History
The idea of liquid rocket as understood in the modern context first appears in the book The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. This seminal treatise on astronautics was published in 1903.
During the 19th century, the only known developer of liquid propellant rocket engine experiments was Peruvian scientist Pedro Paulet, who is considered one of the "fathers of aeronautics.". However, he did not immediately publish his work. In 1927 he wrote a letter to a newspaper in Lima, claiming he had experimented with a liquid rocket engine while he was a student in Paris three decades earlier. Historians of early rocketry experiments, among them Max Valier and Willy Ley, have given differing amounts of credence to Paulet's report. Paulet described laboratory tests of liquid rocket engines, but did not claim to have flown a liquid rocket.
The first flight of a liquid-propellant rocket took place on March 16, 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts, when American professor Robert H. Goddard launched a vehicle using liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellants. The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid rockets were possible.
After Goddard's success, German engineers and scientists became enthralled with liquid fuel rockets and design better liquid fuel rockets testing them in the early 1930s in a field near Berlin.
Read more about this topic: Liquid-propellant Rocket
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“Perhaps universal history is the history of the diverse intonation of some metaphors.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)