16... Tried rocket at 2.30. It rose 41 ft, & went 184 ft, in 2.5 secs, after the lower half of nozzle had burned off. Brought materials to lab. Read Mech., Phys. of Air and wrote up expt. in eve.
17...The first flight with a rocket using liquid propellants was made yesterday at Aunt Effie’s farm in Auburn.
The day was clear and comparatively quiet. The anemometer on the Physics lab was turning leisurely when Mr. Sachs and I left in the morning, and was turning as leisurely when we returned at 5.30 pm
Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.
It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said “I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.” Esther said that it looked like a fairy or an esthetic dancer, as it started off.
The sky was clear, for the most part, with large shadowy white clouds, but late in the afternoon there was a large pink cloud in the west, over which the sun shone. One of the surprising things was the absence of smoke, the lack of very loud roar, and the smallness of the flame.
(ECG: my own comment now seams pretty excited, but it was a beautiful sight to us all.)
That last comment is from Esther, his fiercely devoted wife.
I dabbled with rocketry in 4-H many moons ago, in large part because of Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode, Blues for a Red Planet. Anyway, I've checked a certain almost-trillionaire's Twitter feed, and sadly see no mention of this century-old milestone on our journey to Mars. He might act as though he's an engineer who developed spaceflight from first principles, but real ones know the true giant here.
Selah.
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