Goddard, Robert Hutchings

Goddard, Robert Hutchings, 1882–1945, American physicist and rocket expert, b. Worcester, Mass., grad. Worcester Polytechnic Institute (B.S., 1908), Ph.D. Clark Univ., 1911. From 1914 he was associated with Clark Univ., becoming a professor of physics in 1919. Goddard designed and built early high altitude rockets. In 1926 he completed and successfully fired the world's first liquid fuel rocket. He developed the first smokeless powder rocket, the first practical automatic steering device for rockets, and innumerable other rocket devices. He was one of the first to develop a general theory of rocket action and to prove experimentally the efficiency of rocket propulsion in a vacuum.

Bibliography

See his papers ed. by his wife, Esther C. Goddard (3 vol., 1970).

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Goddard, Robert Hutchings

(born Oct. 5, 1882, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 10, 1945, Baltimore, Md.) U.S. inventor, regarded as the father of modern rocketry. He received his doctorate (1911) from Clark University, where he taught for much of his career. In laboratory work there, he proved that thrust and consequent propulsion can take place in a vacuum and was the first to develop a rocket engine using liquid propellants (static tested in 1925). In 1926 Goddard successfully launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket (gasoline and liquid oxygen) from a farm in Massachusetts. In 1935, having relocated his testing site to New Mexico, he was the first to send a liquid-fueled rocket faster than the speed of sound. He patented the first practical automatic steering apparatus for rockets, developed staged rockets designed to gain great altitudes, and developed the first rocket-fuel pumps, self-cooling rocket engines, and other components of a propulsion system designed for space exploration. Much of his work anticipated that of Wernher von Braun in Germany but was ignored by the U.S. government until after his death at the end of World War II.

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Goddard, Robert Hutchings 

Born Oct. 5, 1882, in Worcester, Mass.; died Aug. 10, 1945, in Baltimore. American scientist and a rocket pioneer.

Goddard graduated from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1908. In 1914 he began working at Clark University, where he was a professor from 1919 to 1943. He served as director of research for the Bureau of Aeronautics of the United States Department of the Navy from 1942 to 1945. Goddard began to work with problems related to the development and use of rockets in 1907. Between 1914 and 1940 he received 83 patents for inventions in rocket technology, and after 1945 an additional 131 patents were registered in his name from archival materials. He began experimenting with hydrocarbon and oxygen liquid fuel in 1920 and bench-testing liquid-fuel rocket motors using oxygen-ether fuel in 1921. In Worcester in 1926, Goddard for the first time publicly launched a liquid-fuel rocket. The fuel was liquid oxygen and gasoline. In the following years he developed and tested a number of experimental liquid-fuel motors and rockets. A crater on the far side of the moon has been named after Goddard.

WORKS

A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. Washington. D. C, 1919.
Liquid-Propellant Rocket Development. Washington, D. C, 1936.
Autobiography of Robert Hutchings Goddard, Father of the Space Age. Worcester. 1966.

REFERENCES

Lehman, M. This High Man: The Ufe of R. H. Goddard. New York.1963. (Bibliography.)
The Papers of R. H. Goddard. vols. 1–3. New York. 1970.