Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History by Andrew Carroll

Author:Andrew Carroll [Carroll, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: United States, Travel, History, General
ISBN: 9780307463999
Google: JDG0K9RiUvwC
Amazon: 0307463974
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Published: 2013-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.