Robert H. Goddard

American physicist

• Born: October 5, 1882
• Birthplace: Worcester, Massachusetts
• Died: August 10, 1945
• Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland

As the deviser of the first successful liquid-fuel rocket and as a tireless explorer of the theoretical and practical problems of rocketry decades before the subject gained substantial support in the United States, Goddard stands as the great American pioneer of space travel.

Early Life

Robert H. Goddard (GAWD-dahrd) was born in the central Massachusetts industrial city of Worcester. Nahum Goddard, then a bookkeeper for a manufacturer of machine knives, and his wife, the former Fannie Louise Hoyt, moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts, when Robert was only an infant but continued to spend considerable time at the family homestead until fifteen years later, when Mrs. Goddard’s health dictated their return to Worcester. Various bronchial ailments plagued their only son, who, because of frequent absences from school, was not graduated from high school until his twenty-second year.

Like many boys of his time, Goddard devoured such prototypes of science fiction as Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898). Goddard dated the discovery of his vocation, however, from an experience that, like the story often told of George Washington, involved a cherry tree but a story whose authenticity is not in doubt. On October 19, 1899, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he climbed a cherry tree on the family property and, while in its branches, imagined a spaceship that might travel to Mars. He later claimed that when he descended from the tree, he was “a different boy,” and for the remainder of his life he would solemnly celebrate the date as “Anniversary Day.” Whenever possible, he visited the tree on October 19, as long as it stood.

Single-minded in his dedication to the idea of space flight, he entered the local engineering college, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in 1904. Although he pondered space travel in his spare time, the nature of his collegiate work suggested to his physics professor the likelihood of a career in radio engineering. On graduation in 1908, he continued his study of physics at Clark University, also in Worcester; Clark had been founded as a graduate school and emphasized the natural and social sciences. Goddard taught physics briefly at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but, on receipt of his Ph.D. in physics in 1911, he accepted a research fellowship at Princeton University, realizing that his aptitude for research exceeded that for teaching.

In March of 1913, he learned that he had contracted his mother’s illness, tuberculosis, and physicians gave him little chance to survive. He spent a year at home recuperating, and by 1914, was well enough to conduct a series of experiments with tiny rockets propelled by a smokeless powder of his own devising. The struggle with disease, however, had exacted its toll, leaving him nearly bald in his early thirties. He remained thin and frail throughout his life, and he developed a stoop while relatively young. The young scientist was of average height, his two most prominent facial characteristics being a trim brown mustache and expressive brown eyes under dark brows.

Rejecting offers from Princeton and Columbia, which he feared might not leave him sufficient time for research, he accepted a position as instructor in physics at Clark, an association that would last the remainder of his life.

Life’s Work

The two world wars bounded, and greatly influenced, Goddard’s working life. Of the 214 patents issued to him, the first two came in the summer of 1914, as World War I was beginning. One, for a cartridge-feeding mechanism, turned out to be impractical in rocketry; the second, for a liquid rocket-fuel, presaged his greatest accomplishment, still more than a decade of hard work away from fruition. Whereas science fiction had fired his imagination early, Goddard invariably approached his investigations in a matter-of-fact way and never seems to have wasted time on romantic but scientifically dubious schemes for space travel. At his time, weaponry, not space flight, occupied the American military, and Goddard, aware that the Germans had pursued applications of the Wright brothers’ great invention more quickly than had Americans, and anxious that they not take the lead in rocket development, wrote to the U.S. Navy about his experiments. Although he provoked some interest, President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of American neutrality discouraged research in military rockets.

Furthermore, despite his success at sending his tiny powder rockets nearly five hundred feet into the air over Worcester by 1915, Goddard had not yet developed a suitable liquid fuel. When his university salary proved inadequate to support his research, he obtained a five-thousand-dollar grant from the Smithsonian Institution, and by the fall of 1918, he had devised a rocket that was capable of being fired from a trench and of delivering a payload three-quarters of a mile away. In November, he demonstrated his rockets at the Army’s proving grounds at Aberdeen, Maryland. Impressed that these rockets outperformed existing trench mortar, the Army agreed to appropriate money for production. A few days later, however, Germany surrendered. It would require another global conflict to revive high-level interest in Goddard’s rockets.

Returning to his first love, the goal of space travel, Goddard, under the auspices of the Smithsonian, published in 1919 a treatise explaining how rockets might ascend to the moon. This work, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes , brought him unwelcome publicity as an eccentric professor, and references to him in the popular press as “moon man” stung this serious investigator. He was fortunate in his academic affiliation, however, for Clark granted him leaves of absence when necessary, and his work proceeded steadily. Between 1920 and 1923, he conducted experiments at the Navy ordnance facility at Indian Head, Maryland. Back in Worcester in 1923, he was appointed director of laboratories at Clark in addition to his professorship. Goddard took time out, in 1924, to marry Esther Kisk, who proved a devoted helpmate; after his death his widow would spend years editing his voluminous papers.

On March 16, 1926, on a farm in nearby Auburn, Goddard achieved his greatest success. The ten-foot rocket he sent up that day traveled for only two and one-half seconds and flew only 184 feet. His sponsor at the Smithsonian, Charles G. Abbot, was not impressed, for Goddard had talked in terms of hundreds of miles, and this rocket had attained a maximum altitude of forty-one feet. In retrospect, however, this short flight looms as momentous as that of the Wright brothers’ airplane twenty-three years earlier at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. This first successful flight of a liquid-propellant rocket established the feasibility of the spectacular space ventures that Goddard did not live to see.

His experiments having outgrown New England pastures, Goddard received the assistance of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, whose 1927 transoceanic flight had earned for him international fame. In 1929, Lindbergh talked philanthropist Harry Guggenheim into granting Goddard fifty thousand dollars for research on a larger scale. This largess enabled Goddard to spend much of the following decade at Roswell, New Mexico, improving his rockets. Clark issued another monograph on his work to date in 1936, but not until after his death would his major publication, Rocket Development: Liquid-Fuel Rocket Research (1948), appear. Unlike Hermann Oberth , his younger German contemporary, who independently achieved results comparable to Goddard’s, the Clark professor shunned publicity and avoided joint projects with other scientists. As a consequence, he spent the latter part of his career laboring in obscurity while Oberth’s work led directly to the V-1 and V-2 rockets of World War II.

During the war, Goddard worked for the Navy in Maryland but found the required teamwork uncongenial. As the war dragged on, declining health and the knowledge that German rocketry was outdistancing that of the United States seized Goddard, and the American government’s decision to concentrate on atomic research left him in a military backwater. In May of 1945, a few weeks after Germany’s surrender, a physician detected a growth in Goddard’s throat. Despite two operations at the University of Maryland Hospital in Baltimore, Goddard continued to fail. On August 10, 1945, America’s rocket pioneer died; his body was returned to Worcester and buried on August 14 the day of Japan’s surrender.

Significance

Assessing Goddard’s achievement later that year, Science magazine credited him with investigating virtually every principle vital to the theory and practice of jet propulsion and rocket guidance. Nevertheless, most Americans did not know him until the early 1960’s, when the successes of the American space program provoked interest in its historical background, and publications describing Goddard’s life and work began to appear.

When his story was told, it was often with an emphasis on the solitariness and obscurity of his endeavors. His biographers have tended to depict him as a lonely hero, obliged to endure at first scorn and later neglect. Historians of rocketry and space travel, however, have pointed out the extent to which he imposed his plight on himself. Retiring by nature, Goddard appears to have been driven further inward by the facetious tone of early journalistic accounts of his research. He conducted his experiments in a secretive and possessive manner, sharing his discoveries with only a few trusted assistants. Although a true scientist, Goddard evinced an inventor’s interest in protecting his work by patent much more often than a scientist’s desire to share his discoveries with fellow scientists in scholarly monographs. Pursued by both professional and amateur societies in his field, he generally remained aloof. As a result, it is likely that he fell behind other researchers in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

One of Goddard’s biographers has noted that his brown eyes could radiate warmth and friendliness at times and turn cold and austere at others. Many anecdotes testify to his congeniality when at ease and among friends, but he seems to have been a man who coveted and cherished his professional isolation. Whatever the explanation of his proprietary attitude toward his work, he was a true pioneer in rocketry. He made original discoveries in many aspects of his subject, producing innovative igniters and carburetors, pumps and turbines, gyroscopic stabilizers and landing controls, jet-driven propellers and variable-thrust engines. His ceaseless dedication and the thoroughness of his research and testing complemented his sheer brilliance. Robert H. Goddard’s legacy, so little recognized at the time of his death, is now manifest in the space age.

Bibliography

Bainbridge, William Sims. The Spaceflight Revolution: A Sociological Study. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976. Useful for its systematized information about the personal characteristics of space pioneers and for its insights into how and why the movement succeeded, this study stops short of explaining the often puzzling pattern of Goddard’s professional behavior.

Braun, Wernher von, and Frederick I. Ordway III. History of Rocketry and Space Travel. Rev. ed. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. This well-illustrated volume gives careful consideration to Goddard’s achievements in relation to those of earlier and later theorists and practitioners. Contains a five-page chronology of Goddard’s rocket tests from 1915 to 1941.

Clary, David A. Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age. New York: Hyperion, 2003. Straightforward narrative of Goddard’s life, exploring and discussing not only his accomplishments but also the character flaws that hampered his success.

Dewey, Anne Perkins. Robert Goddard: Space Pioneer. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962. A short, popular, illustrated work, based on diaries and interviews with the scientist’s widow. This book will serve the purposes of those seeking an intimate portrait of Goddard at home.

Goddard, Robert H. The Papers of Robert H. Goddard. Edited by Esther C. Goddard and G. Edward Pendray. 3 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970. Meticulously assembled from thousands of manuscript pages, this work is a highly competent chronological account of Goddard’s career in his own words. Indispensable to the serious student of Goddard’s life and work.

Lehman, Milton. This High Man: The Life of Robert H. Goddard. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963. Easily the best-written and most thorough of Goddard biographies. Gives some attention to the scientific context in which Goddard worked. Does not interpret Goddard but supplies most of the important facts in a well-constructed and readable narrative. The standard life until someone plumbs the wellsprings of his character.

Stoiko, Michael. Pioneers of Rocketry. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974. For readers wishing a profile of Goddard, this book offers the chance to compare his career with those of four other pioneers, including Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth.

Tyson, Neil deGrasse. “Fueling Up.” Natural History 114, no. 5 (June, 2005): 18-25. Explains how dreams of space exploration moved closer to reality in the 1920’s after Goddard was able to get a small liquid-fueled rocket engine off the ground for three seconds.

Winter, Frank H. Prelude to the Space Age: The Rocket Societies, 1924-1940. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. The best source for Goddard’s relations, or lack of them, with others who shared his interests. Suggests that Goddard’s work would have been less often misunderstood and misinterpreted had he cultivated such relationships.