Robert H. Goddard and the power of Imagination

WHEN ROBERT  H. GODDARD, America’s pioneer rocket expert, was growing in Massachusetts, he loved to study things around him to  see how they worked. His father did everything he could to help him learn. He gave him a telescope to look at the stars and planets and a microscope to study plant cells and bacteria. He even  gave him a subscription to Scientific American, which told Robert about the latest discoveries of the world’s great scientists.

Robert Goddard was born in 1882, more than 20 years before the Wright brothers flew their first airplane. Not a strong boy, he was often absent from school because of illness. But when he could  not be in school, he would study on his own. The things Robert learned would wake up his imagination and give him ideas for experiments he wanted to try.

 One time, using a thin sheet of aluminium, he tired to make a balloon. He filled it with hydrogen gas, but the balloon did not rise. The aluminium, of course, was too heavy.

 Another time he tried to make diamonds by heating graphite, which is a form of carbon. This experiment also failed, but Robert was not discouraged.  Even when his  experiment did not work out as he hoped, he always learned something new and went on to try another experiment. His imagination never failed. Robert was especially interested in all kinds of flights. For example, he studied how birds fly and how they soar or change direction quickly. He also studied butterflies to learn how their wings work.

 When he was 16 years old, he read a novel by H.G. Wells called The War of the World’s.this story of Martians traveling millions of miles through space to Earth became one of his favourite books.

 One October day, two weeks after his 17^th birthday, Robert climbed an old cherry tree his back yard in order to prune some of its branches. As he started to work, he began to wonder whether a machine could rise high from Earth and travel through space to other planets. He sat in the tree, looking far into the sky, and tired to imagine how the machine would work.

 That day he told himself that he would devote his life to inventing a flying machine, a rocker-powered machine that would travel far from Earth into space.

 From that time on, he was a very serious student. He learned everything he could about science and mathematics. Using his imagination and the things he learned, he began to experiment with rockets. 

After he became a professor of physic, he spent every minute of his spare time trying to make bigger and better and better rockets. Soon he became known as the man who wanted to fly to the moon.

  Every time he launched a rocket, he learned something new. He was doing things no one had done before. In fact, he was inventing the science we call rocketry

Goodard’s rockets became ever bigger and more and more powerful. Realizing that a rocket would work best if it used liquid as the fuel, in 1926 he launched the first liquid fueled rocket in history.

 One test in 1929 was noisy enough to bring police and news reporters to Goddard’s launch site. He was told not to launch any more of them in Massachusetts.

  So in 1930 Robert Goddard looked for a new place to launch his rockets. He decided to move his laboratory to Roswell, New Mexico. There he set up shop and continued his experiments. His rockets flew higher and longer, helping him learn many things about the science of rocketry.

  Others also profited from Goddard’s experiments. His writings and patents were studied by rocket scientists in other country. The German government in 1930’s believing that rockets could be used as missiles in warfare, began to develop them. The first long-range missiles, the German V-2 rockets that  struck England during World War II, were designed almost exactly like Goddard’s rockets.

 Robert H. Goddards received 214 patents for his inventions. He did not live to see the day when the first person walked on the moon, but he had learned enough to know that his dream of leaving Earth and travelling to the moon or Mars could become reality. It was Robert Goddard’s imagination that showed us the way into space.