Launching Rockets

The Story of Robert H. Goddard

- Joseph Taylor

THE CLEAR AFTERNOON of October 19, 1899, outside Worcester, Massachusetts, burst with autumn color. Seventeen-year-old Robert “Bob” Goddard was scaling a homemade ladder to prune a spindly cherry tree. As his gaze shifted skyward, the possibilities of the coming twentieth century seemed to float in front of him.

While home ill with bronchitis, Bob had been reading newspaper installments of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. In this science fiction novel, Martians journey to Earth in steel cylinders shot from a giant space gun. How fantastic would it be to travel to the Martians’ world! Bob thought. What might a spaceship that could take humans to Mars look like? How would it work?

After climbing down from his perch, Bob kept on dreaming of space travel. “I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended,” he always remembered, “for existence at last seemed very purposive.”

Born on October 5, 1882, Bob had been fascinated by science since he was five years old, when he discovered that he could generate electric sparks by shuffling his feet on a rug. Learning that electrical power could be stored in a battery, Bob took apart an old-fashioned battery jar. Finding a zinc rod inside it, he waved the rod over his head while shuffling his feet outside, trying to produce enough electrical energy to jump a fence. Though this experiment failed, he was startled when his mother told him to be careful. “Sometime it might work,” she warned, “and then you’ll go sailing away and might not be able to come back.” As a teenager, Bob experimented with turning graphite—a form of carbon—into diamonds. Rather than making him rich, his tube of chemicals exploded, sending jagged pieces of broken glass flying.