Robert Goddard, Rocket Pioneer
He Invented the First Liquid-Fueled Rockets
An American inventor before his time, Robert Goddard invented liquid fueled rockets in 1926.
Robert Goddard, an American scientist, invented and launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926. It only made a short flight, and obtained a speed of about 60 miles per hour. Within a few years Goddard would be launching rockets reaching speeds over 500 miles per hour and traveling over 2000 feet. This was a significant accomplishment, but received little notice since the British had been building black powder military rockets capable of traveling several miles since the early 1800s - such as the rockets mentioned in The Star Spangled Banner.
A few experts took notice, and Goddard’s work was especially noted by a young German, Wehrner von Braun, who would eventually immigrate to the United States and be instrumental in the Cold War’s Space Race. Among Goddard’s original inventions that would become integral parts of later rockets are the pumps and devices for feeding fuel, propellant concepts, and instruments for monitoring and measuring a rocket’s flight path.
Goddard’s work is the direct forerunner of space travel, satellite technology, and many military missiles. He was considered a quack by many in his own time, and his dream of eventually traveling to the moon seemed like pure science fiction, right out of Jules Verne. He seldom gets more than an honorable mention in the history of rocketry with Chinese fireworks, and “the rocket’s red glare” of the British rockets grabbing the headlines, but Goddard deserves to be remembered as an original thinker of great capabilities, and is an inventor worthy of closer study.
As for his country which failed to capitalize on his revolutionary invention, and had to later import German scientists for the job? There was the Great Depression and political turmoil, the New Deal, and then WWII. America was changing into a country where billions of dollars for defense would not evoke a blink of an eye, but in 1926 there were still those who thought excessive federal budgets and spending were against the Constitution. The coming years would change that, for better or for worse. Perhaps Goddard was a dreamer who was ahead of his time in more ways than one. His particular brand of genius could not prosper in a nation where the profit motive ruled private spending, and government spending was intentionally limited. It may be that that America was truly the greater nation, but the Goddards of today do not lack for funding, however esoteric their work. Perhaps liquid-fueled rocket technology was one of those technological leaps whose time was bound to come, and Goddard’s contribution would have found another to make it, but to have done so much with so little funding or recognition makes his accomplishments all the more impressive.
