American physicist Robert Goddard won his first patent for a liquid-fuel "rocket apparatus" on July 7, 1914, and by the following autumn he was building his first prototypes in the physics shop at Clark University. The process from prototypes to launch would take twelve years.
Goddard based his earliest rocket designs on anything from Chinese fireworks to simple artillery. In 1916, however, he approached the Smithsonian Institution for a research grant for "atmospheric" study and received a large sum for the time -- $1,000 and a promise of $4,000 more as needed. The money enabled Goddard to build larger, more complex rockets.
In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, the Army Signal Corps offered to finance Goddard's work if he would investigate the use of rockets as weapons. Goddard agreed and, continuing work he had already begun, produced a recoilless rocket launcher the following year. The Signal Corps was impressed, but four days later, the war ended and so did the Corps' interest.
Goddard had yet to make progress toward anything that could be called a spaceship or even an atmospheric probe, and he realized that he had far to go to resolve the engineering problems that he faced.
One of the biggest of these problems involved aerodynamics and the distribution of weight in a rocket as it used up its fuel. Goddard devised the ultimate solution to this problem with what he called the "step rocket" or multiple-stage rocket. This design called for several fuel chambers. The largest one got the missile off the ground, and then successively smaller ones kept the payload flying. As each chamber or stage ran out of fuel, it dropped from the rocket and the next took over.
Goddard launched the first working liquid-fuel rocket on March 16, 1926. His multi-stage rocket was one of the most fundamental developments in the history of rocketry. Without it, space travel would never have been realized as early as it was.
