Edward Forman

Edward Seymour Forman was an American rocket engineer and inventor who helped pioneer early rocketry in the United States. Born in Gillespie, Illinois, in 1912, he worked with collaborators at the California Institute of Technology's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory and helped demonstrate the first practical jet-assisted takeoff of an aircraft in the United States. He was among the GALCIT researchers who founded Aerojet General Corporation, which became the largest rocket technology manufacturer of the 1940s, and the GALCIT Rocket Research Group he helped establish became the precursor to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He died in 1973.