One hundred year anniversary

Hundred year anniversaries of new technologies don't come up very often, especially in the subject area of space exploration but today is one. 

100 years ago, a liquid-fueled rocket flew into the sky for the very first time. The unlikely contraption was designed by Clark University physics professor Robbert Goddard, and launched from a cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts on March 16, 1926. 

Today, Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), who directed the flight, is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern rocketry, along with Hermann Oberth in Germany and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia. A tiny rocket by any standards, with a very short flight, his rocket named Nell was fueled by a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen. 

A picture you've probably seen before, Robert H. Goddard with his first rocket, Nell. Image from Wikipedia, with a long description including current NASA ownership and its history.

Nell flew for a blistering 2-1/2 seconds and achieved a height of 41 feet. Still, it showed the concepts would work and it even used one of Goddard's design concepts that is still widely used today allowing the super cold liquid oxygen to cool the rocket combustion chamber while the oxygen was leaving the fuel tank.

For his first liquid-fueled rocket flight, Goddard tried putting the engine on top of the fuel and oxidizer tanks in a belief it would create more stability, according to NASA. Following flight tests, Goddard moved the engines underneath the propellant tanks, which "simplified the overall design", and instead for stability added moveable vanes to the engine exhaust and gyroscopes. "He was one of the very first people to take the theoretical ideas around rocketry, and actually turn them into an experiment and really apply the scientific methods and experimentation,"

I'm sure I've read about Goddard and his contributions to developing modern rocketry, but putting this little post together demonstrated that it was mostly lost to memory decay. "If you don't use it, you lose it." The sources I used put together good, readable and short biographies. These were

• Space.com: "2 seconds that changed the world: Robert Goddard launched the 1st liquid-fueled rocket 100 years ago today" 
• NASA: "95 Years Ago: Goddard’s First Liquid-Fueled Rocket" - obviously a celebration article from five years ago, but very readable and good.  
• Ars Technica: "A century after the first rocket launch, Ars staffers pick their favorites" much less page space on R. H. Goddard   

It's worth noting, and the Space.com article has the details that I looked at, that Goddard died young in 1945, of throat cancer, and his wife Esther was instrumental in conveying his history and advocating for him. She was essential in filing his patents. Often, she was the only person who could read his notes to put the patent applications together. Esther got approval for 131 patents of his 214 overall.

EDIT 3/17 @ 0755 EST: In the last paragraph I inadvertently changed that first sentence from "died young in 1945" to  "died young, 45,"