Robert Hutchings Goddard was a pioneer of Rocketry and Space Flight. His inspiration and ideas started young and possesed as time grew. "...the dream of yesterday, is the hope of today and the reality of tomarrow."(Robert Hutchings Goddard)
On October 5th 1882 in the small city of Worcester Massachusetts a child was born to Nahum Danford Goddard and Fannie Hoyt Goddard. They named him Robert Hutchings Goddard. After Robert's first birthday, Nahum was offered a job in a knife machinery company in Boston, where they moved. From an early age Robert shown an interest in science. At the age of five years old, after a visit to his uncle's workshop, where he witnessed a battery produce electricity. At home, he found that he too could produce sparks by scuffing his feet against the carpet. He than thought, if he rubbed zinc from a battery on his shoes, than scuffing his shoes on gravel and jumping off he could jump longer distances.
Robert Goddard
Goddard with Vacuum Tube Device - GPN-2000-001338
Goddard towing a rocket in RoswellThis experiment soon came to a rest after his mother warned him to be careful and asked him what he would do if his plan was successful and sailed away without comming back? His relationships with his parents were quite close, they provided telescopes and materials needed and they sometimes encouraged his daring experiments outside. (Coil, Suzanne M.)
At the age twelve after his mother Fannie came down with Tuberculosis, they moved back out to Worcester to live with his grandmother. Robert too became sick with reoccuring health problems such as bronchitis, colds and Pleurisy(and inflmation in the lungs) which kept him out of school. He turned to books as his companion. He read books such as: Edgar Allan Poe's story Lunar Discoveries, Joseph Atterlay's A Voyage to The Moon, Percy Greg's Across the Zordiac, and...