Physicist Robert H. Goddard fired 'Nell,' a spindly rocket powered by liquid oxygen and gasoline, from a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. It climbed just 41 feet and flew for 2.5 seconds before crashing 184 feet away, but the flight proved liquid propellant rocketry was possible, laying the theoretical and practical groundwork for the space age decades later.
Goddard had been dismissed in the press as a crank; a 1920 New York Times editorial had mocked his idea of rockets working in a vacuum, apparently unaware that rockets don't need air to push against. Undeterred, he spent years in secrecy and near-poverty, funded partly by the Smithsonian Institution, building small liquid-fueled engines in a Massachusetts machine shop.
On a cold, snow-patched afternoon at his Aunt Effie's farm, Goddard and his crew set up the ten-foot rocket, nicknamed 'Nell,' which looked more like plumbing than a spacecraft. It ignited, rose about 41 feet in 2.5 seconds, reaching roughly 60 mph, then arced into a cabbage field 184 feet away. Goddard's understated diary entry described the flight almost clinically, but he understood its significance. It would take another two decades and the German V-2 program, which drew on Goddard's patents, before the world caught up to what he had proven in that farm field: a controllable, throttleable liquid rocket engine was the future of flight beyond the atmosphere. The New York Times would not retract its mockery until 1969, the day after Apollo 11 launched.