Rocket flight idea hatched at Queen’s U

• An unknown Canadian university principal proposed rocketbased space flight 30 years before some more famous scientists suggested it would work.

Historian Robert Godwin says William Leitch of Queen’s University in Kingston accurately described the concept of rocket-based space flight in 1861.

Previous histories of space flight have maintained that the first scientific proposal of rocket-powered space travel came at the end of the 19th century, from Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and by American Robert Goddard.

Both claimed Jules Verne as their inspiration, but Godwin said Leitch published his thoughts four years before Verne’s famous “space gun.”

“There is no doubt in my mind that Leitch deserves a place of honour in the history of space flight,” said Godwin. “The fact that he was a scientist is the key to this story. He wasn’t just making a wild guess.

“Not only did he understand Newton’s law of action and reaction, he almost dismissively understood that a rocket would work more efficiently in the vacuum of space; a fact that still caused Goddard and others to be subjected to ridicule almost six decades later.”

Godwin’s findings were published Sunday in The First Scientific Concept of Rockets for Space Travel.

“Whereas Goddard and Tsiolkovsky got their first inspiration from the science fiction of Wells and Verne, Leitch seems to have been inspired by

The fact that he was a scientist is the key to this story

the advances in powerful telescopes, the newly spin-stabilized military projectiles being manufactured in London, and Isaac Newton,” Godwin writes.

According to Godwin, Leitch’s ideas became lost to history because he died at a young age and his publisher went bankrupt in 1878.

“His suggestion to use rockets in space remained in print for over 40 years, but his name had been stripped away from the work,” Godwin explains.

“The problem was compounded by the title of his book being changed at the last minute to remove all references to astronomy, which led to it languishing for 150 years in the theology section of libraries,” Godwin said in a press release. “But it was still in print when Goddard and Tsiolkovsky made their mark on the field.”

Frank Winter, the former curator of rocketry of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, said: “We can no longer take it for granted that the consistently cited trio of founders of space flight theory — Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, and Oberth — were the only individuals who seriously thought and wrote about the rocket as the most viable means of achieving space flight.

“William Leitch is less well known than the first three, but he should now be included in the overall picture, especially since he predated them.”