Goddard, Robert Hutchings
Goddard, Robert Hutchings (1882-1945), a United States physicist. Virtually all liquid-fuel rocket-propelled missiles are based on ideas first tried by Goddard. During his lifetime, however, he received little recognition for his work. Fifteen years after his death, the United States government acknowledged his contributions by paying the Guggenheim Foundation, which held his patent rights, $1,000,000 for infringements.
Goddard was born in Worcester, Massachusetts and became interested in rocketry at an early age. He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Clark University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1911. Goddard joined the Clark faculty in 1914.
In 1915 Goddard showed experimentally that rockets would work in space as well as in the atmosphere. He successfully fired the first liquid-fuel rocket, in 1926. In 1929 Charles A. Lindbergh persuaded the Guggenheim Foundation to finance Goddard's further experiments. Among Goddard's later improvements was a gyroscope to stabilize rockets in flight.