No reader will be surprised that the origins of rockets as agents of warfare lay in China. There have been occasional references to ‘fireworks’ in antiquity, though nobody can be sure whether these connote anything more than the use of incendiary devices. Gunpowder was long in the making, and we can be certain that alchemists had experimented with inflammable powders for centuries before explosives were perfected. The discovery of black powder is agreed to have been in ninth-century China, and emerged from experiments by Taoist philosophers. Rockets were an inevitable consequence. The first rockets were made by packing black powder into stems of bamboo, and the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan and his son Ögedei used them successfully against Europeans in the thirteenth century. And so rockets were being used in warfare 700 years ago.
Yet it was in India that the first metal rockets were designed and built. The British East India Company fought for decades to subdue the kingdom of Mysore and in 1792 rockets made of iron were designed and built for the rulers of Mysore, Haider Ali and his son Tipu Sultan. The metal casing was some 8in (20cm) long and gave these rockets a range of over half a mile (about 2km) and they so surprised the British that attempts were made to copy them. Examples were sent back to the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, London, where Sir William Congreve developed the design and introduced the (better-known) Congreve rocket which was successful in the Napoleonic wars. Although the Congreve rocket deserves a place in the history of rocketry, it was the Indian craftsmen who had produced the first successful iron rockets. They were launched in their thousands and deserve a conspicuous place in military history.
These rockets were stabilized by having a rod protruding from the rear, just like today’s firework rockets launched from a bottle. In 1844 a self-taught British inventor, William Hale, improved the design so that the thrust was slightly vectored to produce spin along the axis of travel like a rifle bullet. The flight path was stabilized by this design change and the stick was no longer needed. The largest Congreve rockets had weighed up to 32lb (15kg) and Hale’s design allowed this to be doubled to 60lb (about 28kg). These were used by the Americans during the Mexican — American War of 1846–48 and the British Army also used Hale rockets during the Crimean War of 1853–56.
It was in the early years of the twentieth century that matters began to develop in several countries. A Russian high school mathematics teacher named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky published a paper entitled The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices which was the first scientific work on rocketry. He proposed the use of liquid hydrogen and oxygen as propellants and calculated the maximum exhaust velocity they could generate. The publication date of this far-sighted book was 1903.
Knowing nothing of his Russian predecessor, a French aviator named Robert Esnault-Pelterie delivered a lecture to the French Physics Society (Societé Française de Physique) in 1912 entitled ‘Consideration of the Results of the Unlimited Lightening of Motors’ in which he included similar calculations on the output of rocket engines, and even advocated nuclear power (from half a ton of radium) as an energy source for long-distance space travel. Esnault-Pelterie was later in contact with Romanian-born Hermann Oberth, who was destined to become one of Germany’s greatest authorities on military rockets.
It was also in 1912 that the American enthusiast Robert Goddard began his study of rockets. He proposed a small combustion chamber as the best source of power and even outlined the use of multi-stage rockets. Goddard was a highly enterprising visionary and ensured that his ideas were patented in 1914. He patented two inventions. The first was for a rocket using liquid fuel; the second was for a two- or even a three-stage rocket propelled by solid fuel. Two years later he compiled a paper on rocketry at Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1919 the Smithsonian Institution published this paper as a modest book entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. In the following year Goddard was published in the prestigious science journal Nature where he began with these propitious words:
It is the purpose of the present article to state the general principles and possibilities of the method of reaching great altitudes with multiple charge rockets, from which the exploded gases are ejected with high efficiency.[4]
Goddard spent time over the next few years perfecting his design for a rocket with liquid fuel and his first successful rocket flight took place on 16 March 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts. It flew from a 6ft (1.8m) gantry on a short, explosive flight that lasted no more than 3 or 4 seconds; but it proved that the concept worked. Within three years his improved specifications gave steadily improving results — his small rockets could now travel some 200ft (70m) at speeds of up to 60mph (about 95km/h). In 1930 he logged an altitude of 2,000ft (6,000m) and a velocity of 500mph (800km/h). This was truly astonishing progress.
Little general interest was shown in Goddard’s work at the time, and what comments were published had an unenthusiastic tone. Goddard never had the satisfaction of seeing his views take root. Those who knew of his work regarded him largely as a crank.
One of Goddard’s most influential inventions was a portable rocket-powered shell that could be launched by a soldier. With a colleague, Clarence Hickman, Goddard had given a successful demonstration of his invention at the United States Army Signal Corps at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in November 1918. The demonstration was a complete success, but the war ended two days later and the proposal did not develop further. It was revived in World War II, and went on to evolve into the bazooka, which became one of the best-known rocket-powered devices in history.
Goddard had declared his private beliefs in the class oration which he gave on graduating back in 1904. ‘It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today,’ he said, ‘and the reality of tomorrow.’ The twentieth century, and the remarkable events of World War II, would prove how true those words would be.
Rockets had been used during World War I, first by the French. In April 1916, Le Prieur rockets fired from the struts of a Nieuport fighter had brought down the German Zeppelin LC-77 full of blazing hydrogen. Later in the conflict a Belgian flyer, Willy Coppens, and a British pilot, Albert Ball, used small experimental rockets against German balloons. Nothing came of either event, and incendiary shells were found to be more effective.
During the 1920s there were enthusiasts studying rocketry in Russia, France and the United States, but there was little sense of common purpose. In Germany, however, the burgeoning sense of nationalism began to catch the popular imagination. Hermann Oberth was one of the greatest visionaries. He was a medical student at Munich and in 1922 he wrote to Goddard in America to request reprints of his writings on rocketry. Oberth was writing a book which in 1923 was published as Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Interplanetary Space) in which he emphasized how much he had been impressed by Goddard’s writings, which he cited, but went on to write that his book had not in any way plagiarized his American forebear. But interest was suddenly growing in Germany. The very next year Max Valier published Der Vorstross in Weltraum (The Drive to Outer Space) and a year after that Walter Hohmann published his book entitled Die Erreichbarkeit der Himmelskörper (The Attainability of Celestial Bodies). This volume was so technically detailed that it was still being consulted decades later by NASA. In 1926 Willy Ley published his popular book Die Fahrt ins Weltall (Journey into Space) and in July 1927 a group of amateur rocketry enthusiasts — engineers, scientists, doctors, students — met at a restaurant in Breslau to launch the Society for Space Travel (Verein für Raumschiffahrt, known as the VfR), with Hermann Oberth at its heart. It is worth noting that this was an association, not a university department. Although rockets were suddenly fashionable, they remained a subject for amateurs.
4
Goddard, Robert H., ‘A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes’,