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 17th 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.
