Read Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Online
Authors: Andrew Carroll
Tags: #United States, #Travel, #History, #General
“On the afternoon of October 19, 1899, I climbed a tall cherry tree and, armed with a saw which I still have, and a hatchet, started to trim the dead limbs,” Goddard later wrote of his epiphany. Historical anecdotes involving cherry trees tend to be apocryphal, but this one at least is taken from a primary source—Goddard’s autobiography. “It was one of the quiet, colorful afternoons of sheer beauty which we have in October in New England,” he went on to relate, “and as I looked towards the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended for existence at last seemed very purposive.”
“Unfortunately the tree is gone,” Barbara Berka tells me as we’re standing in front of Goddard’s old house on Tallawanda Drive, “but the home is the original.” Barbara, a Worcester resident and nationally recognized expert on Goddard, knows the current owner and was able to secure permission for us to come by.
“It’s big,” I say. Not ostentatiously so, but I wouldn’t define the white clapboard colonial as modest, either.
Barbara points to a corner window and says, “There’s the second-floor room where Robert was born.”
Robert Hutchings Goddard came into the world on October 2, 1882, and, after the family moved to neighboring Roxbury for several years, they came back to this house when his mother required treatment for a nearly fatal case of tuberculosis. Goddard also suffered from a host of illnesses, causing his father to pull him out of high school. Young Robert occupied his time conducting homemade science experiments (an explosion here and there rattled his parents, but no lasting damage was done), flying kites, sky-gazing through a telescope, and reading stacks of books. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells were favorites.
Goddard went back to school in 1901, graduated as the valedictorian, and then enrolled in Worcester Polytechnic Institute. During his senior year at WPI he submitted an article, “On the Possibility of Navigating Inter-Planetary Space,” to
Popular Science Monthly, Scientific American
, and
Popular Astronomy
. All three rejected it. After attending WPI he earned his master’s degree and Ph.D. at Clark University, also in Worcester. In 1912 he taught physics at Princeton while spending his nights theorizing about rocket propulsion. His teaching came to an abrupt halt a year later when Goddard came home after catching tuberculosis. His doctors predicted he’d be dead within two weeks.
Instead, during his convalescence he completed the two patents (1,102,653 and 1,103,603) for liquid-fueled, multistage rockets that would revolutionize space travel and influence rocket design to this day.
Shooting large objects high into the air was not, Goddard would have been the first to admit, a novel idea. Fireworks date back a thousand or two years (no one knows exactly when), and in the thirteenth century, Chinese warriors launched lance-tipped bamboo stalks and other projectiles packed with gunpowder at invading Mongols—who, impressed, created and unleashed their own “fire arrows” while marauding through Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. By the 1800s
virtually every major army was employing some type of crude missile in battle, and U.S. soldiers of course were on the receiving end of the “rockets’ red glare” in September 1814 when British forces pounded Baltimore’s Fort McHenry.
In November 1918, Robert Goddard himself demonstrated to top Army brass at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland a shoulder-held “rocket-powered recoilless weapon” that would enable an individual soldier to blow up a tank or blast through bunker walls. World War I ended days after Goddard’s presentation, so the military shelved his invention. (Twenty-three years later, a talented young engineer named Lieutenant Edward Uhl was tasked by a special ordnance unit to revive the idea. After troops finally got ahold of the M1 rocket launcher, as it was officially called, they nicknamed it “the bazooka” due to its shape and the hollow
thwump
it made when fired.)
Early on, Goddard paid for much of his research out of his own pocket. A $5,000 grant from the Smithsonian in 1917 floated him for two years, but by 1919 he had resumed teaching at Clark to pay the bills. On January 11, 1920, the Smithsonian published reprints of Goddard’s
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes
, outlining in sober, technical prose how multistage “cartridge rockets” could escape Earth’s atmosphere and reach the moon.
Only if Goddard had insisted that the lunar surface were made of Vermont cheddar could he have provoked more ridicule from U.S. and foreign media.
The Graphic
, a well-respected British weekly, blasted Goddard’s idea as demonstrably preposterous for several reasons. First, to achieve the necessary thrust for the roughly 240,000-mile journey, the rocket would disintegrate before even leaving the atmosphere. Second, since the planet Earth is hurtling through space at the fantastic speed of 67,000 miles per hour, there’d be no possible way to accurately line up a moon shot. This would be like firing a bullet from a jet plane to hit a cannonball whizzing through the air. And if in Goddard’s fantasy universe these and other impossibilities could be miraculously overcome, the whole effort would be pointless because the rocket could
never return to Earth in one piece, so there’d be no scientific data to be gathered.
The Graphic
’s editorial was a gentle, condescending pat on the head compared with the wallop Goddard received from the
New York Times
on January 13, 1920. “That Professor Goddard with his ‘chair’ in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution,” the newspaper wrote sarcastically,
does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react—to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
The idea of a rocket propelling itself through space is what the
Times
found most laughable:
After the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.
Some of Goddard’s colleagues at Clark also thought he was a few planets short of a solar system, and one professor delighted in asking him whenever they met in the halls, “Well, Robert, how is your moon-going rocket?” Humiliated, Goddard was reluctant to publicize himself or his theories ever again.
He nevertheless hunkered down and continued his research in and out of the lab. “One day Goddard came into Clark after a rainstorm and walked down the corridors still holding the umbrella over his head,” Barbara tells me, emphasizing how absentminded he’d become.
Goddard did allow for one “distraction”; since 1919 he’d been
courting Esther Kisk, the tall, shy blue-eyed secretary for Clark University’s president. Goddard was initially drawn to her beauty and intelligence, but what sealed the deal, they both later joked, was that she could read his almost indecipherable scrawl. The couple married in June 1924.
Two years later, after endless experiments testing powder- and liquid-based propellants, calculating nozzle dimensions to maximize thrust efficiency, burning self-oxidizing fires in vacuum tubes to ensure that booster engines would indeed function in an oxygen-deprived environment, and trying out different-sized combustion chambers and motors, Goddard was finally ready to bring three-dimensional life to his one-dimensional blueprints.
On March 16, 1926, he trudged through the snow-crusted fields of his aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, and at 2:30
P.M.
launched a ten-foot liquid-powered metal tube into the air. Later that night Goddard wrote in his diary: “It rose 41 ft, & went 184 ft, in 2.5 seconds.” The next day he added, “It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.’ ”
Other attempts, using larger frames, failed, and three years passed before Goddard’s next historic liftoff. On July 17, 1929, he built the first rocket to carry a payload. Packed into the rocket’s 11½-foot body was a thermometer, a camera, an aneroid barometer, and a parachute. None of them ultimately performed their respective duties, but Goddard was tickled that the rocket flew twice as high as its 1926 predecessor.
Aunt Effie’s neighbors did not share his excitement, and while hunting around for the scattered pieces of his creation, Goddard heard sirens off in the distance. Moments later a patrol car pulled up, followed by ambulances (there’d been reports of a plane crash) and two journalists tagging along to investigate what all the commotion was about. “[You’re] the moon-rocket man,” one reporter realized, sniffing a scoop. “How close did you get this time?” It was exactly the sort of attention Goddard loathed. Several days later the Massachusetts fire
marshal branded Goddard a public menace and prohibited him from conducting any more rocket tests in the state.
Through his contacts at the Smithsonian, Goddard was granted access to a patch of federally owned property at Camp Devens in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, to continue his experiments. And while the newspaper accounts predictably painted him as a local laughingstock, they caught the attention of one admirer who believed Goddard was a visionary genius. “Esther,” Goddard told his wife at dinner that night, “I had an interesting call from Charles Lindbergh.”
“Of course,” she said. “And I had tea with Marie, the Queen of Romania.”
The world’s most famous aviator was sincere in his desire to help, and Lindbergh used his connections to secure for Goddard a $100,000 grant from the business tycoon and philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim.
With a staff of assistants, Goddard set up shop on a sixteen-thousand-acre ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, where a stable climate and sprawling desert free of prying reporters and noise-sensitive neighbors made for ideal conditions. The dry, warm air also kept his dormant tuberculosis in check.
Launch after launch, Goddard’s rockets got bigger, sailed higher, and became more advanced. His first major Roswell flight climbed 2,000 feet in the air at 500 miles per hour, and a year and half later he sent up the world’s first rocket stabilized by an internal gyroscope.
On April 20, 1938, Goddard and his team gave their first public demonstration. Officers from the New Mexico Military Institute, who were serving as official witnesses, watched in awe as Goddard’s rocket flew, from their perspective, what looked to be more than a mile (or 5,280 feet) into the sky. Goddard reported the actual height to be 4,215 feet.
Also in 1938 came sad news from Massachusetts. A massive hurricane had barreled down on Worcester and destroyed something of great personal value to Goddard. Taciturn as always, he recorded in his
diary two short but sorrow-filled sentences: “Cherry tree down. Have to carry on alone.”
At the outset of World War II, Goddard traveled to Washington to offer every branch of the armed forces full use of his rocketry patents and research. They all rebuffed him.
Years later the Navy did enlist his assistance on a peripheral project dealing with jet-assisted variable thrust engines, but by then German engineers, using slave labor from concentration camps, had bounded far ahead of the Allies in rocket production. They built the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, the V2, in 1944, and more than three thousand of these 14-ton behemoths rained down on cities throughout Great Britain and Belgium, killing 7,000 civilians. At the helm of the undertaking was Wernher von Braun, one of 350 former Nazi scientists rounded up after Germany surrendered and sent to America as part of a secret U.S. government program dubbed Operation Paperclip. Von Braun eventually led the team that built the Saturn V booster rockets for the Apollo 11 moon mission.
Goddard died from throat cancer on August 10, 1945, less than a week before World War II ended. His patents and experiments continued to influence von Braun and NASA engineers, and to this day every multistage, liquid-fueled rocket is based on Goddard’s designs.
After Barbara Berka and I spend some time walking around Goddard’s old home, we drive several miles away to see the Robert Goddard Monument, which wasn’t unveiled until May 12, 2006. Barbara was instrumental in getting the Worcester memorial built, and the eight-paneled polygonal structure features a ten-foot-high stainless steel rocket standing side by side with the American flag. Barbara wrote the accompanying text on each panel, and Clark University and WPI helped with funding. I ask Barbara if NASA chipped in, too.
“No,” she says.
“I guess they did name the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland after him.”
“They did that as part of a patent-infringement settlement!” Barbara
says. “NASA had been using many of Goddard’s inventions without permission, so Esther had to sue. She won a million dollars and an agreement from NASA to name the Center for her husband. She ended up giving most of the money to the Smithsonian because they believed in him from the start.”
Barbara, a retired science teacher who serendipitously got involved in the Goddard Memorial Association back in 1998, can’t understand why Goddard is so underappreciated considering his contributions to the space program and society at large.
“When I speak at schools, I make a point of telling the students how much their lives are influenced by Goddard,” she says. “Along with his more than two hundred patents, you have all of the spin-offs from the space program.” These include everything from conveniences like scratch-resistant lenses, the DustBuster, and Tempur-Pedic foam mattresses, to more critical innovations such as GPS, self-righting life rafts, and flame-retardant fabrics.
NASA’s crowning triumph, of course, wasn’t a particular invention so much as an event in the summer of 1969 partially inspired by Goddard’s foresight. Throughout the late 1960s, America had been reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, race riots, Vietnam War protests, and an overall sense that the country was splitting apart at the seams. Then, on Sunday, July 20, at 10:56
P.M.
eastern standard time, astronaut Neil Armstrong hopped off the
Eagle
lunar module and was followed nineteen minutes later by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, becoming the first human beings to walk on an extraterrestrial surface.