American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard had visionary ideas about space travel, but he kept them secret, detailing them fully only in a private journal. In 1919, however, he was pressured into making his research public. He reluctantly agreed to publish a paper on rocketry that he had written three years earlier as part of a request for a research grant from the Smithsonian Institution.
So the Smithsonian published Goddard's paper, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, in January 1920. To promote the scholarly book, the Smithsonian issued a press release highlighting a speculation that Goddard had made about sending a rocket to the Moon. A few days after this release, Goddard was appalled to find himself and his ideas spread across every front page in America.
Overnight he was transformed from an obscure scientist into a wild-eyed maniac whom the media now called "the Moon man." The idea of a machine that could roar up into the sky and then land on the Moon was absolute madness.
Immediately after this press coverage, Goddard was hounded by everyone from adventurers to composers to Hollywood press agents. He was criticized for shoddy science and was publicly humiliated in the pages of the New York Times.
Goddard made a few futile efforts to clarify his theories in scientific journals and various newspapers, but he soon gave up and retreated to his physics shop on the Clark University campus. He later wrote in his diary that he would have been better off attaching some wild scenario about a mission to Mars to his paper: the press would undoubtedly have ignored the story as too outrageous.
