People sometimes ask me why I read so many different books on a small pile of pet subjects:
1. The Manhattan Project
2. The Space Race
3. Richard Nixon.
I reply that with every book I read on these subjects, I learn something I didn't know before.
Take, for example, something I read today in Craig Nelson's 2009 book "Rocket Men," which focuses on the Apollo moon program.
Today, I read this:
The great historic irony of Operation Paperclip, meanwhile, was that almost every key element that Toftoy brought to the United States was present already. While the army was negotiating with von Braun in Europe, the American navy's director of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Robert Goddard, passed away on August 10, 1945. Five years later his heirs sued the American government for patent infringement, citing such independently-engineered-by-the-Nazi-team-but-already-patented-by-Goddard rocket elements such as gyroscopic guidance systems, jet vane path controllers, and fuel-line turbo-pumps. Ten years later, the United States paid the Goddard estate $1 million for these rights.
It's not hard to argue that the Nazis had a lot of practical experience with these inventions that Goddard may not have possessed in that amount, and he certainly never built a rocket with the power and range of a V-2, but I had no idea that he'd devised much of the technology used to make rockets work.
So I learned something, reading a new book on a familiar subject. Lesson learned.
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