Word: rockets
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Born in 1882, Goddard was a rocket man before he was a man at all. From childhood, he had an instinctive feel for all things pyrotechnic; he was intrigued by the infernal powders that fuel firecrackers and sticks of TNT. Figure out how to manage that chemical violence, he knew, and you could do some ripping-good flying...
...student and professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and later at Clark, Goddard tried to figure out just how. Fooling around with the arithmetic of propulsion, he calculated the energy-to-weight ratio of various fuels. Fooling around with airtight chambers, he found that a rocket could indeed fly in a vacuum, thanks to Newton's laws of action and reaction. Fooling around with basic chemistry, he learned, most important, that if he hoped to launch a missile very far, he could never do it with the poor black powder that had long been the stuff of rocketry. Instead, he would...
...nearly 20 years, Goddard's theories were just theories. When he'd build a rocket and carry it out to a field, it never flew anywhere at all. When he'd return to Clark, fizzled missile in hand, he'd be greeted by a colleague asking, as was his habit, "Well, Robert, how goes your moongoing rocket?" When he steeled himself to publish his work, the Times made him wish he hadn...
Finally, all that changed. On March 16, 1926, Goddard finished building a spindly, 10-ft. rocket he dubbed Nell, loaded it into an open car and trundled it out to his aunt Effie's nearby farm. He set up the missile in a field, then summoned an assistant, who lit its fuse with a blowtorch attached to a long stick. For an instant the rocket did nothing at all, then suddenly it leaped from the ground and screamed into the sky at 60 m.p.h. Climbing to an altitude of 41 ft., it arced over, plummeted earthward and slammed into...
...rockets are hard to hide, and as Goddard's Nells grew steadily bigger, the town of Worcester caught on. In 1929, an 11-ft. missile caused such a stir the police were called. Where there are police there is inevitably the press, and next day the local paper ran the horse-laughing headline: MOON ROCKET MISSES TARGET BY 238,799 1/2 MILES. For Goddard, the East Coast was clearly becoming a cramped place to be. In 1930, with the promise of a $100,000 grant from financier Harry Guggenheim, Goddard and his wife Esther headed west to Roswell, N.Mex., where...