#164 Robert Goddard (Rocket Man)

What I learned from reading Rocket Man: Robert Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age by David A. Clary. --- [18:16] For even though I reasoned with myself that the thing was impossible, there was something inside me which simply would not stop working. [20:08] Anything is possible with the man who makes the best use of every minute of his time. [20:18] There are limitless opportunities open to the man who appreciates the fact that his own mind is the sole key that unlocks them. [32:55] It’s appalling how short life is and how much there is to do. We have to be sports, take chances, and do what we can. [35:57] There were limits to Goddard’s ability as a salesman, beginning with his failure to determine the interests of his potential customers. [44:18] Goddard must be given his due. The first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket may not have looked like much but nothing like it had ever happened on Earth before. [50:28] He explained his work was aimed at high-altitude research, not outer space. The Wright Brothers, he reminded his audience, did not try to cross The Atlantic the first time up. [52:32] Emerson says, “If a man paint a better picture, preach a better sermon, or build a better mousetrap than anyone else, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” I have had the misfortune not to be an artist, a preacher, or a manufacturer of mousetraps. I have never had any great talent for selling ideas. [59:27] A boy of exceptional brilliance, of humble origins and poor health, who dreamed great dreams and pursued them throughout a dedicated life. He was a distinguished but absentminded professor, a saintly man of rich humor, an enthusiastic piano player and painter, loved by everybody who knew him. Although his own country failed to appreciate the importance of what he did, he continued in his work despite widespread ridicule and the attempts of others to steal it. He never complained, never evinced discouragement or frustration. Above all, he never gave up. [1:04:04] Goddard was a complex and inscrutable individual. He had many admirable qualities, chief among them the patience, persistence, and iron will that helped him to overcome tuberculosis, then to pursue rocketry for three decades. Seldom expressing frustration or discouragement, he accepted failure as part of invention, and kept on working. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  Frank Browning ceased to exist at 6:43 PM on Friday, September 8th, 1944. The street erupted as he walked down Staveley Road in London, smashing the houses on both sides and killing him instantly. Rescue squads found one other dead and 20 injured in the rubble of their houses, which surrounded a crater 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep in the center of the concrete roadway. So began Nazi Germany's V2 campaign, a barrage of stratospheric ballistic missiles bearing one-ton bombs. They dropped without warning.

• 0:42David Senra?

  They were remarkably sophisticated machines, powered by liquid-fuel rockets and guided by gyroscopes and tail fins. How had America's enemy developed such a monstrous contraption? The answer was not long in coming. On January 19th, 1945, the news service of the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC told the world that the fiendish Germans had stolen the whole idea from an American. The V2 was a larger copy of designs worked out before the war by Dr. Robert H. Goddard, a physicist working in isolation near Roswell, New Mexico.

• 1:24David Senra?

  "So closely do the mechanical features of the V2 parallel the American projectile that some physicists think the Germans may have actually copied most of the design," said the report. "Most of these features were patented by Dr. Goddard between 1914 and 1932." It was a perfect wartime picture: strutting Nazis contrasted with a modest American inventor, pilfering his peaceful efforts to explore the upper atmosphere in order to bring death and terror to innocent Allied civilians. The story spread far and wide, and it endured. Goddard himself did not, dying the following August.

• 2:04David Senra?

  His obituaries credited him with inventing nearly everything to do with rocketry and with being the real inventor of the V2. He had been supported in his labors by Charles Lindbergh, perhaps the most famous human on the planet. He participated in Allied examination of the German aviation and rocket programs after the Germans surrendered in May 1945 and co-authored a scathing report claiming that with weapons such as the V2, the Nazis had come close to winning the war. It was time for the American government to stop neglecting visionary geniuses like Goddard and start embracing the technology of the future. To that end, Lindbergh secured a consultant's position to advise the government in rocketry

• 2:48David Senra?

  and space research. When the chief of the air force asked Lindbergh what he hoped to gain, Lindbergh pointed out that while the army was preparing to steal the Nazi missile systems, it should acknowledge that many vital features of them were of American origin. Lindbergh wanted only one thing in return for his work: justice for Bob Goddard. Who was Goddard and what justice was owed to him? That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age, and it was written by David A. Clary. And this is another example of a book that I only found because a listener recommended that I read it. I want to put it into context with the larger discussion we have, and I want to tie this

• 3:33David Senra?

  to another entrepreneur that we've studied extensively in this podcast, and that's Jeff Bezos. All the way back, I think it might be Founder's 38, somewhere in there, I read the book called The Space Barons. And that book, what I focused on in doing that podcast, was mainly the differing strategies that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were using to accomplish similar goals. And it's in that book that we hear of Jeff Bezos' admiration for Goddard. So I want to read an excerpt from that book before I jump back into this one. And so it says, it's talking about one of the first rockets that Jeff's company, Blue Origin, is creating is named after Goddard. So it says, "The vehicle that had come to sea was named Goddard, after Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry.

• 4:18David Senra?

  He was a builder and a dreamer who in 1919 wrote a paper called 'A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes.' It was published by the Smithsonian Institution, and that touched on the possibility of developing a rocket to reach the moon." That's in 1919. "At the time, the notion of reaching the moon seemed as far-fetched as it was ridiculous. Goddard was derided as a crackpot, and even the New York Times wrote a scathing editorial in 1920, which scoffed at the idea, saying a rocket could not work in the vacuum of space. Goddard responded by saying that every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it. Once realized, it becomes commonplace. But the ridicule led Goddard, a shy man who preferred working alone, to an even greater

• 4:59David Senra?

  measure of reclusiveness and dedication to a long-term vision of spaceflight that he knew would take many decades to fulfill." As I read this next section to you, if you've listened to Jeff talk about his goals with Blue Origin, it's going to echo the sentiment that Goddard's talking about his own work. And he's saying this, what was that, maybe 80 years before Bezos? So he says, "How many more years I should be able to work on this problem, I do not know," he wrote in 1932. "I hope as long as I live. There can be no thought of finishing. For aiming at the stars, both literally and figuratively, is the work of generations." So that no matter how much progress one makes, there's always the thrill of just beginning. So when you hear Jeff compare the difference between building Amazon and Blue Origin,

• 5:44David Senra?

  he says, "Most of the infrastructure that he needed to build Amazon was already in place. It was put there by the work of other people that came before him." What he's saying with Blue Origin is like, "I want to build the infrastructure for space entrepreneurs, and I know they're going to, I will be long dead."

• 6:01David Senra?

  By the time that that actually pays off, that people are able to build space companies on top of the infrastructure that I'm doing now. So I thought it was very interesting. There's just a lot of things in this book, and I'm sure I'll mention Jeff a lot today, that just echo a lot of what I learned from studying Bezos. So he says he died in 1945 without having to live to see humans go to space. But just before the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, he received a belated postmortem vindication. By then, it was abundantly clear that rockets could indeed work in space. And the New York Times issued a correction to its editorial a half-century after it was published. And this is the correction they published. It says, "Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton

• 6:42David Senra?

  in the 17th century, and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in the atmosphere." The New York Times regrets the error. "From a purely chronological standpoint, it made sense that Bezos named the first rocket that he creates after the father of rocketry. But they were also kindred spirits. Like Goddard, Bezos was dedicated to taking the long view, with Blue Origin seeing it as an enterprise that would take generations to complete. Like Goddard, Bezos believed that the impossible could be made routine. And like Goddard, Bezos's company shunned the press, keeping its work secret, carefully protected from the scrutiny and the criticism that would surely follow."

• 7:27David Senra?

  And this is just mind blowing. In fact, Bezos was such a fan that he chose Goddard as the middle name of one of his sons. Okay, so now that you know how this connects to everything else that we're studying in the podcast, let me go back to the book Rocketman and let me talk a little bit about his early life, Goddard's early life, and the influence of his father, and then probably his most important trait, his lifelong refusal to quit. So it says, "His father was a technological adventurer. He installed electric lighting in their house, bought an early-model phonograph, and probably aroused his son's interest in electricity. He would be one of the first in the city to own an automobile and a radio." Robert was a sickly child who overcame that adversity along with numerous setbacks to his childish experiments. It was the story of his future life.

• 8:12David Senra?

  Try, fail, try again. The young Goddard was a born genius, energetic despite being frail, persistent through setback or handicap, and possessed a towering intellect. His precocious interest in how things worked and in tinkering experiments is the boyhood story of other inventive scientific pioneers, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and the Wright Brothers. Goddard described his boyhood as "a time of scientific ambition." He experimented with everything. He talked his father into providing him with a microscope, a telescope, and his subscription to Scientific American. By his teen years, he realized that his experimental reach had exceeded his uneducated grasp and concluded wisely. So he was sick.

• 8:57David Senra?

  The author says that he was coddled by his mother and his grandmother, so he's going to wind up being a few years behind, even though he's really smart. I don't think he graduates high school, too. He's like 21 years old. So he's not formally schooled yet. He's realizing, hey, I don't have enough information. I need to get more education, because he's got all these ideas. He hasn't yet found or honed in on his love to try to get to Mars, which I'll get there in a minute, but he is realizing that, hey, I'm reaching the grasp of what I know, that what I can learn through just experimentation. So he says, "He realized that his experimental reach had exceeded his uneducated grasp and concluded wisely." This is a direct quote from him. "The best plan for all of us is to, for all of us to follow, is to leave our researches

• 9:40David Senra?

  and investigations until knowledge and experience are attained, after which our work will either be crowned with success or buried once and for all as an impossibility." That's really quite remarkable, that teenage Goddard is able to convey such a, it seems like more of a, like a mature point of view or perspective he has there, even as a young person. Then there was Goddard's health. Overcoming physical weakness is commonly part of the life stories of great men. And so here's where the author does, kind of doing my job for me, where he is comparing and telling us how Goddard is similar to other great historical figures. He just previously compared him to Edison, to Ford. He continues that theme here.

• 10:24David Senra?

  "The puny Milo carried a calf around daily until it grew into a bull, and he into the strongest man on earth. Beethoven and Edison prevailed over deafness. George Washington was sterile, awkward, and nearly toothless. Theodore Roosevelt was a nearsighted weakling, and his cousin Franklin overcame polio. Roger Bannister's legs were nearly destroyed by a fire, but he grew up to break the four-minute mile. The family account of Goddard's boyhood followed the same pattern." And now we get to the part where he finds, he's inspired by what he read. So he's a fan of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and then reading H.G. Wells' book, "The War of the Worlds," changes his life.

• 11:09David Senra?

  So it says, "He read H.G. Wells' 'The War of the Worlds,' a story about a Martian invasion of Earth. The dramatic story set the stage for a mystical dream that would color his life to the end." And so this is where he's describing this dream he has in 1899, and this is something he references for the rest of his entire life. This is now Goddard writing. "I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn. I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars." This is the very first inclination where he's going to be led to, hey, how do I get

• 11:47David Senra?

  off this planet and go to Mars, which leads to his lifelong career in rocketry. So it says, "And how would it look on a small scale if sent up from the meadow at my feet? I have several photographs of the tree taken since, with the little ladder I made to climb it, leaning against it. It seemed to me then that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving rapidly..."

• 12:15David Senra?

  He's describing what, a rocket, right? 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 purposeful. So he's telling us he found this dream, reading the book and having this daydream, wind up giving him what eventually becomes his life's purpose.

• 12:44David Senra?

  And more on the importance of this event in his life. He repeatedly photographed the site of the event and remarked October 19th annually in his diary as anniversary day. So it's almost like he, instead of celebrating his birthday every year, he celebrates the day that he found his life's purpose. He dated the beginnings of both his interest in space travel and his scientific career from this experience and rated nearly every event of his life thereafter as very purposeful. This is the birth of his technological optimism. The very idea of interplanetary travel lit a fire in him. He reread Vernon Wells many times and never shook off the sense of infinite possibilities that they inspired. If the human mind could conceive of such things, the young Goddard wondered, could it not also figure out a way to do them?

• 13:29David Senra?

  And after the realization of his dream or his purpose in life, he realizes, hey, I don't, I don't actually have enough knowledge on how to do this. So he winds up being able to enroll in, in high school. So it says he realized that he had been floundering in ignorance, trying to solve problems without knowing what he was doing. This made me realize that if a way to navigate space were to be discovered or invented, it would be the result of a knowledge of physics and mathematics. So that's what he's going to dedicate his life to studying. He enrolled in high school as a sophomore in 1901, just before his 19th birthday. Goddard was eager to learn and he was even more eager to do. I have no idea why, but when I read that section, I thought of this, this paragraph. In the biography of Alexander Graham Bell, the book's called Reluctant Genius.

• 14:12David Senra?

  I covered a few, maybe a few months ago by now. But at the time, Alexander Graham Bell is 28 years old. He's, he's on the cusp of his invention of the telephone. But he realizes that he's missing, there's a couple of parts of knowledge that he's missing. So he's, he's meeting with this older, successful inventor. I think the guy's like close to 70 years old at the time. And he's seeking his advice. He's like, well, I don't know this part. Maybe I should just give it, like hand off what I know so far to somebody else that has this knowledge and then we can complete the project. So let me read from that book real quick. He says, "He told the eager young inventor that his idea was the germ of a great invention. Since he lacked the necessary electrical knowledge, he asked Dr. Henry, should he allow others to work out the commercial application?

• 14:56David Senra?

  Dr. Henry didn't pause for a minute. If this young Scotsman, meaning Alexander Graham Bell, was going to get the commercial payoff from his invention, he simply had to acquire an understanding of electricity. 'Get it!' he barked at the 28-year-old." So in this case, in the case of Goddard, we have him yelling at his own self. He's like, hey, I, I need to go, barking at his own self. I need, I don't have the information I need. I need to go seek out people that do have this information. And his, in his life, even though he's accused of being really secretive and more working, wanting, deciding to work in isolation, there's a series of older mentors that played a very important part in his life.

• 15:38David Senra?

  So he did actually go and seek out people that had access to resources or knowledge that he did not have. So I'm fast forwarding. We're going to get to the end of Goddard's high school. And he winds up being essentially what people consider the smartest person in school. He'd been selected to give the class oration as the best student. He titled his speech on taking things for granted. And this is where I'm going to have to mention Jeff again. It's amazing to me, the parallels between Goddard and Bezos. So Goddard is about to give his speech on getting to space. Right? And if you go back and read and study the life of Jeff Bezos, he was a valedictorian

• 16:21David Senra?

  of his high school, and his high school speech, the same speech that Goddard's giving, he talked about his desire to colonize space. And that's exactly what Goddard's doing here. So it says, the last part of the, the last part of the last sentence, meaning of Goddard's speech, made it the most frequently quoted high school speech in history. So I'm just going to read the last paragraph to you. Just as in the sciences, we have learned that we are too ignorant, that we are too ignorant safely to pronounce anything impossible, so for the, so for the individual, since we cannot know just what are his limitations, we can hardly say with certainty that anything is necessarily within or beyond his grasp.

• 17:01David Senra?

  Each must remember that no one can predict to what heights of wealth, fame, or usefulness he may rise until he has honestly endeavored, and he should derive courage from the fact that all sciences have been at some time in the same condition as he. And that it has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. So that's the last sentence they said is the most frequently quoted high school speech in history. Shortly after, so, now this is, this is very interesting, though. You know, we all have these ups and downs where we have to manage our, our own mental health, for lack of a better word. Shortly after so optimistically lecturing his classmates, he found himself wallowing

• 17:43David Senra?

  in uncertainty and discouraged by his lack of accomplishment. In that mood, he incinerated his accumulated notes. So we have a lot of, he, he, he kept a diary and a journal his entire life. The, well, we're, a big part of what we're missing is the fact that he, he went over his own, like his, the, the scientific experiments he was doing in high school, and he reread them with, he reread them and, and judged them to be like immature or amateurish, maybe is the better word. And so he decides to light them afire.

• 18:19David Senra?

  Then his inherent optimism and determination reasserted themselves. Quote from Goddard, "The dream would not down. And inside of two months, I caught myself making notes of further suggestions. For even though I reasoned with myself that the thing was impossible," meaning getting to Mars, "there was something inside me which simply would not stop working." So now he gets to college and a few things, important things happen. One, he finds two very important teachers that encourage him along the path that he's pursuing. Then we see that he develops this lifelong routine and we also see more of the uncertainty that's very common in young people, not sure what to do with their life. Two teachers had a special influence on him. One was the head of the physics program, Wilmer Duff, who was a very demanding applied

• 19:04David Senra?

  physicist and a pioneer in fields ranging from acoustics and ballistics to electricity. The other was an English professor, I don't know how to pronounce his first name, so we're just gonna call him Professor Combs, who taught the young Goddard how to express the ideas rolling through his mind. Goddard had developed a lifelong routine. He divided his day into two parts, work or school during the day, and an evening devoted to writing down his suggestions and his ideas on science and technology. Goddard reviewed his years of intellectual floundering and confessed to bouts of laziness and changing interests as a youngster. He was still unsure of his footing. And so around this time of life, we see this waffling back and forth, like, I have this

• 19:47David Senra?

  dream, I have this desire, but right now, I think it's impossible, everybody else thinks it's impossible, maybe I should give up. Okay, no, no, I'm really passionate about this, I'm not gonna give up, and going back and back and forth. I want to draw your attention to some of his aphorisms. So we see the, like, what was his mind like as a young college student? So I'm just gonna read some aphorisms that he wrote down from his diary. It says, "The diary recorded commonplace events and interspersed with observations and aphorisms." Here's one of them. "Anything is possible with the man who makes the best use of every minute of his time." Here's another. "There are limitless opportunities open to the man who appreciates the fact that his own mind is the sole key that unlocks them."

• 20:28David Senra?

  And finally, if there's no law against it, then it will happen one day. He had reached a preliminary conclusion that would be possible to get an object from Earth into outer space. And the way to do that would be by using rockets. It had not been an easy road to that end, as the notebooks filled up with speculations, questioning, doubting, rejection, and fresh approaches. In March 1906, this is seven years after he had that daydream in the cherry tree. Okay, that happened in 1899. So we're seven years later. In March 1906, he nearly gave up, writing in his diary that he had decided today that space navigation is a physical impossibility. And the only note that I could possibly leave on this page is, I'm always interested in

• 21:13David Senra?

  contemplating these alternate paths that we can take depending on the decisions that we make. What would his life be if he quit here? So we obviously know that he doesn't stick with that feeling for very long. He's like, okay, it's physically impossible. I just got to figure out how to do it. And so I need to, as he's working his way through this and realizing, well, let me read this paragraph first, and then I'm going to get to the Russian version of Goddard. Before reaching space by rocket could be proved feasible, rigorous mathematics had to address the problem. That, Goddard recognized, was the major challenge facing him in 1909. What he did not know was that another mathematically inclined physicist had beaten him to the punch. So remember at the very beginning where Lindbergh's like, hey, you know, the Germans just copied Goddard's ideas.

• 21:58David Senra?

  He had, you know, a lot of his patents were in the public domain. People were reading them and building on them. The author makes a case that that may not be true, that there was parallel developments. We see this in history of technology several times, in Russia, Germany, and America at the same time. So I want to introduce you to one of them, the Russian version of Goddard, who I found, I just think his story is really interesting, actually, really kind of humorous in some cases. So it says, "There's a mathematically inclined physicist who had beaten him to the punch." He was, and there's no way, I can't even pronounce English words, so I'm not going to try to pronounce his Russian name. I'll let YouTube do that for me.

• 22:43David Senra?

  Okay, so that guy was born the Russian, uh, was born the son of a Russian forester in 1857 in a remote village. By the age of 13, his mother was dead and he was nearly deaf. He was a voracious reader. Jules Verne was among his favorites. So the, um, this author, David Clary, compare, um, well, actually, I'll get there towards the end, talks about the similarities between the, the three versions of Goddard. So the American version, the Russian version, the German version were all inspired by Jules Verne, which I thought was really interesting. Uh, after he consumed the village library, he moved to Moscow. There, he practically lived in the public library, concentrating on higher mathematics,

• 23:23David Senra?

  attending lectures and subsisting on brown bread. During this time, Moscow, during his time in Moscow, he inhaled the weird mystical atmosphere of the public library. So the librarian of the Moscow library influenced somebody that, another, I don't know how to pronounce her name. It's Madame Blavatsky, maybe? She's the founder of theosophy. Okay? So the theosophists believed that Earth was not human race's natural home and that humans were more, more properly belonged in the cosmos. Uh, this Russian version of Goddard agreed. Finding a way into space became his life's work, which generated hundreds

• 24:05David Senra?

  of publications in science, science fiction, and philosophy. In 1895, he began working on rocketry. He concluded that no powder fuel provided enough energy and that liquefied hydrogen and oxygen, mixed and ignited in a chamber, offered the best source of propulsive force. Uh, through his experimentation, Goddard's gonna realize the same thing. He starts out trying to do powder and he realizes, no, it has to be liquid oxygen and hydrogen. Uh, the combination of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen that produces water is the most energetic chemical reaction in nature and liquefying them would concentrate them. The paper, so it talks about all the stuff that he's producing. The paper presaged everything to come in rocketry, including how to calculate the thrust

• 24:48David Senra?

  of the rocket motor and the velocity required to escape Earth's gravity. He proposed a multi-stage rocket as the most practical design. This is all presented with hard facts and rigorously calculated numbers. He had proved that reaching space was not only possible, but feasible. Since his aim was to disperse humans over the cosmos, he also considered using solar energy to provide power to colonies in space. It's just remarkable that people are having these ideas in the 1890s and early 1900s. But this appeared in a journal read by few in Russia and almost no one elsewhere. And so it says Goddard was unaware of his Russian competition, and so he soldiered on. Now, at the age of 26, he's fully ensconced. He's going to stay on this path no matter what. He says physics is his life.

• 25:32David Senra?

  Now, his life almost came to an end, though. His mother contracted tuberculosis, and so the doctors feared that the same, he had a lingering cough and a cold and congestion that just wouldn't go away. So a doctor comes to examine him and tells him, at 26 years old, that you're dying, that you have two weeks to live. And this is where we see the free-thinking Goddard, who comes up with his own treatment. They had agreed that he'd come down with the disease that was killing his mother. They gave him two weeks to live. He wrote to his grandmother in Princeton and asked her to pack up his papers and bring them to him, because he feared that he might die without leaving proof of his ideas behind.

• 26:12David Senra?

  Goddard's boyhood penchant for demonstrating the truth of impossibilities drove what happened next. He engineered his own regimen, devised experiments in deep breathing, and spent most of his time on his parents' veranda, this is in the middle of the winter in the Northeast, heavily wrapped in blankets, while filling his lungs with the frigid winter air.

• 26:35David Senra?

  So one of his professors, a physics professor, comes to visit him. And his name is John Hubbard. And he says, "Underneath Bob was a free thinker and childish. The memory endured for Hubbard, who wrote after Goddard's death in 1945. I shall never forget the smile and twinkle from the depths of a hammock where there were several, when there were several inches of snow on the ground and the frosty air was around zero. The thing that affected me most," so he's talking about seeing Goddard in a hammock, trying to breathe in this deep air, when there's, you know, snow and you shouldn't be outside. "The thing that affected me most was that, so far as we know, he had no medical authority for his action. It seemed to be his own idea entirely, and he had, in no uncertain terms, absolved his

• 27:20David Senra?

  family and his doctors from any responsibility. He improved steadily." So now Goddard's talking about, in his autobiography, notes that he was going to compile into an autobiography. It says, "The doctors examined me again in June," so this is a few months after, "and he said he never expected to see me as well as I was. But I should never do any more research, and I should live a great deal outdoors. I told him there were some things I just couldn't help working on." So now I want to get into why, like, what is, what are some of his motivations? You know, he's, he's not like the Russian version of Goddard that, that thinks that humans came from a different, like, we're meant to be in the cosmos, Earth is not our, like, our natural home.

• 28:04David Senra?

  And coming across research and reading about why he wants to do this. One, you're going to see when I'm about to read to you, he sounds, this sounds a lot like Elon Musk. And the other thing is, I thought in humor, is that people used to believe that the moon was going to crash into the Earth, and Goddard used that as a motivation to make humans a multi-planetary species, to ensure our survival.

• 28:28David Senra?

  Drawing upon a prediction by astronomer Sir George Darwin that the moon would someday crash into the Earth, Goddard began, this is a direct quote from him, "From an economic point of view, the navigation of interplanetary space must be affected to ensure the continuance of the race. And if we feel that evolution has through the ages reached its highest point in man, the continuation of life and progress must be the highest end and aim of humanity." These words could easily come out of Elon's, and variations have come out of Elon Musk's mouth. So it says, "Progress must be the highest end and aim of humanity, and its cessation the greatest possible calamity." So this entire time, up until this point, I should say, his goal is like, "I want to

• 29:10David Senra?

  get humans to Mars," right? And then he realizes, the lesson, and what I'm about to read to you is, he needs to focus, he realizes he needs to focus on solving the most important problem first. "I can't worry about problems that happen during space travel if I can't get off the ground. So why am I worried?" And he's writing, you know, thinking about, um, what's the term, like when they freeze, is it cryogenics? Where like the suspended animation, where they freeze humans and then hopefully they can bring them back to life in the future? He had all these weird ideas, they sound like science fiction in a lot of ways, about how to, you know, make humans travel through space for 10,000 years and survive, or a million years, whatever the case is. And he's really like, "This is a

• 29:50David Senra?

  giant waste of time." Now, he realizes this now, but he also never, his wandering mind is something that stays with him up until the very end. Anyway, so it says, "Goddard worked his way out of the early confusion to produce what would become his magnum opus, under the title, 'The Problem of Raising a Body to Great Altitude Above the Surface of the Earth.' It began, 'The problem is concerned with the practicality of doing two things: the rising of apparatus, such as recording instruments, to a great altitude, and letting it fall back to the ground by suitable parachutes; and second, the sending of apparatus,' so think about apparatus, rockets, anything like that, okay, 'to such great distances from the Earth that the apparatus comes under the influence of the gravitational attraction of some other heavenly body.'" That was an amazing turnaround from

• 30:35David Senra?

  everything Goddard had written before. An essential truth had hit him like a thunderbolt. It was fruitless to talk about roaming space until he figured out how to get there. For the first time, he had placed first things first. So that's the lesson. Focus on solving the most important problem first. Don't worry about things, problems that may happen on step two, three, or four. You can solve those when you get there. He assembled a mathematical proof that it can be done. A rocket can make it into space. I haven't even mentioned the fact that he has a job while he's doing this. For most of his life, he is a part-time rocketeer. So he is a professor. There's many cases where he'll have an absence, leave of absence from his professorship. Most of the time, he's going around.

• 31:18David Senra?

  And the reason I couldn't help thinking about Jeff Bezos when I'm reading this book, too, is a lot of the book is scrounging together a little bit of money to fund his experiments. He's not a wealthy person. He's got to rely on, he writes on the Guggenheims later, the Smithsonian, all these different people and institutions that fund his work. And the reason I thought about Bezos is I'm sure Bezos knew that. And so what he talks about is, you know, why the ability, the unique opportunity he has is, listen, he's like, I can sell. And he's been doing this. I haven't checked in a few years, but last time I checked, he was selling about, Bezos was selling about a billion dollars a year of Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin. And I just can't, it was so obvious that the benefit Bezos had in building Amazon first

• 32:03David Senra?

  to then fund, you know, essentially have a blank check to fund his rocket work where Goddard never had that in his life. And he would accomplish so much more if he didn't have to do it part-time, or if he didn't have to, there's many years where he had to stop working completely, go back to being a professor, and then wait for a next round of funding. He tried to go to the military, all this. And it's just, again, I think this is where Bezos learned from the lesson of Goddard, and he's able to have a solution to the problem that Goddard never really had a solution for. So this is a little bit about his job. His employment was as a physics instructor in the undergraduate Clark College. He taught a course in electricity and magnetism for three hours per week, and then met with Dr. Hubbard one hour weekly to discuss his laboratory work.

• 32:44David Senra?

  It's during this time, though, he's always, he's always gonna be sick, right? It doesn't help that he drinks a lot and he smokes cigars like people smoke cigarettes. So he dies relatively early, I think he's 62, dies of throat cancer. But he talks about, he has, from an early age, he realizes how short life is. And so this is Goddard, he says, "It's appalling how short life is and how much there is to do, and how much there is to do, we have to be sports, take chances, and do what we can." For some reason, when I read that, it made me think of one of my favorite quotes I've ever heard, it's from Henry Rollins, and he says, "There's no such thing as spare time, there's no such thing as free time, there's no such thing as downtime, all you got is lifetime, go." So this is a little bit about Goddard's personality.

• 33:28David Senra?

  In person, he was mild, courteous, introspective, and almost wholly absorbed in his studies. He was generally looked upon as being slight, but harmlessly mad, and his absurd ideas of designing rockets that could travel to the moon as an initial step towards his ultimate objective, Mars. It is hardly necessary to add, at the time I knew Robert Goddard, I had no remote conception of the range and precision of the amazing mind and imagination concealed behind the facade of the pleasant professor, who in spite of the fact that I was not one of his students, never failed to greet me with friendly courtesy. He remembered me and frequently expressed interest in the progress of my studies and my response to, and my response to life at the university. He was always in a hurry, he worked hard at whatever he was doing.

• 34:13David Senra?

  For instance, I never saw him walk slowly. On the other hand, I did not perceive any sign of impatience. He, and this is, I think, one of, something that, um, one of the lessons that I think is most important for, that I learned from reading the book, is like, the ability to react, to not overreact to ups and downs. And so that's what everybody said about Goddard, it's like, his rocket could succeed and he would act the same as if it blew up. And so it says, "He appeared to take the ups and downs calmly. My most vivid impression of Goddard was his sense of humor, his ready laugh, and his ability to be elated like a youngster over small incidents."

• 34:53David Senra?

  Okay, so a large part of this book is Goddard going to the military, trying to get, trying to sell them on here. These could be, there could be applications. This is before, obviously, the Germans use this idea in World War II. There could be military applications. Not only they were thinking about like a vertical takeoff for planes at the time, potentially missiles. He has a hand in developing the bazooka. But the problem is, is he was really bad at sales. And it's, this is a limiting factor. If you cannot explain and convince other people the value of what you're doing, or what your work is, it's going to inhibit that. So you have to overcome that. And so I'm going to read this paragraph to you. But

• 35:35David Senra?

  the note of myself is this is Goddard's failure to adhere to what I call the George Clooney sales method. Okay, so I'll explain what that means in a minute. This is after a meeting that he has with somebody in the army. And the guy says, can't you see there's millions in this thing for you? He proposed preparing a supply of small rockets, carrying warheads, firing a lot of them, and seeing where they hit. And Goddard, he's basically admonishing Goddard for not explaining, he's talking about his work and what he hopes to achieve, but not presenting it as a solution to his customers' problem. And in this case, the customer is the military. So it says, "There were limits to Goddard's abilities as a salesman, beginning with his failure to determine the interest of his potential customer." So he talks about, again, people are selfish. They're only focused on what you can do for

• 36:19David Senra?

  them, right? So instead of saying, instead of talking about all the things you've accomplished, the ideas you have, wanting to go to space and everything else, but hey, this is the work I'm doing, and this is how you can benefit. And I'll tell you how Clooney used that for his career. "In wartime, military authorities were inundated with crackpot schemes to furnish the ultimate weapon. Goddard's proposal of what might be was sufficient to persuade a research institution like the Smithsonian to support his development to the point of practicality. But generals and admirals needed something that already worked." So I was listening to a podcast one time. Can't remember who said it, but I have a note that I had never forgotten. This happened like two or three years ago. And it's George Clooney's realization that he was not presenting, when he'd go on auditions, he was not presenting himself as a solution, right?

• 37:03David Senra?

  You need to present yourself as a solution to your customer's problem. So it says, "George Clooney's luck changed when he realized that the audition is a problem for the people giving the audition." Okay, so a lot of people are like, "Oh, please pick me. Look how talented I am. Please, please, please." Because they're so hopeful. Not realizing, look at it from another person's perspective. I'm doing a movie, a TV show, commercial, whatever it is. I don't want to sit here doing auditions all day. I want, I need somebody to fill this role. The fact that this role is unfilled is a problem. And so, look at it on the other side of the transaction. That's an opportunity for Clooney, in this case, to present himself as a solution to that problem. So let me go, let me start, read this from the very top again. "George Clooney's luck changed when he realized that the audition is a problem for the people giving the audition. They want to find an actor for the role.

• 37:47David Senra?

  If I present myself as a solution to your problem, rather than the person dying for your approval, it will increase my chance for success." Hey, I don't even know, I think he had famous what being a, I think he was on a show ER or something. "Hey, you need a doctor, whatever role he played? Okay, I can do that. Look, this is how I can do that." And again, I just think that's really, I just love, shorthand think of that as the George Clooney Sales Method. Don't talk about what's important to you. Present yourself as a solution. Just a few quick random things here, which I found more interesting. "On the same day, Goddard tested a single charge rocket weighing about two pounds. It flew about a half a mile." And so I always think about this quote from Bezos where he says, you know, "All big businesses start as small businesses," right?

• 38:31David Senra?

  He uses the oak growing from the acorn example in a lot of his speeches, if you listen to them. And the reason I bring this up is because Goddard just tested a rocket. It weighs two pounds. SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is 230 feet tall and weighs 3 million pounds. From this little kernel of an idea, two-pound rocket. Fast forward, what is it, 110, 120 years? No, about 100 years from now. Yeah, about 100 years where we're in the story. And rockets weigh 3 million pounds.

• 39:03David Senra?

  That's unbelievable to me. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. How you have a rocket that's 23 stories tall? It's amazing to me. Next page. History is full of useful ideas. He had discovered that a rocket was more accurate when its head end was heavier than the rest of the missile. An elementary principle of ballistic stability known to archers, bow and arrow, for millennia. Again, history is full of useful ideas. I love that. Another idea that I thought about when I was reading this book. Bezos has this idea. It's like, do you want the difference between missionaries and mercenaries? And you want a team, people on your team, help you. If you have a goal, you want to recruit other people to help you accomplish your goal. You need missionaries, right? Mercenaries will go around because you pay them most or whatever the case is.

• 39:47David Senra?

  They're in it for what you can do for them. Where missionary believes in what you're actually doing. The people that work on rockets are full of missionaries. They really love to work on rockets. Here's an example of that. This is one of the people helping Goddard. A cartridge exploded while Hickman was opening it, taking off the thumb and two fingers on his left hand. So he's losing three fingers on his left hand and half a finger on his right. He emerged with cuts on his face and chest, but his eyes were all right. He was still game. He continued to work after two more accidents. So Goddard is eventually, I mentioned this earlier. He's going to eventually realize, hey, I can't, I can't use cartridges. I can't use powder. I've got to do, it's got to be liquid fueled rockets, right?

• 40:31David Senra?

  But really, I don't want to skip over too much because a lot of this book is just, it's long, slow work. I can tell you right now, there's no way I could have done what Goddard did. I just don't have that kind of patience. I guess if you're really passionate about something, you definitely could. But I mean, in this case, this is an idea that works eight and 13 years later. Okay, so let me read this and you'll understand what I mean. It took that long for him to admit that no matter how hard he flogged his multi-charged dead horse, it would not get up. Finally, in 1922, when admitting this name, asked Goddard for an accounting, he sent what turned out to be his final report on the multiple charge rocket. He had a position to fall back on, and fortunately for his ego, it was one that he addressed

• 41:16David Senra?

  when he was younger. It was the use of liquid propellants, which he had considered in his notebook in 1909 and then mentioned again in 1914, in his 1914 patent. He returned to hydrogen and oxygen. Liquified oxygen and liquefied oxygen, excuse me, liquefied hydrogen and liquefied oxygen were theoretically ideal as being the elements in their most condensed form. So again, he gave up, he goes back to an idea. First writes it in his notebook in 1909, first mentions it in the patent 1914, spends eight and 13 years working on this multiple-stage powder rocket, right? And eight and 13 years later, he realizes, okay, I had an idea, let me go back to that.

• 41:58David Senra?

  So not only what I found interesting, not only does Goddard have to maintain his own, like he has to deal with his own emotional roller coaster of the ups and downs that are inevitable and creating an entire new technological field, right? But I'm going to read you a sentence here, or a paragraph. The book is full of examples. I could spend the entire time we have together, just reading examples of people telling Goddard, hurry up. And again, I just want to give you an example of that and just realize that it's hard enough dealing with our own internal shenanigans, our own internal mental shenanigans, to not have to get it from the outside. But again, he has to, he doesn't have what Bezos had. He did not have independent wealth. He's got to go to these people and ask for money. And in return, when you get money from somebody, they want to see something in return.

• 42:42David Senra?

  So it says, "The fiscal shortage was aggravated by Abbott's shortening temper. I am, however, consumed with impatience," his patron told him. "And I hope you will be able to actually send a rocket into the air sometime soon. Interplanetary space will look much nearer to me after I've seen one of your rockets go up five or six miles in our own atmosphere." So that's happening in 1923, continues, he's going to get letters and communication from different people, he's relying on different patrons, I guess, to use that word, up until he dies. So eventually, he does have success. He becomes the first person to have a successful flight of a liquid propelled rocket. Okay, never happened before. The year is 1926.

• 43:26David Senra?

  Remember, it was 1899 when he had this idea that this is what he was going to do for his life work. This is 27 years later. He is 44 years old. So winds up going, let's see, 41 feet in the air and travels 184 feet away. It doesn't sound very, very far, but I love that he compares this. He puts it into historical context for us. "A year later, he was still swollen with pride, comparing Aunt Effie's frozen strawberry and cabbage patches," that's where he did his experiments, "to Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers did their experiments. As a first flight," it compares, this is Goddard writing, by the way, "as a first flight, it compares favorably with the Wright's first airplane fight. However, which was 120 feet in distance and a height of 10 feet, it took 12 seconds."

• 44:11David Senra?

  I think his took like, I forgot, a couple of seconds. It was going like 60 miles per hour, so it didn't take that very long. "And the event at demonstrating the first liquid propelled rocket was just as significant. Goddard must be given his due. The first flight of a liquid propelled rocket may have not looked like much, but nothing like it had ever happened on Earth before." And so that's where Goddard distinguishes himself between other people that arrived at similar realizations that rocketry was actually possible. They did it, they proved it on paper. Goddard proved it on paper and then actually proved it in real life. And so that's why he's considered the father of rocketry.

• 44:53David Senra?

  And one of the reasons I love studying the beginning of a field, an industry, a science, is because there's no such thing as experts. There's nobody that you can hire that has experience because what you're doing is brand new. And one of the quotes, all the way back on Founder's Number 50, I read Mark Andreessen's blog archive. And if you go back there, you can actually download, I think I left a link in the show notes on that podcast, hopefully I did, you can actually download his ebook for free. It's like 250 pages of just Mark's thoughts. And he said something in his blog that I never forgot. And he says, "I'm a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time." I'd rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who's done it before and isn't that excited to do it again. But that first part, I'm a firm believer that most people do do great things doing it for the first time. We see

• 45:37David Senra?

  that in, we study the beginning of the automobile industry. You see it in this book as well. And this is how somebody goes from being a janitor to a rocketeer. And that's just inspiring to me. It gets me all fired up. So it says, Goddard used some of the money to hire Charles, Charles Mincher, who was working his way through Clark as a janitor. I asked Goddard for work when he had it, Charles remembered, and sometime in 1929, he told me that he had $100 to put me to work. So I want to include that part because sometimes, you know, they're giving $500 to do, $500 contribution to his research. Maybe it's 2,500. Eventually, the Guggenheim started giving him like 25 grand a year. But he's, the reason I'm bringing this up is because what he, what he's able to accomplish

• 46:22David Senra?

  with the limited resources he has was nothing short of miraculous. Okay. So it says, he told me he'd be given $100 and put me to work. He said, when you think you've earned $100, you quit. Charles stayed until Goddard's death and became a distinguished rocketeer in his own right. Now, something that helped Goddard attract money later on, let's say the last 25% of his career is because the Smithsonian put out a press release on Goddard's paper about, hey, maybe we can land a rocket on the moon. It was picked up by the AP in a very short amount of time. Couple of weeks, he becomes world famous. This gets the attention of Charles Lindbergh, who's, like the author said, is probably the most famous person

• 47:03David Senra?

  on the planet after his first, he was the first person successfully solo, do a transatlantic fright by himself. Okay. Transatlantic flights, excuse me, by himself. So the friendship that Goddard and Lindbergh start.

• 47:19David Senra?

  Also Lindbergh's really good friend with one of the heirs to the Guggenheim. So I actually looked up for the book because the Guggenheim's family is a large part, plays a large role in this book. And this is now, I think, like three or four generations after. I think it was Meyer Guggenheim was like the first, like the generational inflection point, to use that term I've used before. So the one that like started the Guggenheim dynasty. You might, the reason I know the name is because the Guggenheim in New York, it's also, I think, ties together, I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright's last, I think he was working on it when he died, the architecture, obviously. So anyways, from his friendship with Lindbergh, he meets Guggenheim. Guggenheim fawns a lot of this stuff. So this is just a little bit about the three friends.

• 48:03David Senra?

  And I thought this was interesting. So it says, "It was one of the most remarkable friendships of the 20th century, involving three highly intelligent, energetic, and ambitious men. Each guarded his private self behind a wall of tacternity, yet all three were eminently famous. All devoted themselves to the future of human flight." So that's what drew them together, their interests, right? "None would reveal his inner sentiments no more to one another than they would to the world at large." So also private had a deep private life as well, even if they were super famous. "They were different people from different worlds. Harry was a fabulously wealthy capitalist and a modern Renaissance prince with a wide-ranging interest and the wherewithal to pursue them." Very, very wealthy.

• 48:45David Senra?

  "He had a gift of making money and a greater one for giving it away in a quest to improve the world. Yet he was the sort of man who loved humanity in the abstract, but could not get along well with individual members of the species. The Lone Eagle," that's the nickname for Lindbergh, "started out focused on a solitary ambition to fly, became at an early age the world's foremost celebrity, then spent the rest of his life seeking a personal sense of himself by widening his interests while ferociously safeguarding his privacy and that of his family. As for the Rocketeer, a shy man with limited social skills, rocketry was his life, and everybody and everything else was subordinate to his goal of reaching extreme altitudes in his own way and on his own schedule."

• 49:26David Senra?

  One thing that Goddard was remembered for doing for a lot of people that worked for him is he preached resourcefulness. Same thing, if you read Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters, listen to him talk, he talks about resourcefulness over and over and again. So he says, "He taught them to make do with what they had, fashioning fine instruments out of whatever scraps we could find. They wasted nothing." So it talks about having to, again, they don't have a lot of money, rocket blows up, they gotta scavenge whatever they can from the explosion and then build another rocket with it. And so in some cases, they're reusing rocket parts over and over again. It's almost like a patchwork quilt, if you think about it. Like, you can make one rocket that may contain the pieces of

• 50:08David Senra?

  the previous three, or four, or five different rockets. But again, this idea that you have to be resourceful, we have limited money, you cannot waste anything is something Goddard would tell his, not really employees, some of them were, I mean, well, yeah, he was paying them. He was taking money that he was getting from obviously other sources and paying them. So people he'd worked together, whether you want to call them employees or not, it's a great analogy here, another historical analogy that I'm a sucker for. Goddard went on to explain his work, which is aimed at high-altitude research, he said, not outer space. "The Wright brothers," he reminded his audience, "did not try to cross the Atlantic the first time up." So we see the progress of Goddard's work. This is his best work to date. The year is

• 50:49David Senra?

  1930, Goddard is 48 years old. "All was ready on December when Nell," that's what they call rockets, they nicknamed from some kind of show, I forgot what it was. "But when the rocket erupted into life with a thunderous roar, it went about 2,000 feet up in the air and 1,000 feet away," Goddard recorded in his diary. "That only took seven seconds. There was no explosion and little damage. The parachute opened partly and not much was damaged. It was the highest liquid fuel rocket to date, and he was still ahead of everyone else." So I put that up because... He just had his greatest success. He's 40 years old. He's been working on this forever. The money runs out. So he was gonna have no more success over the next two years.

• 51:34David Senra?

  Funding dries up due to the Great Depression that's happening. And he has to go back to being a professor. So I go back to what many people feel is like a fatal flaw. His fatal flaw is his inability to sell his work. And I bring that up to you because the, the, his inability to overcome, whether if you can't sell it yourself, that's fine. Go find somebody that can. But his inability to do that wound up having, he took several years off. He had these interruptions throughout his career. So I pose a question to you. What would he have accomplished if he never had any interruptions? If he didn't have to go back to being a part-time rocketeer? And then another cautionary tale from the life of Goddard is the fact that he was never able to avoid distraction. So it says he was distracted.

• 52:16David Senra?

  His diary reflects increasing time devoted to reading and copying homilies and quotations of a stoical nature. He could be humorously self-pitting. The rocket is, this is him writing, "The rocket is very human. It can raise itself to the very loftiest position solely by the ejection of enormous quantities of hot air." Emerson says, now he's quoting other people he's reading, "If a man paints a better picture, preach a better sermon, or build a better mousetrap than anyone else, the world will make a beaten path to his door. I, like many others, have had the misfortune not to be an artist, a preacher, or a manufacturer of mousetraps." So I didn't even think about that the first time I read it. But now what I, what I was just talking about, about his inability to sell people on, on his work and to, to raise more funding for it. He's kind of reflecting on that too.

• 53:01David Senra?

  He's like, "I have the misfortune not to be an artist, a preacher, or a manufacturer of mousetraps." But again, the, the main lesson here is avoid distraction.

• 53:11David Senra?

  And I bring that up because Goddard never seemed to fix that problem. And I've suffered with that problem myself. I remember reading a quote one time. It was a, I forgot who it was, but his mentor had just died. And he talks about what, what he learned, what his mentor told him. And one of the best things is to, you gotta focus, man. You're not gonna accomplish anything if you don't focus. And he said, "Rabbit-eye kid, quit jumping." Stay focused. And so this is a main lesson because Goddard never fixed this problem. Lindbergh had become impatient with Goddard's switching layouts. So he switching layouts instead of focusing on something simple to make a high flight sooner. So a lot of his people that were responsible for helping with funding wanted him to say, hey,

• 53:53David Senra?

  the higher up a rocket goes, the more attention it draws, the more attention it draws, the more funding you'll get. They kept preaching that to Goddard over and over again, but he'd get distracted instead of optimizing, say, okay, I went up 2,000 feet and let me try to go up 4,000, 5,000, which would have been the shortest path to more money. He'd be like, oh, okay, well, I learned something. Let me try to fix and tweak this little thing, which may help the overall rocket's performance later down the road, but it's not going to help us achieve our first goal. We need it to go higher so we can get more funding. So that's why Lindbergh's pissed off, like stopped switching. In April of 1936, he lectured the Rocketeer. It is extr- and Goddard's now in his 50s. It is extremely difficult for anyone with techni- without technical training and who is not a scientist to properly value scientific work and to and not be influenced by the general recognition of success, which goes with actual demonstration.

• 54:38David Senra?

  So he's saying, people need to see your work. They don't understand the theory behind it. They don't understand, they're not going to be able to say, oh, this is where I'm at now, but don't worry about where I'm at now. Think about what's going to happen five, 10, 50 years into the future. That's not how people think. And that's what Lindbergh's telling them. I feel the morale of everyone concerned would be greatly increased if you would find it possible to obtain a record-breaking flight. Guggenheim agreed. Still, shifting from one idea to another, however, Goddard complicated things further. Going back to this idea between, difference between missionaries and mercenaries, you really have to love your work to do this. The people that work on rockets seem to really love it. This is that Charles, this is the janitor that became, that became a Rocketeer.

• 55:21David Senra?

  So they're trying to do a, they want to do a demonstration, but the weather's not cooperating. So it says, "High winds prevented a launch." So Charles Munzer stayed overnight to guard the rocket. The next morning, a tornado demolished the tower and the rocket, tossing Charles a considerable distance, though without serious injury. So one guy's losing three fingers on one hand, one, half a finger on another hand, getting blown in the face, but can still see. The other guy's getting picked up and thrown by a tornado and still going back to work. That's amazing. This is Goddard. Again, I want to hone, hammer this because I think it was one of the worst mistakes he made and something that we all have to understand. We're, we need the cooperation of other humans. Even if you work alone, you need other humans to understand the value of your work. Honest, this is on his failure to get the money

• 56:06David Senra?

  he needs to operate at the scale he wants. "I've never had myself any great talent for selling ideas," he confessed. So this, he's making the same, and this is the problem. He's making the same mistake he had in World War I and World War II. Again, if you're asking people for money, you have to be able to tell them what they're getting in return. He refused to do this. "His failure to cooperate with his potential clients," this is the military, "by adapting himself and his rocketry to their needs caused them to turn down all his proposals." Why is that important? Because they're turning, there's no money. "He did not sufficiently explain how his rockets might be useful in warfare." They don't care about getting to Mars. They're trying to defeat, in this case, the Germans again and

• 56:50David Senra?

  the rest of the Axis. If you're asking people for money, you should be able to tell them what they will get in return. And unfortunately, the last few years of his life, because he's dying from cancer, you know, they're not, he never gets to see, he dies, let's see, he had this dream in 1899, dies in 1945. They, we, humans get to the moon in 1969. So he had this idea of going to another planet in 1899. So that doesn't happen for, what, 72 years later. So it says, "Goddard would not see that happen because he was dying." Beginning in early 1943, a diary entry stating "Stayed in bed all day" became increasingly frequent. "The doctor discovered a growth in his throat and advised immediate surgery."

• 57:32David Senra?

  So he dies of throat cancer. His dad died of the same thing. "Goddard's iron will had seen him through tuberculosis, his smoking and drinking, and his frustrations in long hours of his work, but it could not conquer throat cancer. The disease, the disease had claimed his father as well. He communicated by writing on a notepad and refused to admit that he was in pain." So he was married to a very supportive wife his entire life. Her name was Esther. They were married for 21 years. She outlived him by like 37 years and the vast majority of her life is spent building up and making sure that he got credit for all of his life's work. Esther was there day in and day out, but on the morning of August 10th, 1945, she needed to go home for a few hours. He's in the hospital. While she was gone, he died

• 58:17David Senra?

  quietly. So this is a quote from one of his obituaries. Even more impressive than Dr. Goddard's technical skill, insight, and ingenuity were his extraordinary perseverance, patience, and courage. He carried on many of his investigations in the teeth of public skepticism and indifference. With limited financial resources, again, I just can't help think how Bezos knew that and then corrected for that. With limited financial resources and in spite of heartbreaking technical difficulties, a combination of obstacles which might have baffled and disheartened a less stouted-hearted pioneer. Almost single-handedly, Dr. Goddard developed rocketry from a vague dream to one of the most significant branches of modern engineering. And everything he accomplished, he did on a limited budget, I don't think

• 58:59David Senra?

  he ever had more than maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen people working with him. So it is rather remarkable. Now, after his death, his wife goes with the help of Guggenheim and Lindbergh and all these other people, they get biographies written about him. You know, there's all kinds of, so many different things are named after Goddard. But this is how Goddard's wife remembered him. And the last sentence is the most important, and I want to connect this to last week's biography too, okay? "It presented him the way she wanted the world to know him, as a boy of exceptional brilliance, of humble origins and poor health, who dreamed great dreams and pursued them throughout a dedicated life. He was a distinguished but absent-minded professor, a saintly man of rich humor, an

• 59:43David Senra?

  enthusiastic piano player and painter, loved by everybody who knew him. Although his own country failed to appreciate the importance of what he did, he continued his work despite widespread ridicule and the attempts of others to steal it. He never complained, never evinced discouragement or frustration." And here's the last sentence. "Above all, he never gave up." So that's how Goddard's wife remembered him. She dedicated decades of her, the last few decades of her life to doing that. And I couldn't help but think, it's like, let's compare that to Alfred Nobel's, his, the strongest relationship he had, the closest thing he ever got to a spouse was, was that woman Sophie, which they referred to as his mistress, right? Because they never got married.

• 1:00:28David Senra?

  And, you know, she, her letters are really shitty towards him. She pumps him for money. After he dies, she threatens his estate with blackmail. And the reason I bring that up is because I think it was through Tim Urban's blog, Wait But Why, which I've recommended many times, is he has this idea, or he expresses this idea, it's not new, but saying if, if you're trying to have a happy life, right? Two decisions you have to nail, you have to get right, and that's your spouse and what you do for work. And it's very hard to have a happy, satisfying life if you don't make, if you don't make those two decisions correct. So Goddard, even though he never got to see the fruition of his dreams, seemed to enjoy his life. He picked his life's passion, worked at it for multiple decades until he couldn't work anymore. And he had a good relationship with somebody that actually cared about him.

• 1:01:13David Senra?

  Alfred was miserable. I don't even, he didn't seem to enjoy his work very much, even though he was very successful at it, and never, and had, kept a person around him that was horrible. And so I just, I always think about, okay, yes, I want, I want to get ideas to use in work. I want to learn from these biographies, but there's a goal here. I want to make sure that I don't waste the one life I have. And by reading these stories and learning from the people that have come before me, I'm going to grab the good ideas and avoid their mistakes. And again, I think Tim is right. Nail those two decisions. Pick the right spouse and pick the right, what you're going to do for work. And I think Goddard got that right, and Nobel did not. Just a few more things here.

• 1:01:58David Senra?

  This is the similarities of the three fathers of rocketry. One American, one German, and one Russian. The lies of the three fathers reveal some interesting similarities. All were inspired by Jules Verne. All were teachers oriented toward applied mathematics. All produced treatises demonstrating that projecting objects into space by means of liquid field combustion were theoretically possible.

• 1:02:21David Senra?

  Each had a streak of mysticism and indulged in fantasy. Each had a flawed personality and a difficulty getting along with others. Yet each was likable enough to turn acquaintances into devoted admirers. Each had a monumental ego that approached the narcissistic. All three lived to see the field each believed he had invented pass them by. Goddard's achievements paraded his first, and they made formidable lists. He first applied a dilaval nozzle to a rocket, most likely mispronouncing that, and so redefined the rocket motor. He first proved that a rocket would work in a vacuum.

• 1:03:01David Senra?

  He turned multi-stage and liquid fuel rocketry into mechanical designs, not just ideas. He redefined battlefield rocketry and provided the conceptual foundation for the bazooka. His 1919 publication on reaching extreme altitudes was original, monumental, and elegant. He was the first inventor to launch a liquid fuel rocket, the first to produce a rocket with inertial guidance system, the first to use a thrust vector control in a rocket, the first to use a gimbal engine, the first to build turbopumps for a rocket, the first to assemble liquid fueled rocket motors in clusters, and the first to send a powered

• 1:03:45David Senra?

  vehicle faster than the speed of sound. The list of achievements was reflected by 214 patents in his name. In 1960, the American federal agencies concurred with Guggenheim's claim that no rocket or jet aircraft could take to the sky without Goddard's inventions. Goddard the man was a complex and sometimes inscrutable individual. He had many admirable qualities, chief among them the patience, persistence, and iron will that helped him to overcome tuberculosis, then to pursue rocketry for three decades. Seldom expressing frustration or discouragement, he accepted failure as part of invention and kept on working.

• 1:04:29David Senra?

  Charles Lindbergh believed he knew where Robert Goddard stood in the pantheon of the world's rocketeers. As he once said, "Probably no figure in the history of science had a greater vision than that of Robert Goddard, or more courage and tenacity in translating his vision into fact."

• 1:04:48David Senra?

  The determination of a youth to conquer the universe in spite of doctor's warnings that he have few weeks more to live, the vision of a man physically projecting himself off his earth and into space, the design and construction of prototypes by which this project would shortly be accomplished. What more is needed to carry mortal man into the fields of the immortals?

• 1:05:15David Senra?

  And that is where I'll leave it. If you want the full story, I highly recommend buying the book. If you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 164 books down, 1,000 to go. Thank you very much for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.