Who really thought that? Who thought that it violated the laws of physics?
Well, there was this moron:
That Professor Goddard with his "chair" in Clark College and the countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution does not know the relation of action to reaction, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react--to say that would be absurd. Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools...In short, he was saying that rocket travel was impossible because in the vacuum of space it would have nothing to "push against", and that even schoolchildren should know this...
-- New York Times editorial, 1921.
But then again, since that moron was an editorial writer and not an actual expert, that just proves the wisdom of Sloth's original comment: "You guys should take notice that aside from yourselves, the only other people treating this as plausible are the dumbest people in the world (i.e., TV journalists)." TV journalist, newspaper editorialist -- same difference.
The New York Times, wrong then, wron now..