Robert H. Goddard

He was a thin, frail boy, almost always ill — stomach trouble, pleurisy, colds, bronchitis — and he fell two years behind his classmates in Worcester. On October 19, 1899, at 17, he climbed a cherry tree to cut dead branches and came down decided. He wrote later that he was a different boy descending than he had been going up, and that existence had at last seemed purposive. He marked the date privately every year for the rest of his life and called it Anniversary Day. He graduated from South High as valedictorian in 1904, took a physics degree at Worcester Polytechnic in 1908, and a master's and doctorate at Clark by 1911. In 1913 tuberculosis nearly finished him and permanently weakened his lungs.

Two patents issued in 1914 — one for a multistage rocket, one for a rocket burning liquid propellant — contained most of what came afterward. Then the Smithsonian monograph of 1919, a newspaper editorial that turned him into a joke about high-school physics, a flight lasting 2.5 seconds at Auburn, Massachusetts, in March 1926, and more than a decade of firings on the flats outside Roswell, on Guggenheim money Charles Lindbergh had gone looking for. BriefHistory carries that record and the space age it seeded. The question left here is why he worked the way he worked.

The tuberculosis left him expecting a short life, and he spent it refusing to let anyone watch. Frank Malina came out from Caltech in August 1936 and got little beyond what was already in print. Theodore von Kármán wrote afterward that the trouble with secrecy is that a man can go in the wrong direction and never find out. The cost landed on the other side. George Sutton, who joined Wernher von Braun's American team in the late 1940s, said that he and his colleagues had not heard of Goddard at all, and would have saved time if they had — the Germans and the Soviets held copies of the patents, and the U.S. Patent Office had withheld rocket patents through the war. Von Braun's people had read him. The Americans building on von Braun had not.

Throat cancer was diagnosed in 1945. He kept working, able to speak only in a whisper, and died in Baltimore on August 10 at 62. Esther Goddard then did what he had not finished: she sorted the papers and secured 131 further patents in his name, bringing the total to 214. NASA named its Greenbelt center for him in 1959, the year Congress voted him a gold medal. In 1960 the armed forces and NASA settled the infringement claims for a million dollars, then the largest such settlement the government had paid, half of it to Esther. On July 17, 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched, The New York Times printed a correction.

Robert H. Goddard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• U.S. Patent 1,102,653 — multistage rocket patent
  Filed before anyone had flown one 1914
• U.S. Patent 1,103,503 — liquid-propellant rocket patent
  Gasoline and liquid nitrous oxide 1914
• A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes book
  The Smithsonian monograph with the moon calculation at the back 1919
• First liquid-fueled rocket flight invention
  Auburn, Massachusetts. It rose 41 feet and travelled 184 feet in 2.5 seconds. 1926
• Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development book
  The last substantial thing he published while alive 1936
• Variable-thrust rocket engine for the Navy invention
  Ancestor of the engine that powered the Bell X-2 1942

• October 19, 1899 aged 17 Climbs a cherry tree at 17 and decides what he will do He observed the date every year afterward and called it Anniversary Day.
• 1913 aged ~31 Tuberculosis nearly kills him and permanently weakens his lungs He worked from then on expecting a shorter than average life.
• 1914 aged ~32 His first two rocket patents are granted
• June 21, 1924 aged 41 Marries Esther Christine Kisk, a secretary in the Clark president's office She photographed and filmed the tests and kept the accounts.
• March 16, 1926 aged 43 Flies the first liquid-fueled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts His diary entry on the event was almost comically flat.
• 1930 aged ~48 Moves to Roswell, New Mexico, on 100,000 dollars of Guggenheim money Charles Lindbergh had gone looking for the backing on his behalf.
• August 1936 aged 53 Frank Malina visits from Caltech and is told almost nothing Von Kármán wrote that secrecy lets a man go the wrong way and never learn it.
• 1942 aged ~60 Moves to Annapolis to build jet-assisted takeoff engines for the Navy His wife feared the damp climate would finish his lungs. It did.
• August 10, 1945 aged 62 Dies of throat cancer in Baltimore at 62

• Charles Lindbergh 1902–1974
  Aviator who made the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927. funded through
• Wernher von Braun 1912–1977
  German-American aerospace engineer who led the development of the Saturn V rocket that took humans to the Moon. read and copied by
• Neil Armstrong 1930–2012
  Astronaut who commanded Apollo 11 and became the first person to set foot on the lunar surface. made the next step possible
• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. inventor he was measured against
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. popularized the field he opened