7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

Robert Goddard

(b. Oct. 5, 1882, Worcester, Mass., U.S.—d. Aug. 10, 1945, Baltimore, Md.)

R

obert Hutchings Goddard was an American professor

and inventor generally acknowledged to be the father

of modern rocketry. He published his classic treatise, A

Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in 1919.

Early Life and Training

Goddard was the only child of a bookkeeper, salesman,

and machine-shop owner of modest means. The boy had a

genteel upbringing and in early youth felt the excitement

of the post-Civil War Industrial Revolution when

Worcester factories were producing machinery and

goods for the burgeoning country. From childhood on he

displayed great curiosity about physical phenomena and a

bent toward inventiveness. He read in physics and mechan-

ics and dreamed of great inventions.

In 1898 young Goddard’s imagination was fired by the

H.G. Wells space-fiction novel War of the Worlds, then

serialized in the Boston Post. Shortly thereafter, as he

recounted, he actually dreamed of constructing a workable

space-flight machine. On Oct. 19, 1899, a day that became

his “Anniversary Day,” he climbed a cherry tree in his

backyard and “... imagined how wonderful it would be to

make some device which had even the possibility of ascend-

ing to Mars... when I descended the tree... ,” he wrote

in his diary, “existence at last seemed very purposive.”

Goddard’s fascination with space flight and the means

of attaining it continued into his college years at the

Worcester Polytechnic Institute. In an assigned theme,

“Travelling in 1950,” he was also intrigued with the notion

of “the fastest possible travel for living bodies on the

earth’s surface” and projected a plan for travel inside a steel