If you count Robert Goddard, it’s about 100 years.
Goddard only got up to about two miles in altitude, but he did it with a liquid-fueled engine.
Too bad he didn’t like math, or he might have figured out how to scale his combustion chambers up without melting them. Of course, he wouldn’t have had access to high-speed turbopumps even if he had figured out regenerative cooling.
Goddard did not put anything into space. Neither did the Chinese who invented the solid fuel rocket which is also used to launch crafts into space.
Goddard was a genius and von Braun took all his knowledge to put the first man made object into space.