🔒Goddard’s legacy: The past, present, and future of Central Mass. innovation

One hundred years ago on March 16, 1926, one of the most significant technological developments in human history happened in a cabbage field in Auburn. Assisted by his faithful wife Esther, physicist and inventor Robert Goddard launched the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket. While it puttered only 41 feet into the air, the world would never be the same, said Charles Slatkin, founder of The Robert Goddard Project and The Wonder Mission, two Worcester efforts he started to honor Goddard’s impact. “I find it more significant than the Wright Brothers,” he said. “You think of how little time it took to get from a cabbage farm in Auburn to the Moon. Fifty years after that, we have explored every single planet in our solar system.”

Central Massachusetts’ history of innovation did not begin with Goddard, nor did it end with his death in 1945. Spanning from the Industrial Revolution to today, the region’s innovators left their mark across industries. “One thing I show to the students every year in various courses is the famous editorial from the New York Times that ridicules Robert Goddard, telling him that rockets will not work in space,” said Charles Agosta, physics professor at Clark University in Worcester. “You have to be [resilient] in science, especially if you want to make big breakthroughs. I certainly have thought about that a lot in my career.”

The dawn of Worcester innovation

Born in the city in 1882, Goddard graduated from South High Community School and earned his bachelor’s degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a master’s degree from Clark University. He would only leave Central Massachusetts for Roswell, New Mexico, when his experiments needed wide open spaces, Slatkin said. Goddard would have never received his WPI degree if not for Ichabod Washburn. Born into rural poverty in Kingston, Massachusetts, Washburn moved to Leicester at 16 to work as a blacksmith, according to WPI. A pioneer in the wire manufacturing industry, he co-founded Washburn and Moen Manufacturing Co. in 1831, eventually creating the world’s largest wire producer, used for everything from pianos to wire for hoop skirts. Washburn worked with industrialist John Boynton to found the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science, which would evolve into WPI. Goddard enrolled at WPI in 1904, but his interest in space came a decade before after he read H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” at age 17. He began to think of Mars and beyond. “He climbed his favorite cherry tree in the backyard at dusk on Oct. 19, and he had an epiphany,” Slatkin said.

Looking up at the clear night sky, he dreamt of a device to take humans to space. Goddard marked the Oct. 19 anniversary each year and would later lament the fact a hurricane destroyed the tree in 1938. As his knowledge grew, so did the skepticism from the media and general public about his fantastical ideas regarding rockets and space travel. He got stuck with the deriding nickname of Moon Man. While never fully appreciated in his lifetime, his successful March 1926 launch secured his legacy as an all-time inventor. “It didn't go very high or very far, but it was the first time someone had the gumption to point up, not even knowing what was there,” Slatkin said. “So it's this wonderful, iconic story.”

Monkey wrenches, smiley faces, and life sciences

Not all Central Massachusetts inventions have been rocket science. Over the decades, everything from the monkey wrench (1840) to the first commercial Valentine’s Day card (1847) to candlepin bowling (1879) have been invented in Worcester. Worcester manufacturer The David Clark Co. played a role in the development of anti-G suits used by Allied fighter pilots in World War II, later designing pressure suits and other equipment for NASA. The most culturally-impactful Worcester invention was artist Harvey Ball’s smiley face, created in 1963 as an employee morale effort for State Mutual Life Assurance Co. The city has invented enough items of note to take up a whole wall of exhibit space in the Museum of Worcester, which highlights everything from fashion to weapons of war. But lists of notable inventions from Central Mass. hit a bit of a lull after the 1960s. This lines up with a time where changing global economic trends wreaked havoc on Worcester’s manufacturing companies, said Jon Weaver, president and CEO of Worcester-based incubator Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives. Rising from the ashes of the decimation, MBI was formed in 1984. “The city had gone through three decades of disinvestment after globalization really decimated our manufacturing sector,” Weaver said. “Decade by decade since, we've innovated, we've overcome, and MBI is part of that story.”

MBI now spearheads efforts to inject more life sciences startups into the Central Mass. economy. This includes antibody drug discovery platform Biocytogen, which has raised $335 million; veterinary therapeutics firm Invetx, which was acquired for $520 million in 2024; and Convergent Dental, which raised $115 million and developed a CO2 laser used for anesthesia-free dental procedures, according to MBI. Since MBI’s founding, Worcester’s startup scene has grown to include incubators like Auxilium and The Venture Forum, as well as angel investor network Wire Group. Cutting-edge firms like SpadXTech, which leverages microbes to grow materials to replace plastics, and Loop C02, which converts carbon dioxide into adhesives, have ties to MBI. “We're on the verge of a really major shift in the way we do manufacturing across the globe, and the lessons that we've learned in biology are now opening up a new what we call the American bioindustrial revolution,” Weaver said.

Finding the next Goddard

Today, the next generation of physic-related inventors and entrepreneurs at Clark University can turn to Professor Agosta for mentorship. An expert in low-temperature experimental physics, Agosta co-founded Machflow Energy, a company developing a high-tech heat pump to address climate change. Growing up, Agosta said Goddard served as a role model, as his father helped build rocket engines for NASA during the space race. “Every time we had a rocket launch in this country, everyone was watching TV and listening to Walter Cronkite,” Agosta said. “That was an important part of everyone's childhood in the 60s.” Like Goddard, Agosta occasionally heads from Worcester to New Mexico to conduct his experiments in a safer environment: the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “We use high voltages, and the magnets create incredible forces, and they have the possibility of blowing up,” he said. “Luckily, we have these old buildings with foot-and-a-half thick brick walls. We have all sorts of layers of safety, but it's definitely a field we have to have some guts. Every once in a while, something goes wrong, and there's a huge noise, and everyone gets a little shaken.” Like children of the 1960s, who faced the persistent threat of nuclear war, the next generation of inventors surely have plenty of social issues to stress over, Agosta said. “A lot of the way I mentor is by example,” he said. “I'm not hiding anything when we're trying to get experiments done in one of these national laboratories. We're using millions of dollars of equipment, millions of dollars of people's time. We don't want to waste anyone's time, and we don't want to not get results, and then they can sort of see the intensity and the focus and how to get things done.” Eric Casey is the managing editor at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the real estate and banking & finance industries.