Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. Originally set in England, Wells’s novel was adapted for the Boston area and appeared under the title Fighters from Mars, or The War of the Worlds, in and near Boston. See “Material for an Autobiography of R. H. Goddard, Written in July 1927, with interpolations made in 1933,” PRHG, 1:7. 2. “Material for an Autobiography,” PRHG, 1:9–10. 3. “On Taking Things for Granted,” graduation oration, South High School, Worcester , Mass., June 24, 1904, PRHG, 1:66. 4. See PRHG, 2:656; PRHG, 1–3, passim; and Milton Lehman, This High Man (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1963), 22. 5. Robert H. Goddard, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 71, no. 2 (1919): 1–69. 6. He calculated the amount of flash powder a rocket would have to carry to ignite on the moon and be visible from Earth. See Goddard, “Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” 55–57. 7. “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon,” New York Times, January 12, 1920, 1, 3; “Modern Jules Verne Invents Rocket to Reach Moon,” Boston American, January 12, 1920, 1. 8. Bronx Exposition, Inc., to Smithsonian Institute, January 12, 1920, box 2, RHG, published in PRHG, 1:408–9. 9. “First Volunteer for Leap to Mars,” New York Times, February 5, 1920, 1; “Woman Asks to Rocket with Capt. Collins to Moon,” New York American, March 21, 1920, 1; “Asks for First Ride to the Moon,” New York World, September 21, 1920, 1; “Volunteers for a Trip to Mars in a Rocket” news clipping and Vanora Guth to Smithsonian Institution, April 3, 1920, box 2, RHG. Public response was so great that, the editors of Goddard’s published papers explained, “only a few examples from the deluge to the Smithsonian Institution and Dr. Goddard following the early 1920 publicity are included.” PRHG, 1:408n. See various letters, PRHG, 2:583, 584, 666, 911–12. 10. Lehman, This High Man, 110. 11. Statement by R. H. Goddard for newspapers, January 18, 1920, PRHG, 1:409. 12. R. H. Goddard to Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, January 19, 1920, box 2, RHG, published in PRHG, 1:410. 13. Lehman, This High Man, 111. 318 NotestoPages3–6 14. William Sims Bainbridge, The Spaceflight Revolution (Malabar: Robert E. Krieger, 1983), 28–29. See also PRHG, 1–3, passim. 15. John Henry Boyle, “Oh They’re Going to Shoot a Rocket to the Moon, Love” (1922), cited in Lehman, This High Man, 110; Walter Rolfe, “The Moon–Rocket March” (1924), Samuel DeVincent Sheet Music Collection, series 1, box 7, NMAH. 16. Roy Turk-Willy White, “I’m Going Way Up to Mars” (1920), DeVincent Sheet Music Collection, series 1, box 7, NMAH. 17. Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931), 197. 18. On the cultural prestige of science in this period, see Marcel C. LaFollette, Making Science Our Own (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); and Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971). For a different perspective, see John C. Burnham, How Superstition Won and Science Lost (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 19. Thomas P. Hughes, Human-Built World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2–4, observes that while the word “technology” existed, it was not popularly used until after World War II. 20. Cultural histories of technology include Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Leo Marx, The Pilot and the Passenger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine (New York: Penguin, 1977). 21. Allen, Only Yesterday, 199. 22. Allen, Only Yesterday, 197. 23. On the “American Way of Life,” see Charles McGovern, Sold American (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 8. On the “American Dream,” see James Truslow Adam, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), 214–15. 24. Gramsci notes the interest and regard the European Left held for American technological movements such as Fordism and Technocracy. See Antonio Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 279–318. 25. Allen, Only Yesterday, 197. 26. Patrick Rizzo, “A History of the First Forty Years of the Amateur Astronomers Association,” adapted by Stephen Lieber for the Amateur Astronomers Association website, http://www.aaa.org/membersarticle12; “4,500 Battle in Museum to See Einstein Film,” New York Times, January 9, 1930, 3. 27...