Timely corrections

["Brian Shorey" <bshorey@domain.elided>]

The following was posted internally at Cisco recently.  It might be an
urban legend, it might not be.  Either way, given the topic of timely
corrections, I found it amusing.

**************

In 1919 or 1920 [sources differ], Robert H Goddard,
later the inventor of the liquid-fuel
rocket, published a paper "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes"
in which he proposed a rocket could even reach the moon.

The NY Times published a scathing editorial:

As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
 highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor
 Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It
 is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the
 moon that one begins to doubt ... for after the rocket quits our air
 and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither
 accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then
 might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College
 and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know
 the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
 better than a vacuum against which to react ... Of course he only
 seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

          - New York Times Editorial, 1920.


The day after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, the Times
published:

 Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the
 findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th century, and it is now definitely
 established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an
 atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.

                       - The New York Times, 1969
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