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Summary
Summary
More famous in his day than Einstein or Edison, Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945) was the father of rocketry and space flight, launching the world's first liquid-fuel rockets and the first powered vehicles to break the sound barrier. Supported by Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim, he invented the methods that to this day carry men to the moon and make jet planes fly. Yet he is the forgotten man of the space age, ignored by his own government until Germans demonstrated his principles in W.W.II., when they instead usurped his patents. This is the definitive biography.
Author Notes
David A. Clary, former chief historian of the U.S. Forest Service, is the author of numerous books and other publications on military and scientific history. He has served as consultant to several government agencies and teaches history at Eastern New Mexico University at Roswell, where he resides
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Americans of the WWII generation will probably recognize the name of Massachusetts-born scientist Robert Goddard (1882-1945), who frequently made the pages of American newspapers and magazines in the 1930s with his rocket experiments outside Roswell, N.Mex. Baby boomers and their children, however, may never have heard of this pioneer in the construction of liquid-fuel rockets. Clary, former chief historian of the U.S. Forest Service, attempts to clean Goddard's biography of the varnish applied in earlier biographies supervised by the scientist's widow and his close friend Charles Lindbergh. Goddard emerges here as a paradoxical man who relentlessly promoted his work, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in Guggenheim grants, while shunning offers to collaborate with other scientists. Clary presents a clear and relatively straightforward narrative of his subject's life, but the book is undermined by his inclination to be a detail-oriented documentarian (describing every launch and its outcome) rather than taking the broader view of a historian. If readers skipped the book's last few pages, where the author sums up the significance of Goddard's work for rocket science, they might come away thinking that he was just another New England crank with a flair for self-promotion. Clary also fails to confront directly the question of whether Goddard's drinking habits undermined his work or just his health. Nevertheless, readers who come to this generally well-written biography with some knowledge of Goddard's significance will find much of interest to fill out their knowledge of this complex and fascinating scientist for whom NASA's Goddard Space Center is named. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
No biography of the inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket has appeared since Robert Goddard's widow orchestrated the hagiography This High Man by Milton Lehman (1963). Goddard is not presented in such an idealized fashion in Clary's more objective account. The foibles Clary finds include a few personal proclivities that inhibited Goddard from realizing his full potential. Highly inventive, Goddard was also obsessively secretive, seemingly more dedicated to patenting every contraption he devised than to appeasing his sponsors (Charles Lindbergh among them), who beseeched him for results, usually futilely. Ostensibly a retiring sort, content to be cosseted by the women (mother, grandmother, wife) who managed his affairs, Goddard in fact harbored a big ego. Patiently accreting the facts, Clary illustrates the myriad ways Goddard's self-regard impeded his success: he was a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy. Made more interesting for his imperfections, this well-researched portrait cements Goddard's status as a hero in the history of space technology. GilbertTaylor.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. XI |
| Introduction | p. XV |
| Chronology of Robert H. Goddard | p. XIX |
| Abbreviations Used in Text and Notes | p. XXIII |
| Prologue: Justice for Bob Goddard | p. 1 |
| 1 Anniversary Day | p. 5 |
| Heart of the Commonwealth | p. 6 |
| The Cherry Tree | p. 7 |
| To Fly Among the Stars | p. 14 |
| The Hope of Today | p. 16 |
| 2 Something Impossible Will Probably Be Accomplished | p. 21 |
| As Useful a Unit as Possible | p. 22 |
| The General Notion of a Plan | p. 28 |
| And Everybody Connected with You | p. 33 |
| An Indelible Impression on My Mind | p. 37 |
| 3 Some First-Rate Work Yet | p. 41 |
| He Will Have the Vitality to Pull Him Through | p. 41 |
| The Problem of Raising a Body | p. 44 |
| Take Chances, and Do What We Can | p. 51 |
| It Was Almost Impossible to Turn Him Down | p. 54 |
| 4 Extreme Altitudes | p. 59 |
| I Regard the Scheme as Worth Promoting | p. 59 |
| Can't You See That There's Millions in That Thing for You? | p. 65 |
| Indications are That Spies are active | p. 68 |
| Official Inertia Only Obstacle | p. 73 |
| 5 Professor Has Perfected Invention for Exploring Space | p. 81 |
| I Was Enthusiastic Over the Way I Have Been Treated | p. 82 |
| The Ideal Type of Rocket Is, However, the Liquid-Propellant Rocket | p. 84 |
| A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes | p. 87 |
| She Would Certainly See That He Was Constantly Encouraged | p. 97 |
| 6 This Flight Was Significant, As It Was the First | p. 103 |
| He'd Go Away for a Few Days or a Week and His Classes Would Be Canceled | p. 104 |
| This Has Been Distinctly an American Piece of Work | p. 107 |
| Hope That You Will Be Able to Actually Send a Rocket Up into the Air | p. 112 |
| I Think I'll Get the Hell Out of Here! | p. 119 |
| 7 Nell | p. 123 |
| It is Physically Possible to Send a Rocket to the Moon | p. 124 |
| Until You Get a Good High Flight I Do Not Consider Your Rocket Developed | p. 127 |
| Man in Moon Scared Green | p. 133 |
| In the Field of Aviation They Were Way Beyond Their Time | p. 138 |
| 8 The Great Adventure in New Mexico | p. 147 |
| Leave the Gates As You Find Them | p. 148 |
| Come and See Goddard the Man Whenever You Feel Like it | p. 155 |
| Send Me a Report of Progress So That I Could Have A Little News to Give Her | p. 158 |
| Humanity Among the Faculty | p. 163 |
| 9 He was a Hobbyist | p. 167 |
| I Wonder What is Happening | p. 168 |
| Flying Couple Visit with Dr. Goddard | p. 169 |
| His Many Years of Experience Would Have Had A Strong Influence | p. 176 |
| The Most Thrilling Sight I Have Ever Witnessed | p. 181 |
| 10 Have to Carry on Alone | p. 189 |
| Not Saying it with Flowers, But with Dollars | p. 190 |
| A Billowing River of Fire | p. 199 |
| Problems Regarding National Defense are Beginning to Arise | p. 200 |
| It is a Case of a Square Peg in a Round Hole | p. 207 |
| 11 One of the Pities of the Present War Time | p. 211 |
| Bob Needs Howard More Desperately Than Ever | p. 212 |
| The University Would Like to Have My Resignation | p. 217 |
| Vergeltungswaffe | p. 221 |
| Almost Single-Handed, Dr. Goddard Developed Rocketry | p. 228 |
| 12 We Have Collaborated in Serving Bob's Memory | p. 233 |
| The Patents Were My Primary Goal | p. 234 |
| Everything in Our Power to Inform the Public | p. 242 |
| There Are Still some Tag Ends to Do for Bob | p. 247 |
| He Took Himself Too Seriously | p. 253 |
| Epilogue: Into Fields of the Immortals | p. 255 |
| Notes | p. 261 |
| Bibliography | p. 299 |
| Index | p. 317 |
