he did not know what royalties he could expect: all his rocket and jet patents were tied up with Curtiss-Wright, which was not very active in the matter and might turn them back to him sooner or later.

“A Thousand Superdoopers C.O.D.”

In September 1944 the first V-2s struck London. These were no longer pilotless airplanes but true liquid-propellant rockets forty-six feet tall, which climbed more than fifty miles before falling at several times the speed of sound, with no warning sound.

On August 6 the producer of the CBS radio program “We the People” asked him for a comment on self-propelled weapons: he was, he wrote, unquestionably the best-known of all Americans who had made a long study of the subject. He added that he had been sorry to learn, on the telephone, that Goddard had not been well. On August 10 Goddard declined: he would be considerably handicapped in discussing the present situation, so much was confidential; perhaps later, when he was no longer working for the government. The same day he wrote to Abbot, whose resignation as Secretary of the Smithsonian he had just learned of, that Abbot had been a very good friend to him and had seemed to him the very embodiment of the Smithsonian.

On August 20 a postcard arrived from Italy. It was signed by a corporal of the U.S. Army Signal Corps: thanks, Dr. Goddard, for your work on the rocket; please send 1000 “superdoopers C.O.D. to Berlin”; yours for victory. On August 22 Wheeler of the news agency wrote that the Germans had reportedly used the giant V-2 against England, and asked for an interview or an article. It was to this letter that Goddard replied on August 24, speaking of his patent and nothing else.

“Patience Tried”

This imposed silence weighed on him. On June 10, 1944, he had written to the critic Edmund Wilson of The New Yorker, who had just reviewed Willy Ley’s book Rockets. Wilson had written that the first liquid-propellant rocket had been launched in March 1931 by one Johannes Winkler in Germany. Goddard corrected him precisely: Ley himself spoke of the first liquid rocket in Europe, and acknowledged in a footnote that Goddard’s had taken off earlier; so far as was known, the first liquid-rocket flight had been his own, in Massachusetts, in March 1926. Ley, he added, tended to stress what had been done in Germany and to belittle American contributions. Yet most of the pioneer experiments on powder and liquid rockets had been made in the United States, his 1919 paper had contained the first modern theory of the rocket, and almost all the basic patents had been taken out in America. He found it wryly amusing to read that his 1919 paper, published in “happy America,” had been overlooked in the gloom of Europe: Oberth had requested and received a copy from him fourteen months before publishing his own book.

He went on answering those who wrote to him, though. On June 19, 1944, a thirteen-year-old boy from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had sent him the drawing of a spaceship. Your design, Goddard replied, shows good streamlining, but there is a great deal that has to go inside. On June 23 the boy thanked him: his friends and relatives had not believed he would get an answer.

On September 4 he thanked G. Edward Pendray for a vigorous letter Pendray had published in Time magazine. Since 1919, Goddard wrote, he had often been tempted to discuss astronautical matters further but had not done so, chiefly because he had worked on military rockets for the Army in the last war, for the Navy between the wars, and for both in this one. He had so far been able to keep the lid on, even though Ley’s book had tried his patience. Pendray’s letter, he concluded, had touched briefly and beautifully on all the accumulated sore spots.

On September 12 he wrote to Thompson, who had passed on to him questions from an officer, Captain Cover, about propellants: the powders in use were doing excellent service; but it was only a matter of time before materials with greater energy, requiring less pressure, would be sought. The liquid-fuel rocket, he wrote, was of course the answer. On September 13 he told Pendray that he planned to continue rocket research after the war, in New Mexico or elsewhere, even though the future of private research was most uncertain.

Archery

Meanwhile the work went on at Annapolis. On July 3 an aluminum turbine placed directly in the blast of a 350-pound-thrust acid-aniline motor drove the pumps. On July 17 he wrote to Boushey that the Navy had given him two specific, urgent jobs with acid. On July 28 he sent the Guggenheim foundation two checks for 1,500 dollars each: the minimum royalty from Curtiss-Wright for the first half of 1944, on the half interest in his patents he had assigned to the foundation; it gave him great satisfaction, he wrote, to be able to do something, even in a small way, for the foundation that had so generously supported his research.

On September 1 the Goddards moved into the Soper house, not far from Tydings-on-the-Bay. On October 9 a test ran ninety seconds; a three-minute test stopped at two, probably because of the bearings. The next day, October 10, 1944, with new bearings, the acid-aniline motor ran for three minutes and ten seconds, with an average thrust of four hundred pounds, on the seawall at Annapolis, before Navy representatives. Photographs were taken. That evening, after supper, Goddard tried out the new archery set in the Soper house yard, well suited to it: four rounds. The boy who had once shot arrows straight up in Boston and knocked off the neighbor’s spectacles was sixty-two.

On October 19, Anniversary Day, he wrote up a test report, then in the evening read a book titled Timeless Mexico and listened to the radio. On October 23 he replied to the Smithsonian, which was considering reprinting his 1919 paper: an excellent idea, for he kept receiving requests he could not fill. And he suggested that it also publish the results of his New Mexico research of 1930 to 1940. On October 31 William H. Cole, who had taught biology at Clark in the 1920s and now headed the research council of Rutgers University, invited him to join Rutgers after the war.

“The Persistent Man”

On November 6, at the Curtiss-Wright plant in Caldwell, New Jersey, he noted that assisted takeoff seemed to be out for the Army and Navy as well as for civil aviation; it was a V-2-type rocket that now seemed to be of interest. On November 7 he met G. Edward Pendray of the American Rocket Society for the first time, in the lobby of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, and they lunched at the Engineers’ Club. On the 9th Pendray wrote that he had been delighted to meet him and asked for a photostat of his correspondence with Oberth of 1921 or 1922, an important historical point likely to be disputed. On November 14 Goddard sent him Oberth’s letter, noting that, being a New Englander, he had kept the envelope too. He had sent his 1919 paper to everyone who asked for it, until the supply ran out.

On November 23, Thanksgiving Day, Goddard spent the morning at the Bureau in Washington, then went home to dinner with Esther and her mother: turkey, potatoes, peas, cranberry sauce, date pudding, and coffee. He telephoned the Aldens, smoked a cigar, and listened to the radio.

On December 4 Pendray sent him the chapter of his book devoted to him, titled The Persistent Man. Goddard sent it back on December 11 with a few corrections. It was very well written, he told him; Pendray certainly had a gift for presenting the dramatic side of things, a gift he himself lacked. The chapter did not speak only of his work: it was the only one in the book that presented him as a person. In the same letter Goddard announced that, at Pendray’s suggestion, he had written a short foreword for the reprint of his 1919 paper.

That same December 11 he finally sent Roope the photograph Roope had asked for, for the Clark laboratory. Rockets and jets were progressing, he wrote, far faster than they could have dreamed in the 1920s. The first flight at Auburn, where Roope had been timer and surveyor, was at last recognized as the first liquid-rocket flight; and the 1919 paper was recognized as the first sound theoretical work. Roope replied on December 14 that the photograph would have a place of honor on his office wall, that he was glad Goddard’s work was at last being recognized, and that the United States was finally waking up to the vast importance of rockets: apparently, he wrote, “it takes a war to make the obvious discernible.”

“Where the Brakes Are Applied”

On December 15 Goddard wrote to Guggenheim that the Bureau of Aeronautics wanted to keep him at Annapolis for at least six more months, and that there was talk of having him spend part of his time advising Army Ordnance on American developments parallel to the German V-2. That weapon, by all reports, was almost identical with the rocket he had been working on in New Mexico when he switched to war work, only larger.

On December 21 he wrote to Boushey that he had heard nothing from Colonel Trichel of Army Ordnance: there would therefore be no consulting on the American V-2. They could both understand, he added, where the brakes were being applied. As far as he knew, Army Ordnance was aiming at a six-hundred-mile rocket but starting with a forty-mile powder rocket.

For Christmas 1944 Dr. Kronenberg and his wife, neighbors, came to dinner on the 23rd and stayed until half past eleven looking at photographs. On the 24th Goddard slept until half past eleven; in the afternoon Sergeant Gordon and his wife, other neighbors, brought cigars, wine, and a piece of costume jewelry for Esther. On the 25th packages were opened at the tree, Captain Finch and his wife came to dinner, and they listened by the fire, from four to six, to the Elgin radio show.

On December 27, in New York, he dined on the tenth floor of the Engineers’ Club with Pendray, Warfel, Coffman, Colonel Trichel, Lovell Lawrence, and two other members of the American Rocket Society. The society’s board, of which Goddard was a member, had called together some fifteen key people to make it a true national technical organization, bringing in the researchers of California. He watched the lights in the buildings and the snowstorm. At dinner he sat between Trichel and Lawrence. He left at half past eleven. The American Rocket Society would become, in 1963, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The next day, December 28, at Mercer Field, he gave Guggenheim his comparison table. He added an explanation: if the military had done nothing with the long-range rocket in 1940, it was because it was suited to large sizes and long running times, and therefore to long ranges, and the United States had no need for long-range rockets at the time. They lunched on a turkey sandwich, plums, and coffee. The editors of his papers would add that after Goddard’s death the foundation had copies of the inscribed photograph widely distributed among missile people. The rocket in the photograph is now in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“Rabbit Tracks in the Snow”

On December 30, 1944, it had snowed during the night. Driving to Washington in the morning, Goddard noticed rabbit tracks in the snow along the road and across it. “Cute,” he noted. The scenery looked like Christmas cards: pink-purple ice on the bushes, yellow grass in the foreground, snow on the roofs of houses and barns, snow-covered evergreens by the doors. That day he attended a conference with Reaction Motors and Navy officers on interception by jet aircraft: his team would do the pumps, turbines, and gas generator; Reaction Motors, the chambers and controls. He rode back with House, Truax, and Parker. On January 1, 1945, Lovell Lawrence of Reaction Motors came to see the big pumps and gas generator set up that very morning, and proposed that Goddard merge with his company.

On January 3 he wrote to Lieutenant Commander Fischer: the problems were interesting, and quite possibly of immediate application; but he would miss the freedom of peacetime research, where one picks one’s own ground. The same day he wrote to Earle of Curtiss-Wright that Boushey, who had seen the V-2 abroad, had told him it was practically identical with the pump-fed rockets he had flown in New Mexico.

On January 8 a letter arrived from Roswell. Captain H. T. Kelly, an instructor at the New Mexico Military Institute, had learned that he had tuberculosis, and Goddard had sent him a note of encouragement. Kelly thanked him: he had decided he would “lick” the disease; he had learned more, he wrote, from people like Goddard who had “been through it” than from all other sources. The young man the doctors of 1913 had written off was now sixty-two, and it was he who was being thanked for his wisdom.

The National Geographic Bulletin

On January 19, 1945, the National Geographic Society issued a news bulletin written by its writer Kerbey; it was Harry Guggenheim who had suggested that the Society was the best organization to do so. The title: “Germany’s Flying Vengeance Bomb V-2 Follows American Prewar Rocket Design.” Examination of a V-2 that had fallen into Allied hands in Belgium, it said, showed that it was similar to rockets developed in the United States before Pearl Harbor; its mechanical features paralleled those of the American projectile so closely that some physicists believed the Germans might have copied most of the design. The captured V-2 contained all the elements of Goddard’s rocket, arranged in the same order; the only notable differences were alcohol instead of gasoline and a slightly different way of cooling the walls. The bulletin added that the largest American rocket of this type, twenty-one feet long and eighteen inches in diameter, carrying about two hundred fifty pounds of fuel, developed, it was estimated, the power of one of those ponderous locomotives that pull fifty freight cars, and that the V-2 was, in effect, an enlarged version of it, weighing about twelve tons, nine of them fuel.

On January 17 Goddard himself had written to William B. Allen of a Navy pre-flight school: most of the features of the long-range V-2 had been worked out under his direction in New Mexico from 1930 to 1941. On January 24 he was in Schenectady, at the General Electric research laboratory, as an Army consultant on a long-range rocket project named Hermes. Morning and afternoon he talked rockets with Richard Porter, with Irving Langmuir, Nobel laureate in chemistry, with William Coolidge, and eight others; he lunched with them and the head of the department. In April General Electric would want to engage him as a consultant; Curtiss-Wright would not release him.

Sources: memorandum given to H. F. Guggenheim (December 28, 1944); letters from V. A. McLaskey (July 16, 1944) and reply (July 19, 1944); letter to J. N. Wheeler (August 24, 1944); letter from H. C. Parker (March 1, 1945) and reply (March 6, 1945); correspondence with T. Adams, CBS (August 1944); letters to H. A. Boushey (July 17, 1944), to F. A. Collins (July 28, 1944), to A. Wetmore (October 23, 1944), from W. H. Cole (October 31, 1944), to G. Grosvenor (January 26, 1945), from J. N. Wheeler (August 22, 1944); letter to C. G. Abbot (August 10, 1944); postcard from a corporal (August 20, 1944); letter to E. Wilson (June 10, 1944); correspondence with G. E. Pendray (September–December 1944); letters to L. T. E. Thompson (September 12, 1944), to P. M. Roope (December 11, 1944) and reply, to H. A. Boushey (December 21, 1944), to C. F. Fischer and R. L. Earle (January 3, 1945); National Geographic Society bulletin (January 19, 1945); letter to W. B. Allen (January 17, 1945); diary (July 1944–January 1945) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III.

Chapter 37 · 1945 The Last Spring

On the evening of June 2, 1945, in Worcester, Robert Goddard stepped onto the platform at Clark University’s commencement in cap and gown. That morning he had gone to pick up the gown at 1 Tallawanda Drive, the house where he had lived so many years, and had drunk a cup of coffee in the kitchen. President Wallace Atwood, under whom he had worked so long, conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Science. Professor Benjamin Merigold read the citation: nearly every feature of the modern rocket was entirely due to him or had been greatly improved by his work. As early as 1941, the citation added, he had produced a model of a complete rocket of the V-2 type, like the one the Germans had only recently introduced in the war. He was sixty-two. Ten weeks later he would be dead.

A Winter on the Bay

The winter of 1945 was hard on Chesapeake Bay. Usually, Goddard wrote on March 2 to Harold Tuson of Worcester, there was only one snowstorm of about four inches, which lasted two or three days. This year there had been several, and the cold had kept snow on the ground for three or four weeks. The ice in the bay shifted with the wind; some days, from the living-room window, a field of irregular ice could be seen as far as the eye could reach. It looked like pictures of the Arctic.

In the same letter he described his life. Everyone was very busy, but it was routine, and one day was much like another. He worked from eight to noon, then from half past twelve to half past four; in the evening he read, and sometimes listened to the radio. Esther was taking courses at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore: she caught the electric train about one o’clock and usually came back on the one that reached Annapolis at a quarter to ten at night. She had Fridays off and did the marketing on Saturdays; Sunday was quiet all around. Esther’s mother was spending the winter with them and kept things going: without her they could not have kept such a schedule. He saw hardly more than one movie a month. He wished he had time to go to the opera in Baltimore: the year before they had seen Carmen and La Bohème, both superb, but they had come home exhausted.

At Christmas, for lack of gasoline, they had done little entertaining. They had had a small tree; they had saved a few decorations and a string of lights from the year before, and had decorated the mantelpiece with evergreens. The house had a living room forty feet long, all paneled in dark pine. Goddard found it a bit gloomy; Esther liked it very much. It was shaped like a wide U whose broad side faced the bay. He had taken many color photographs of the house and the woods, and also, one day, black-and-white stereoscopic pictures in an old frozen swamp. He explained the technique to Tuson: you take two pictures one after the other from the same spot, moving the camera about three inches to the side for the second.

On February 19 he had bought an old 1936 Chevrolet with forty-seven thousand miles on it, to get to work on the days Esther went to Baltimore; until then he had had to take the car out in the evening to meet her train. All this, he concluded, sounded like a lot of activity but wasn’t really. By half past six he was ready to flop into an easy chair by the fire with a hundred-watt lamp and what he hoped would be a good book. They had thought they might leave on January 1, and perhaps go back to New Mexico; they were staying until July 1. Things changed so fast that it did not pay to plan more than a month or two ahead. In four years they had had one week of vacation.

On Sunday, February 18, he had read a biography of Jules Verne and photographed the snow. On the 21st he noted that his stomach had been bad that night. He stayed in bed until half past one, had milk toast at noon, then went to the shop to write letters. On March 3 he heard the frogs for the first time that spring.

“A V-2, Controlled in Flight”

That March he had been asked to write a general book on jet propulsion and rockets. He drew up its outline, in nine chapters. The first told of the facts and fancies of the early days; the second, of Congreve and the black-powder era; others, of smokeless powder or resonance combustion. The last was titled “Projection to Infinity”: the relation between starting mass and exhaust velocity, already calculated in 1919; the ten to twelve thousand feet per second of exhaust velocity that would be needed for the thing to become practicable; orbits, whose detailed discussion he judged premature; and subatomic energy, its production and control. He would not have time to write this book.

On March 7 he went to Washington by bus. He lunched with Abbot at the Smithsonian, then they went up to talk in the tower room, on the eleventh floor. In the evening he heard a lecture by Pendray and took the bus back to Annapolis. He talked with Esther until five past one in the morning. The next day he wrote to Pendray that he had the gift of making an excellent public address, enhanced by his lively sense of humor.

On March 9 a letter from Atwood arrived from Worcester. By unanimous vote of the University Senate, unanimously approved by the board of trustees, Clark invited him to receive, on Saturday, June 2, the honorary degree of Doctor of Science. On March 15 Goddard replied that he would be highly honored. It would be an additional pleasure, he wrote, to receive it from the hands of the man under whom he had worked so long at Clark and whom he esteemed so highly as a friend.

On March 14 he informed Curtiss-Wright’s patent attorney that one of his applications, Case 58CN, had been allowed. This amounted, he wrote, to a V-2 controlled during flight. The patent would be issued on April 2, 1946, under the title “Control Mechanism for Rocket Apparatus.” Goddard would not see it.

The Attack of March 16

On March 16, 1945, nineteen years to the day after the Auburn flight, he dined in Washington at the Army and Navy Club with Esther, Lieutenant Commander Fischer, and his wife. After dinner he was seized by a severe digestive attack. The Fischers drove the Goddards back to Annapolis. Esther and the Fischers were alarmed, the editors of his papers note.

The work went on. On March 22 he saw a V-2 combustion chamber in a storehouse. The next day he examined its parts. In his diary he copied a sentence from a novel, The House on the Cliff: with nerves and muscles already strained almost beyond endurance, a man somehow squeezes out the last half ounce of effort that means success.

On March 27 he went to New Jersey, to Reaction Motors. On the way Lovell Lawrence offered him a one-fifth interest in the company, with work at Roswell or elsewhere. In the afternoon an oxygen-gasoline gas generator was tried: it blew up, probably because the gasoline arrived first and the spark stayed on too long. On March 28 he got up at a quarter to six to go see Dr. Slack in Baltimore. Back in Annapolis he examined the V-2 pumps: on the alcohol side, a ball bearing; on the oxygen side, a steel shaft running against four bronze blocks, with less than four thousandths of an inch of clearance, lubricated by the liquid oxygen itself. On the 29th he stayed in bed in the morning: his stomach. He slept.

On March 30 the season was far advanced: dogwood, shadbush, pear, cherry, wisteria, and lilacs were in bloom. On the 31st he copied into his diary an admission by an art critic of The New Yorker: he fundamentally did not like Kandinsky’s work, which was another way of saying, of course, that he did not understand it. Goddard added only an exclamation mark in parentheses.

On April 1, Easter Sunday, he went with Esther to the service at St. Anne’s Church. In the afternoon the Nafes came by with their baby, and he went down to the shore with Jack Nafe to look for fossil amber. On April 5, at noon, Esther’s mother had a dizzy spell; Marjorie Alden came out and stayed with her until a quarter to five.

The Big Rocket on Hold

On April 6 General Electric wrote to him from Schenectady: its physicist Richard Porter wanted him as a consultant on the Hermes project, the Army’s long-range rocket, a few days a month for six months. Army Ordnance had obtained the Navy’s assurance that he could be spared to a limited extent. On April 7 an engineer on the project wrote again: since his January visit they had built a small motor of twelve and a half pounds of thrust, using liquid oxygen and alcohol, with the tangential cooling he had explained to them; they would like the designs of his earlier motors.

But his patents and his work were tied to Curtiss-Wright. Goddard could send nothing to another company without its agreement, and he asked Earle of Curtiss-Wright to decide quickly. His main interest, he wrote, remained long-range rockets. On April 26 General Electric gave up: he already had other commitments. Goddard forwarded the letter to Earle with this comment: the letter appeared to end the collaboration with General Electric; so far as he could see, what he had done on the large long-range rocket would have to be held in abeyance. On April 20 he had dined with Esther and Colonel Boushey at Carvel Hall in Annapolis.

On April 16 Atwood had asked him for his principal scientific accomplishments that could safely be mentioned, and told him not to be modest. On April 26 Goddard sent him a list. He had worked on rockets since 1908 and had taken out more than seventy patents or applications. He cited the first mathematical theory of long-range rocket flight; the 1914 patents, which described the expansion nozzle of all modern rockets, the feeding of liquid propellants into the combustion chamber, and the step rocket; the first liquid-oxygen-and-gasoline flight, at Auburn, on March 16, 1926, with Professor Roope among the observers; the powder rockets of 1918, with Hickman and Parker, from which the bazooka-type rockets descended; the 1938 flight with an official barograph; the 1934 patent on the resonance chamber, a principle used in the German V-1; and finally the production in 1941 of a complete V-2-type rocket, of 250 pounds empty, with tanks, motor, centrifugal pumps, turbines, a small rocket-motor turbine drive, and pilot-gyro control of movable air and blast vanes.

On April 27 he noted that he had hated to get up at six thirty-five. It had been decided that his team and equipment would move on July 1 to the Curtiss-Wright plant at Caldwell, New Jersey, where he would continue the Navy work; at Annapolis the paperwork was eating up too much of his time and energy. On April 30 he prepared for his attorney Hawley a patent application on a “vacuum-tube transportation system,” a dream of his student years. In the evening he read Dashiell Hammett and copied a sentence: “The outcome of careful planning always looks like luck to saps.”

“Twenty-Five Years Is Not So Very Long”

On May 1, 1945, he wrote the foreword to the reprint of his two Smithsonian papers, that of 1919 and that of 1936. The American Rocket Society would publish them in 1946 under the title Rockets. The general principles of 1919, he wrote, remained as sound as ever. Then came a sentence in which the whole story of 1920 can be heard: the subject of projection from the Earth, and especially any mention of the Moon, must still be avoided in dignified scientific and engineering circles, even though sending a rocket over long distances on the Earth no longer raised eyebrows quite so high. The best course, he concluded, was simply to repeat the closing paragraph of the 1919 paper, as valid now as then: these developments involved many experimental difficulties, but they depended on “nothing that is really impossible.” And to remember that, from some points of view, “twenty-five years is not so very long, after all.”

He also told, in a single sentence, of the morning at Auburn: those who took part felt a lift of spirit because the rocket had worked, but the distance reached did not seem great enough to warrant calling attention to the event. And he ended with 1941: preliminary flights of the light pump-fed rocket were under way when development was dropped for other, more urgent war problems.

Rest and Sun

On May 4 he stayed in bed and read Tristram. On the 5th, still in bed, he noticed irises nearby, pretty, in two shades of pale lavender or lilac. On the 7th he stayed in bed most of the day. On Sunday, May 13, he corrected notes in the afternoon, then walked with Esther down to the swamp. He heard the frogs, or peepers.

On May 16 he went with Esther to see Dr. Slack in Baltimore, who advised complete rest and as much sun as possible. They lunched at the Garden Tea Room. Back at the shop he watched a spark-plug ignition test. On the 18th a four-hundred-pound chamber was started fifty times in succession: the problem of restarting in flight. At the Navy’s request he was writing in those days a long description of the V-2 pumps. On May 19 he received from Pendray his book, The Coming Age of Rocket Power, with the chapter “The Persistent Man.” On the 20th he sat in the sun. On the 22nd he took a sunbath on the lawn behind the house. On the 24th it was too cool for the sun; he walked and took a nap. That day Esther finished her courses at Johns Hopkins.

On May 30 they were in New York with Esther’s mother, whom they put on a train. In the evening Robert and Esther went to see the musical Oklahoma!: very good, he noted. On the 31st they bought a billfold at Macy’s; he took a nap, and in the evening they went to Radio City Music Hall. Then they took the night train to Worcester. He stayed awake most of the way to Bridgeport.

Worcester, June 2, 1945

On June 1, in Worcester, he stopped at his attorney Hawley’s to mail a patent application on the resonance chamber, then in the evening went to the Atwoods’ reception for the undergraduates. On June 2 he went to fetch his gown at Tallawanda Drive, drank coffee in the kitchen, attended the baccalaureate sermon at Clark in the afternoon, then the alumni dinner, and finally the commencement. He received his honorary doctorate. The citation recalled that he had graduated from Worcester Polytechnic in 1908, that he had received his doctorate in physics from Clark in 1911, and that he had for many years been a valued member of its faculty. It cited the expansion nozzle, the first successful use of liquid propellants, gyroscopic steering, the parachute for instruments, the resonance chamber; more than seventy inventions. Afterward he went back to the Atwoods’ reception.

On Sunday, June 3, he slept until about ten, had dinner with the Woodburys, took the gown back to Tallawanda, then went to Paxton to see Esther’s mother and Al and Bea’s place. His papers keep a photograph of him taken at Paxton in June 1945. In the evening he took the train to New York, then, at five minutes to one in the morning, the train for Baltimore.

He had written a note to the alumni of Clark’s class of 1920, who had also been at the commencement festivities. On June 12 Judge Carl Wahlstrom of that class replied: the fifteen classmates present would have liked the festivities to last long enough to spend some time with him. We consider you sort of a member, he wrote, because, as you said, our new careers started at the same time. Mrs. Goddard too was sort of a member of the class: she had been one of their favorites in 1920. In 1920 Esther Kisk had been the secretary of the president of Clark College.

The Eight Men

On June 6 he prepared the move to Caldwell. He wrote Curtiss-Wright a letter introducing each of the men he was bringing, with the date he had joined: Howard Alden, research engineer, associated with the research since 1938; Thure Ljungquist, supervisor of construction, since July 1931; A. P. Freund, since February 1941; Albert Campbell, since May 1942; Henry Sachs, from August 1924 to February 1931, back in August 1944; L. N. Randall, since February 1941; Charles Mansur, since November 1929; George Bode, since September 1941. They were not simply machinists or members of a test crew, he explained: each had done construction work and designed new methods and equipment. He recalled that all this work, at Clark, in New Mexico, and then for the Navy, had been carried on as a nonprofit undertaking, educational or philanthropic.

The editors of his papers would note that Curtiss-Wright’s throttleable XLR25 rocket engine, which would power the Bell X-2 experimental rocket plane, was a direct descendant of his design. Goddard would not take part in its development.

On June 7 and 8 the gas generator and a seven-hundred-fifty-pound chamber were tried again. On June 9 he stayed in bed in the morning and read a biography of Tesla and the diary of Samuel Pepys. On June 13 Howard Alden announced that he had decided to leave on July 9 for the University of Wyoming.

The Night of June 14

On June 14, 1945, Goddard wrote letters and worked on his patent cases. In the evening he sat on the porch. That night, the editors note, he suffered a severe choking spell. On the 15th he wrote letters until ten, then came back to sit on the porch and read; that day Dr. Slack arranged for him to see a surgeon, Dr. Edwin Looper. On Saturday, June 16, he went with Esther to Baltimore to see Dr. Looper. The surgeon found a growth in his throat and recommended its immediate removal. Arrangements were made for him to enter the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore on Monday, June 18, and to be operated on the next day. Back home, he sat on the porch.

On Sunday, June 17, 1945, he read the papers in the morning. He wrote to Brady of Curtiss-Wright to confirm the two telephone calls Esther had made for him the day before: he would be hospitalized for a week, and out of the running for three or four weeks more. He gave his instructions: Ljungquist would go to the plant on Monday, with Alden if possible; the equipment had to be bought soon so that it could be crated. And he added: this letter authorized Mrs. Goddard to sign for him any documents that could not wait for his recovery. He went to the post office and to the shop to get papers. The Gordons came with Iris at eleven and stayed to supper. He listened to the radio in the evening. Esther’s mother arrived at about eight.

It is the last page of his diary quoted in his papers.

“A Few Months More or Less”

On June 19, 1945, he underwent surgery in Baltimore. On June 23 Harry Guggenheim, who had just heard about the operation from Esther, wrote to him at the hospital: he was sorry Goddard had had to go through this, and looked forward, once he had recovered, to talking with him about his plans and the work he was about to do for Curtiss-Wright.

On July 6 Atwood wrote from Worcester. Clark had heard that the operation had been a serious one and that the convalescence might take time. Atwood reminded him how much he had accomplished, praised a life of creative work and a rare persistence in research, and hoped he could draw real satisfaction from it, while acknowledging that Goddard was a man who looked ahead rather than back. Then came a gentle teasing line: Goddard would always keep his eye on some distant star, Atwood wrote, unless it should be the Moon that had made him famous. He added that he thought the throat trouble had been handicapping Goddard for some time.

On July 27 Guggenheim wrote again. He was distressed to learn that Goddard was still in the hospital under constant treatment. What mattered now, he wrote, was complete rest somewhere and a full recovery; Goddard should stop worrying about jet propulsion or anything else. His experiments had taken many years, the road ahead was long, and a few months more or less would make no real difference. Once his health had returned, they would make a fresh start together toward the great future ahead.

Robert Hutchings Goddard died on August 10, 1945, in Baltimore. He was sixty-two. His papers do not name his illness; the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum speaks of throat cancer, and recalls that he regularly smoked cigars. Four days later Japan announced its surrender: the war that had interrupted his rockets ended without him.

On November 23, 1945, the journal Science published the tribute of the American Rocket Society, which had elected him to its board of directors a few months before his death. The Society called him one of the greatest pioneers of American science and engineering. What it admired most was less his technical talent than his perseverance, his patience, and his courage: he had worked against public skepticism and indifference, with little money and through discouraging technical setbacks, and almost alone he had turned the rocket from a vague dream into one of the most important branches of modern engineering.

Sources: letter to H. Tuson (March 2, 1945); outline of the book “Principles of Rocket and Jet Propulsion” (March 1945); letters to G. E. Pendray (March 8, 1945), from W. W. Atwood (March 9, April 16, and July 6, 1945) and replies (March 15 and April 26, 1945), to W. S. Orton (March 14, 1945); correspondence with General Electric and R. L. Earle (April 1945); foreword to the reprint of the Smithsonian papers (May 1, 1945); letter to J. W. Long (June 6, 1945), from C. E. Wahlstrom (June 12, 1945), to G. W. Brady (June 17, 1945), from H. F. Guggenheim (June 23 and July 27, 1945); citation read by B. S. Merigold (June 2, 1945, after the Worcester Telegram); tribute in Science (November 23, 1945); diary (February–June 1945) and editors’ notes — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vol. III; “Who Was the Original Rocket Man?”, Air & Space Quarterly, no. 19, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution Archives, “Robert H. Goddard: American Rocket Pioneer.”

Chapter 38 · After 1945 Esther and the Memory

On March 16, 1961, thirty-five years to the day after the little flight at Auburn, NASA dedicated at Greenbelt, Maryland, a few miles from Washington, a group of buildings bearing his name: the Goddard Space Flight Center. That day Esther Goddard received, posthumously on behalf of her husband, the medal the United States Congress had awarded him for 1959. Sixteen years had passed since his death. In 1945, G. Edward Pendray would note, few people still believed that rockets would one day become practical, or that spaceflight would become a reality. By 1961 the Soviet Union and the United States had already put satellites into orbit.

What Was Left in the Shop

Shortly after Goddard’s death the Curtiss-Wright company bought all his equipment from the Guggenheim foundation. The throttleable rocket engine developed there, the XLR25, would later power the Bell X-2 experimental rocket plane.

A curious disappearance marked those first months. From September 1941 until his hospitalization in June 1945, Goddard had submitted thirty-four progress reports to the Navy, and seven to the Army Air Forces. Within two months of his death the carbon copies of his thirty-four Navy reports vanished from his files at Curtiss-Wright in Caldwell. The Navy agreed to supply photostats as they were declassified; but twelve of them, those of December 1941 and all of 1942, were inexplicably missing from its own archives. The illustrations for the seven Army reports also could not be found. Despite years of searching at the Navy, at Wright Field, and at Curtiss-Wright, the editors of his papers note, these documents have never been found.

Two Hundred Fourteen Patents

Esther Goddard was her husband’s executrix. She had typed his manuscripts, filmed his flights, shared his Roswell years; she knew his notes better than anyone. With Harry Guggenheim and Charles T. Hawley, Goddard’s patent attorney, she set to work. During Goddard’s lifetime forty-eight patents had been issued to him. Thirty-five others he had applied for were completed and issued after his death. Then Esther, as executrix, applied for and obtained one hundred thirty-one additional patents from the notes, sketches, and photographs he had left. In all, two hundred fourteen Goddard patents. It had become clearly impossible, observers remarked, to design, build, launch, or guide a rocket, or to fly in space, without infringing a Goddard patent.

In 1948 Prentice-Hall published Rocket Development: Liquid-fuel Rocket Research, 1929-1941, the condensation of his New Mexico experiment notes that Goddard himself had made in 1944 and 1945. Esther and Pendray edited it. The book would be reissued in 1961.

The Million Dollars

In 1951 the Guggenheim foundation, to which Goddard had assigned half his rights out of gratitude, and Esther Goddard filed an administrative claim with the military departments: the government was using Goddard’s patents in certain missiles then under development. Years passed. The missile and space programs accelerated, and production for defense and space involved several of Goddard’s inventions. NASA, created on October 1, 1958, joined the claim.

In August 1960 NASA announced the settlement. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and NASA paid Goddard’s widow and the Guggenheim foundation one million dollars for the right to use more than two hundred of Goddard’s patents, covering, the announcement said, basic inventions in the field of rockets, guided missiles, and space exploration. Among them, the editors of his papers note, two patents titled “Control Mechanism for Rocket Apparatus,” drawn from applications Goddard had filed during the war, played a decisive role.

This man, who had lived all his life on a professor’s salary, and then during the war on a salary that never exceeded nine thousand dollars a year, had received in all, from nonmilitary sources, 209,940 dollars for his rocket research from 1917 to 1941: the Smithsonian, Clark, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Research Corporation, the Carnegie Institution, and above all Daniel Guggenheim and his foundation. For the time, and in the depths of the Depression, the editors of his papers estimate, no scientist had ever received as much for a single project before the Second World War.

The Memory

Harry Guggenheim was determined that Goddard should receive the credit due him. He had Goddard’s rockets exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and at the Smithsonian in Washington. Through the foundation he created the Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center at the California Institute of Technology, and aerospace propulsion laboratories at Princeton; in both, the principal professor holds the title of “Robert H. Goddard Professor.” At Caltech, the school of Malina and von Kármán, the leading chair thus bears his name.

His four complete rockets, those of 1926, 1935, 1938, and 1941, were given to the Smithsonian. They are now in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, along with his oil portrait, the wooden box that held the 1916 manuscript, and the rocket in the photograph given to Guggenheim in December 1944. On April 25, 1959, the Roswell Museum opened a Goddard wing; a launching tower was set up there with a replica of the 1940 rocket, and later his shop was reconstructed with its original machines.

The honors multiplied, and only a few will be mentioned. In 1958 Esther received for him a gold replica of the 1926 rocket. In January 1959 she accepted on his behalf the Louis W. Hill Award of the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences. Clark’s class of 1959 gave a bronze tablet for the entrance to the physics building. On June 28, 1960, the Smithsonian presented Esther with the Langley Medal: Goddard was its ninth recipient. On July 13, 1960, the American Rocket Society dedicated a granite marker at the site of the first flight at Auburn, with a tablet by the nearby road explaining its significance. On March 16, 1961, the Goddard Space Flight Center was dedicated at Greenbelt. Each year, on March 16, the National Space Club awards a Goddard trophy, a bronze bust, for the greatest achievement of the preceding year in missiles, rockets, and spaceflight. On March 16, 1965, President Johnson and Congress proclaimed a “Goddard Day.” In 1969 Clark University dedicated the Robert Hutchings Goddard Library, where all his patent files are kept. There are also streets, schools, a power plant at Indian Head, where he worked from 1920 to 1922, a tower at Fort Devens, where he had had to move his tests in 1929, and a stamp issued at Roswell on October 5, 1964.

One more discreet tribute perhaps says more. In the Cathedral of the Pines at Rindge, New Hampshire, an open-air sanctuary of which Esther was a trustee, a piece of petrified wood is set into the lectern. In New Mexico Goddard had used it as a paperweight.

The Correction

On July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 left for the Moon, the New York Times published the ironic correction mentioned earlier: a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere, and the paper regretted its error of 1920. On July 20 two men walked on the Moon. The man who had been mocked for writing that a charge of flash powder might be sent there was no longer alive to see it; Esther was.

The Papers

In 1958 the Smithsonian, the very institution that had given him his first rocket grant in 1917, suggested publishing his papers. Harry Guggenheim agreed that the foundation would finance the work. Esther was named editor in chief, with G. Edward Pendray as co-editor. It took more than ten years to choose, from more than six thousand pages of diaries, notebooks, letters, and reports, what would be published. The Papers of Robert H. Goddard appeared from McGraw-Hill in 1970, in three volumes and some seventeen hundred pages. Almost all of this book comes from them.

In her introduction Esther wrote that it took an almost quixotic imagination to set out to conquer space before the airplane had even become operational, and almost incredible fortitude to devote nearly forty years to the work amid the skepticism of the scientific world and the public. She quoted a saying she found very apt: if scientists could foresee the obstacles ahead of them, they would never begin. And she described her husband as a pioneer of innate naivety, who attacked each obstacle with optimism and believed, year after year, that each difficulty would be the last.

Sources: foreword by G. E. Pendray and introduction by Esther C. Goddard; editors’ notes on the reports to the Navy and the Army Air Forces and on the sale of the equipment to Curtiss-Wright; statement of funds received (note of December 28, 1944); Appendix 1 (patents and the 1960 settlement, NASA announcement of August 1960); Appendix 5 (milestones); Appendix 6 (exhibits, honors, and memorials) — The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, vols. I and III; NASA, “Dr. Robert H. Goddard, American Rocketry Pioneer” (dedication of the Goddard Space Flight Center, March 16, 1961); New York Times, July 17, 1969.