It WAS Goddard.
Oberth was corresponding with Goddard in the late 1920s and Oberth later said that this was the foundation that the German space exploration society that he and Von Braun put together.
All the major elements of modern rockets were designed and patented by Goddard. Every rocket today that flies is a Goddard rocket, just with improvements.
When Von Braun and Rudolph were questioned by OSS after the war about what they did at Peenemunde, they said why are you asking us? We learned all of this from Goddard.
But because Goddard refused to be sucked into the Aerojet gang of Malina and Von Karman, he was pointedly not funded and ignored by the Army. His funding came from Guggenheim at the urging of Lindbergh.
He also invented triode tube amplifiers that were the basis for Collins Radios. He assigned that patent to Art Collins for free to spite David Sarnoff and RCA, who copied his patents and then tried to claim that DeForrest was the inventor. The resulting lawsuit ended in 1959 in Goddard’s favor, but of course it was way too late and he had died.
Goddard was a 100% American genius and creator. The Germans were smart guys and worked hard, but it was always the stupidity of American military bureaucrats that looked elsewhere for engineering capability rather then at home, probably because they couldn’t put up with a guy who was independent and didn’t need their “guidance” going down the wrong paths.
You got that right!!!
Whoa! I thought DeForest DID invent the triode. Didn't the USPS even put out a stamp some years ago commemorating that? I didn't know about the Sarnoff angle but I did read a book about (the SOB) Sarnoff stealing the technology for television from Philo Farnsworth, who'd invented it.
The New York Times on Goddard, in a 1921 editorial:
“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 . . .”
Isn’t it gratifying to know that when it came to things scientific the so-called “paper of record” had its collective head as far up its collective posterior 100 years ago as it does today (as evidenced by its pontifications on global warming/climate change/climate disruption/whatever they’re calling it today).