One of the many illustrations by Émile-Antoine Bayard that accompanied Jules Verne's 1870 novel From the Earth to the Moon. These visualizations of Verne's text proliferated the collective imagination. In news coverage of Robert Goddard's rocket, it was these images and ideas that artists and journalists drew from, as opposed to his actual work. Editorial cartoons and illustrations almost always depicted some combination of launching a rocket via cannon and/or a rocket that could carry passengers.
Illustration of a rocket ready to launch from atop a city building, drawn by early animation pioneer Max Fleischer. Multiple images appear alongsideThe Independentarticle titled "A Trip to the Moon". These images were used in educational films (a new market) under the supervision of Fleischer himself. It was during his time at Bray that Max created Koko the Clown and the "Out of the Inkwell" series, for which he invented the rotoscoping animation technique. Photographs of Fleischer at Bray show a mix of animation and model work being produced for the educational films.
These images proliferated much of the press surrounding Goddard during the 1920s and were reproduced in many newspaper articles during those years. The Bray/Fleischer images found in this series come from the three shorts in their "Mechanics and Science Films" series produced from 1918 to 1920, titled "All Aboard for the Moon", "Hello, Mars", and "If We Lived on the Moon". It is not a coincidence that these shorts were made the same year as the Goddard "moon rocket" press.Popular Science Monthlyalso had a hand in these shorts and are credited as "Edited By". This image comes from "All Aboard for the Moon".
