From Dream
to Destiny
100 years ago, Robert H. Goddard put humanity aboard a rocket ride to the future
Photographs by Steve King
As a boy, Robert Goddard would climb into the cherry tree in his yard and gaze into the night sky. He didn’t wish upon the stars, but instead envisioned how to reach them, like the characters in his favorite H.G. Wells novels. Years later, in his high school commencement address, he told his fellow graduates, “The dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”
On March 16, 1926, Goddard, now a Clark-trained scientist, launched a liquid fuel rocket into the sky from the frozen ground of his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. The rocket flew 41 feet into the air and landed 184 feet away, traveling for 2.5 seconds.
They were 2.5 seconds that changed the world.
Goddard had met his dream head on. Just four decades after that launch in Auburn, his pioneering experiments would help put astronauts on the moon and inspire generations to consider the possibilities of interplanetary travel. He’d removed the “fiction” from science fiction and made a defiant leap into the cosmos, the destination endless.
In the following pages, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Goddard’s historic launch with a gallery of artifacts housed in the Clark University Archives and Special Collections. They are items, most of them worn and weathered, that reveal a brilliant and churning mind.
There were no cherry trees in the Roswell, New Mexico, desert where Robert Goddard relocated to send his primitive rockets into the sky. But in a larger sense, that Worcester tree where he perched at night had roots that stretched all the way to those western sands and beyond. The promise he made to himself in the branches of that tree kept him grounded even as it lifted humanity skyward.
In 1959, Robert Goddard was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest U.S. civilian honors, for his pioneering work in rocket development (this is the Archives’ bronze reproduction of the original). The medal expresses appreciation for distinguished achievements and contributions, beginning with its first recipient, George Washington, and including honorees who reflect a vast range of accomplishment and sacrifice, from George Gershwin to Rosa Parks to Mother Teresa.
The efforts to put humans into space have been amply recognized: The crew of Apollo 11 and NASA’s “hidden figures” mathematicians are medal recipients.
“It’s appalling how short life is and how much there is to do one would like to do. We have to be sports, take, chances, and do what we can.”
—Robert Goddard
This early gyroscope of Goddard’s is worn and nicked and probably still bears traces of his DNA. While launching a liquid-fuel rocket into the sky is the scientist’s most renowned intellectual feat, figuring out how to steer it once it got there may have been his most overlooked.
Goddard experimented obsessively with gyroscopic technology; in 1907, he published “The Use of the Gyroscope in the Balancing and Steering of Aeroplanes” in Scientific American, and in April 1932, he conducted a brief test in which a rocket’s flight path could be primitively—but successfully—controlled. Goddard’s early technologies were foundational to the sophisticated systems that guide today’s spacecraft, planes, and seagoing vessels.
“Maybe by working patiently but not long at time you may turn out some first-rate work yet.”
—W.F. Magie, Head of Princeton’s Palmer Physical Laboratory,
to Robert Goddard
Several health ailments kept young Robert Goddard housebound for much of his childhood, but he used the quiet time to become a voracious reader.
One of his seminal influences was H.G. Wells’ science fiction classic The War of the Worlds, which set the Worcester boy’s imagination afire with the possibilities of interplanetary travel. Goddard never forgot the author’s impact on him and later wrote him a fan letter, which elicited a handwritten response from Wells:
“Thanks for your friendly letter. It’s the sort of greeting we appreciate—from people like you.”
“Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express-train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.
It looked almost magical as it rose, without an appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.’ ”
—Robert Goddard, recounting his historic rocket launch
Robert H. Goddard Collection, Clark University
Launch frame
One of Goddard’s early launch frames—fitted together from pipes and joints—is shown reassembled in the Goddard Library. From his Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, Goddard sent the first liquid fuel rocket 41 feet into the air and 184 feet from the frame that sat in the grass.
The rocket flew for 2.5 seconds; a brief but historic journey.
“He was generally looked upon as being slightly but harmlessly mad, with his absurd ideas of design rockets that could travel to the moon as an initial step toward his ultimate objective, Mars.”
—Hugh L. Kennleyside, M.A. 1921
Robert H. Goddard Collection, Clark University
“Robert Hutchings Goddard — Father of the Space Age”
An artifact may travel a great distance to reach its final destination in a university collection. But 238,857 miles (477,714 miles round-trip) through the void of space?
That was the journey of a credit card-sized book titled Robert Hutchings Goddard — Father of the Space Age, the autobiography of the rocket pioneer and long-time Clark professor. The leather-bound tome with gold-leaf edging was the first book ever flown to the moon.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin actually had brought two copies of the book without thinking to inform NASA, but he later confirmed they had accompanied him to the moon aboard Apollo 11. He gave one copy to Robert Goddard’s widow, Esther, who donated the book to Clark’s archives.
The book is framed with an American flag and an astronaut’s shoulder patch also taken to the moon.
Notebook
Robert Goddard began keeping a diary in 1898, and he didn’t stop writing until his death in 1945. His research notebooks burst with detailed accounts of his ideas, observations, inspirations, and experiments, some entries accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations of rocket components and their interactions.
He and Esther took care to have his notebook pages notarized—Goddard was intensely protective of his inventions and wary of the theft of his intellectual property by competitors in Germany and Russia.
Robert H. Goddard Collection, Clark University
While the prose that flowed from his pen tended toward the technical, he sometimes hinted at the poetic.
In an entry reflecting on his historic 1926 launch, he imagined the rocket describing its own brief, wobbly flightpath: “I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.”
“My husband felt that he was a very fortunate man. He was doing precisely what he wanted to do most in all this world.”
—Esther Goddard
Liquid-propellant rocket motor
This motor of Dr. Robert H. Goddard is from about 1930. Just a year earlier, he’d launched the first liquid-propellant rocket to carry scientific instruments (an aneroid barometer and thermometer).
The rocket flew to 90 feet but crashed, the noise and resulting grass fire creating a public sensation. It was reported that the publicity led to Goddard’s rocket work coming to the attention of aviator Charles Lindbergh, who connected him with the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics.
Robert H. Goddard Collection, Clark University
However, in a 2011 interview with Clark Magazine, astronaut Buzz Aldrin insisted that his father, Edwin Aldrin Sr., Clark class of 1915 and a former student of Goddard’s, made the fortuitous introduction of Lindbergh to Goddard.
Robert H. Goddard Collection, Clark University
A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes
The title is hardly dramatic, but the ideas expressed between the worn covers of this 1919 edition of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections were, for their time, electric.
While Robert H. Goddard had been writing about the possibility of a liquid fuel rocket as early as 1909, this essay served as both a significant refinement of his theories and a request for funding of his rocketry experiments—the start of a decades-long sales pitch to deep-pocketed benefactors, nonprofit institutions, and the federal government.
Goddard found an early fan. “I believe the theory is sound, and the experimental work both sound and ingenious,” wrote Charles Abbott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
“It seems to me that the character of Mr. Goddard’s work is so high that he can well be trusted to carry it on to practical operation in any way that seems best to him. I regard the scheme as worth promoting.”
Robert H. Goddard Collection, Clark University
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