These rockets followed all three of Sir Isaac Newton's three laws of motion. Mainly, however, it was Newton's third law which was in effect: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Thus, when the rocket's burning gases thrust downward, the opposite reaction is a thrust upward, sending the rocket in a fiery are into the night sky.
In the 1700's William Congreve, in England, tested improved Chinese rockets as weapons of war. They achieved little success at the time, although when Francis Scott Key wrote the Star Spangled Banner during the War of 1812, the phrase, "the rockets' red glare" referred to Congreve missiles fired by the British against Fort McHenry.
The real father of modern rocketry was the American, Dr. Robert Goddard, a physics professor who, in the early 1900's, began experiments with rockets to send weather-recording instruments higher than meteorological balloons had ever gone.
He tried both solid fuel (powder) and liquid fuel (gasoline and oxygen), and in 1926 the world's first liquid-propelled rocket was successfully fired at Auburn, Massachusetts.
Starting with his first crude apparatus, he went on to add guidance features, an automatic parachute to bring recording instruments back to earth safely, and subsequently developed the principie of the multistage rocket which, forty years later, was used to put both United States and Russian satellites into orbit around the Earth.
Goddard's first rocket
