Robert Hutchings Goddard was a futurist. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 5, 1882. He was the son of a machinist and his father was known for his brilliance with machinery and tools. The Goddard’s moved from Worcester to Boston while Robert was just an infant, because his father went in half and half on a local machine tools shop. In Boston, is where the young Robert Goddard spent his youth as an only child, and most of his younger years were spent alone at home due to his mother’s illness with tuberculosis.
Robert would not see his family’s hometown of Worcester again until he was seventeen in 1899. Much of his life was spent as an ill child (Spangenburg, 10), and he was an average student with an aversion to mathematics. Illness kept him out of school entirely in that autumn of 1899, and by this time Robert had only completed his freshman year of high school. Although he was unable to spend a lot of time within institutional walls, the young Goddard was not without a strong yearning to learn--at least to learn science. Much of the time he spent sick at home sick was consumed reading the Scientific American, or books from the library both science and science fiction novels—-especially H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, a novel he would re-examine often in later years (Burrows, 32).
Robert Goddard found happiness while doing his chores and often used found this time for relaxing. Like many young seventeen year olds, the time was spent daydreaming and this was the case on the 19th day of October 1899. Little did the young man know that this entry in his diary would change his entire life:
“As I looked toward the fields in the east I imagined
how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale if sent up from the meadow at my feet. . .It seemed to me that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by virtue of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path. I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive.” (Yost, 145)
This new idea was known as the linear-force-from-eccentric-rotation, and although it was only a daydream of the young man, it was the spark that would ignite Goddard’s unendin...
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...f his research, the inventor was able to accomplish his goal of creating a rocket capable of flight, and his design would later reach the stars. Furthermore, had his work been sponsored by the Armed Forces after the First World War, the space race would have not been such a challenge for the United States (Yost, 144). Dr. Goddard is still revered and remembered as the Father of Modern Rocketry.
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Furthermore, if we look at the distinguished Scientist Isaac Newton and his acclaimed laws of gravity we can understand some of the thinking tools he used. Mr. Newton’s imagination and inspiration was a key player during the scientific revolution era. “Legend has it that, at this time, Newton experienced his famous inspiration of gravity with the falling apple.” (Bio.org, 2017)
Literature and film have always held a strange relationship with the idea of technological progress. On one hand, with the advent of the printing press and the refinements of motion picture technology that are continuing to this day, both literature and film owe a great deal of their success to the technological advancements that bring them to widespread audiences. Yet certain films and works of literature have also never shied away from portraying the dangers that a lust for such progress can bring with it. The modern output of science-fiction novels and films found its genesis in speculative ponderings on the effect such progress could hold for the every day population, and just as often as not those speculations were damning. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein and Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis are two such works that hold great importance in the overall canon of science-fiction in that they are both seen as the first of their kind. It is often said that Mary Shelley, with her authorship of Frankenstein, gave birth to the science-fiction novel, breathing it into life as Frankenstein does his monster, and Lang's Metropolis is certainly a candidate for the first genuine science-fiction film (though a case can be made for Georges Méliès' 1902 film Le Voyage Dans la Lune, his film was barely fifteen minutes long whereas Lang's film, with its near three-hour original length and its blending of both ideas and stunning visuals, is much closer to what we now consider a modern science-fiction film). Yet though both works are separated by the medium with which they're presented, not to mention a period of over two-hundred years between their respective releases, they present a shared warning about the dangers that man's need fo...
Deadly and helpful, science is a dual-edged sword. Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of the first to emphasize this through his literary works. “Rappaccini's Daughter” and “The Birthmark” are two of his works where he teaches this lesson through the trials of his characters. Focusing on the motif of the “mad scientist”, Hawthorne brings to light the points that people struggle with humanity, learning to love themselves and others, and that science can be more harmful then helpful.
Stoehr, Taylor. Hawthorne's Mad Scientists. Hamden: Shoe String Press, 1978. Weinstein, Cindy. "The Invisible Hand Made Visible: 'The Birthmark'." Nineteenth Century Literature 48 (1993): 44-73.
Wernher von Braun. Idealist and visionary. Braun began his career in 1925 with the hopes and dreams of leading humanity to the stars. Do you know what he said when the first rocket hit London? He said that “the rocket performed perfectly, it just landed on the wrong planet.”
Butler, Marilyn. "Frankenstein and Radical Science." Reprinted in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Norton Critical Edition. 1993; New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. 302-313.
Shelley, Mary. "From Frankenstein." The Example of Science. Ed. Robert E Lynch and Thomas B. Swanzey. New York: Pearson Publishing, 2000. 152-156.
The Best Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century. Ed. Orson Scott Card. New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2001. 212-217.
Manning, Kenneth R. (1983). Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just. New York: Oxford University Press
On March 13, 1855, Percival Lowell was born in Cambridge, to a wealthy Bostonian family. His parents were Augustus Lowell, a president of cotton companies and director of banks, and Katherine Bigelow Lawrence, daughter of Abbott Lawrence, a textile manufacturer and founder of the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Percival Lowell was very well educated, having attended and graduated Noble and Greenough School in 1872, as well as Harvard University, graduating in 1876 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics. Interestingly, his graduation speech was about the formation of the solar system, which showed that, even then, he was interested in astronomy. He was later awarded honorary LL.D degrees from Amherst College in 1907 and Clark University in 1909. His brother, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, went on to become the president of Harvard, while his sister, Amy Lowell, helped introduce new poetry into America. He then took the customary grand tour of Europe, though he traveled farther than most--all the way to Syria. Once he completed college, Lowell worked in his family’s textile business for six years. A lecture concerning Japan in 1882 inspired Lowell to travel to the Far East. He served as a foreign secretary to the Korean Special Mission, part of the first Korean diplomatic mission, in 1883. He later wrote a number of books on the Far East. Books by Percival Lowel...
certain motions to the earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected."
Haynes, Roslynn D. "Wells Scientific Background: Scientist or Visionary?" Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: Volume 6. Detroit, Michigan: Book Tower, 1982. 522. Print.
Marylin Butler, in her article "The first Frankenstein and Radical Science," describes how William Lawrence, a physician, lecturer, and friend to the Shelleys, may have had a profound influence on the Shelleys' perceptions and opinions of science. Butler reports how Lawrence was a passionate student of "materialist science," a re...
[Verne is acknowledged as one of the world's first and most imaginative modern science fiction writers. His works reflect nineteenth-century concerns with contemporary scientific innovation and its potential for human benefit or destruction. In the following excerpt from an interview with Gordon Jones, he commends the imaginative creativity with which Wells constructs his scientific fantasies and stresses the difference between Wells's style and his own.]
In the early 1900’s technology began to boom. Many tales of science fantasy were created. The imagination of many was stirred violently as America and the U.S.S.R. were neck and neck in the “Space Race�. Magical tales of aliens and Martians were shaped by the twisted and horrifically minds of authors such as Isaac Asimov. Many remember the comical almost, ridiculous movies of the early nineteen fifties. At that time though, many believed them to be real and were frightened beyond normal convention. Many authors in this era began to evolve, much how the earlier ancient writers evolved themselves.