March 16 · This Day in America
On a snowy cabbage farm in Auburn, Massachusetts, a quiet Clark University physicist named Robert Goddard lights a contraption of gasoline and liquid oxygen and steps back. His wife Esther films it. The rocket rises — wobbling, alive — climbs forty-one feet, flies for two and a half seconds, and drops in the field a hundred and eighty feet away. By any ordinary measure it is almost nothing. By the measure of history it is everything: the first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket, the same principle that will one day lift men off the planet entirely. Newspapers mocked Goddard for suggesting a rocket could reach the Moon. Forty-three years later, Apollo 11's crew flew there on his idea. "It is difficult to say what is impossible," he wrote, "for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow."
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1751
He is small, soft-spoken, and frequently sick — and he will out-think nearly everyone in the room. Born this day in Virginia, James Madison arrives at the Constitutional Convention with a plan already drafted, takes the notes that are now our clearest record of it, co-writes the Federalist essays, and authors the Bill of Rights. The "Father of the Constitution" did not look like a founder. He just built the machine the country still runs on.
Source: www.montpelier.org
“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”Robert H. Goddard, 1904