Re: [Phys-l] NYT editorial 1920

["Laurent Hodges" <lhodges@iastate.edu>]

There was a most interesting humorous followup to this.  On or about the date
the first Americans landed on the moon, 49 years later, the Times reprinted this
short comment and admitted it was incorrect, concluding with something like "The
Times regrets the error."

Laurent Hodges

> As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the  
> highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor  
> Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It  
> is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the  
> moon that one begins to doubt . . . for after the rocket quits our  
> air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither  
> accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then  
> might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College  
> and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the  
> relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something  
> better than a vacuum against which to react . . . Of course he only  
> seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. - New  
> York Times editorial, 1920
>
>
> bc suspects high schools then, certainly now, were better at the FCI  
> than the editorial staff of the NYT
>
>
> p.s. UnderNews 2008 Feb. 02 
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