Robert H. Goddard Totally Explained

Everything about Robert H Goddard totally explained

Robert Hutchings Goddard, Ph.D. (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945), U.S. professor and scientist, was a pioneer of controlled, liquid-fueled rocketry. He launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926. From 1930 to 1935 he launched rockets that attained speeds of up to 885 km/h (550 mph). Though his work in the field was revolutionary, he was sometimes ridiculed for his theories. He received little recognition during his lifetime, but would eventually come to be called one of the fathers of modern rocketry for his life's work.

Early life and inspiration

Robert Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to Nahum Danford Goddard (1859–1928) and Fannie Louise Hoyt (1864–1920). Robert was their only child to live to adulthood. Another, younger, son was born with physical disabilities, and died not long after birth. When the age of electric power began to take shape in U.S. cities in the 1880s, the young Goddard became interested in science. When his father showed him how to generate static electricity on the family's carpet, the five-year-old's imagination was inspired. Robert experimented, believing he could jump higher if the zinc in batteries could somehow be charged with static electricity. The experiments failed, but his imagination would continue undiminished.
Goddard developed a fascination with flight, first with kites and then with balloons. He also became a thorough diarist and documenter of his own work, a skill that would greatly benefit his later career. These interests merged at age 16, when Goddard attempted to construct a balloon made with aluminum, shaping the raw metal in his home workshop. After nearly five weeks of methodical, documented efforts, he finally abandoned the project; his remarks on it read, "Failior(sic) crowns enterprise." However, the lesson of this failure didn't restrain Goddard's growing determination and confidence in his work.
He became interested in space when he read H.G. Wells's science fiction classic The War of the Worlds when he was 16 years old. His dedication to pursuing rocketry became fixed on October 19, 1899. While climbing a cherry tree to cut off dead limbs, he imagined, as he later wrote, "how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet." For the rest of his life he observed October 19 as "Anniversary Day," a private commemoration of the day of his greatest inspiration.

Education and early work

A thin and frail boy, almost always in fragile health from stomach problems, Goddard fell two years behind his school classmates. He became a voracious reader, regularly visiting the local public library to borrow books on the physical sciences. Later, he continued his formal schooling as an 18-year-old sophomore at South High School in Worcester. His peers twice elected him class president. At his graduation ceremony in 1904, he gave his class oration as valedictorian. In his speech, Goddard included a phrase that would become emblematic of his life: "It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today, and the reality of tomorrow." Goddard enrolled at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1904. He quickly impressed the head of the physics department, A. Wilmer Duff, with his thirst for knowledge. Professor Duff took him on as a laboratory assistant and tutor.
   His social activities continued at Worcester. He joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and began a long courtship with Miriam Olmstead, an honor student who was second in his high school class. Eventually, she and Goddard were engaged, but they drifted apart, and the engagement ended around 1909.
   While still an undergraduate, Goddard wrote a paper proposing a method for “balancing aeroplanes,” and submitted the idea to Scientific American, which published the paper in 1907. Goddard later wrote in his diaries that he believed his paper was the first proposal of a way to stabilize aircraft in flight. His proposal came around the same time as other scientists were making breakthroughs in developing functional gyroscopes.
   Goddard received his B.S. degree in physics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1908, and then enrolled at Clark University in the fall of that year.
   His first writing on the possibility of a liquid-fueled rocket came in February 1909. Goddard had begun to study ways of increasing a rocket’s energy efficiency using methods alternative to conventional, powder rockets. He wrote in his journal about an idea of using liquid hydrogen as a fuel with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. He believed a 50 percent efficiency could be achieved with liquid fuel, an efficiency much greater than that of conventional rockets.
   Goddard received his M.A. degree from Clark University in 1910, and then completed his Ph.D. at Clark in 1911. In 1912, he accepted a research fellowship at Princeton University.

First patents

In the decades around 1900, radio was a new technology, a fertile field for exploration and innovation. In 1911, while working at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., Goddard investigated the effects of radio waves on insulators. In order to generate radio-frequency power, he invented a vacuum tube that operated like a cathode-ray tube.

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