Although the AIS kept detailed financial records on costs, there is no indication that the organization paid any sort of rent or fee for the use of the field. A single $10 bill for \u201a\u00c4\u00famaterials labor and services\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 may have covered everything supplied by Schuck\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s Garage.<\/p>\n
\u201a\u00c4\u00faMy dad never talked too much about it,\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 Richard Schuck remembered. \u201a\u00c4\u00faIt wasn\u201a\u00c4\u00f4t that important. The launch frame was easy work for a competent welder, although it was custom-built and had to be hauled to the field. People in town seemed to have thought these people were no more than friendly crackpots, willing to spend some money, presumably harmless, who were just fooling around at something.\u201a\u00c4\u00f9<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This would explain why Egbert T. Bush never bothered to write about the \u201a\u00c4\u00f2friendly crackpots.\u201a\u00c4\u00f4<\/p>\n
\u201a\u00c4\u00faThe steel and lumber was hauled up to what is now the Michelenko property,\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 Mr. Reading remembered. \u201a\u00c4\u00faI was dying to go watch it all with some pals of mine. It was deer season, and I had done some hunting up in that area, of course. But my mother got wind of it and wouldn\u201a\u00c4\u00f4t let me out of the house. On a Saturday, too! Word had gotten around that these New York folks were going to explode some sort of bomb up there, and she was certain that I\u201a\u00c4\u00f4d get too close and be blown to bits!\u201a\u00c4\u00f9<\/p>\n
Nobody from Stockton, not even the property owners, seems to have observed what actually happened. Mr. Pendray\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s papers say that since the electrical igniter did not work, David Lasser volunteered to touch off the motor fuse, using a crude torch made of rags soaked in gasoline. One of the Acme photos shows Mr. Lasser, in his shirt-sleeves, torch in hand, running for cover, the motor already spewing flames.<\/p>\n
\u201a\u00c4\u00faIn an instant,\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 Mr. Pendray wrote, \u201a\u00c4\u00fathere was a great flare, as the pure oxygen struck the burning fuel . . . The gasoline was also pouring into the rocket motor. With a furious, hissing roar, a bluish-white sword of flame about 20 inches in length shot from the nozzle . . . and the rocket lunged upward against the retaining spring.\u201a\u00c4\u00f9<\/p>\n
The small group of experimenters was so excited by this, Mr. Pendray admitted, that they all \u201a\u00c4\u00faforgot to count the seconds, as they passed, in that downward-pouring cascade of flame.\u201a\u00c4\u00f9<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mr. Pendray made some claims about the success of the test, but they were \u201a\u00c4\u00faroughly 10 times longer, bigger or better than anything Dr. Goddard (or the Germans) had yet achieved.\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 The following day, the weather continued bad, and the rocket had been blown off its platform, so further tests were cancelled, and the group left Stockton Sunday evening to return to New York.<\/p>\n
All except Frank Pierce, who waited until Monday to bring the rocket paraphernalia back by train. Adding the cost of Pierce\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s rail freight and his extra room and board brought the total expenditure to $99. The AIS received $98 in royalties from sale of the photographs taken of the test. Bruce Palmer asked:<\/p>\n
Was the Stockton test worth doing? It would seem so.<\/p>\n
Mr. Pierce noted that the fuel lines had nearly clogged with frozen vapor, a promise of high-altitude engine failure unless somehow solved. The aluminum nozzle that concentrated the thrust had partly melted, despite the ice jacket cooling.<\/p>\n
The AIS urged that liquid oxygen be used to prevent meltdown. That idea was promptly adopted, in this country by Dr. Goddard, and by scientists abroad, including a promising young graduate student in Berlin, named Wehrner von Braun, creator of the V-2 ballistic rocket a decade later.<\/p>\n
What happened to Rocket #1? The following spring, repaired, improved and renamed Rocket #2, it rose from Red Hook, N.Y., reaching a height of 200 feet, an unofficial world record at that time.<\/p>\n
But it blew up, a grim precursor of all the rocket disasters the world has witnessed since.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
G. Edward Pendray<\/strong> was born on May 19, 1901 in Omaha, Nebraska, but he lived in Jamesburg, NJ for many years, and died on Sept. 15, 1987 at Cranbury, NJ. He and wife Leatrice M. Gregory married in 1927. After the New York Herald-Tribune, he was science editor for Literary Digest until 1936 when he was hired by Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Co., with responsibility for public relations at the 1939 World\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s Fair in New York. While there, he coined the word \u201a\u00c4\u00f2laundromat.\u201a\u00c4\u00f4<\/p>\nPendray, despite his competition with Robert Goddard, ended up editing Goddard\u201a\u00c4\u00f4s papers with his widow. The American Rocket Society, formerly the American Interplanetary Society, in turn became the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), which gives out the \u201a\u00c4\u00faG. Edward Pendray Award.\u201a\u00c4\u00f9 In the 1950s, Pendray was involved with the Guggenheim Institute of Flight Structures at Columbia University, and the establishment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.