Goddard's life for the next 20 years was devoted to making those "necessary preliminary experiments." Working in the 1920s in Massachusetts with financial support from various sources and in the New Mexico desert with Guggenheim Foundation funds during the succeeding decade, Goddard compiled an amazing list of "firsts" in rocketry. Among other things, he carried out the first recorded launching of a liquid-propellant rocket (March 16, 1926), adapted the gyroscope to guide rockets, installed movable deflector vanes in a rocket exhaust nozzle for stability and steering, patented a design for a multistage rocket, developed fuel pumps for liquid-rocket motors, experimented with self-cooling and variable-thrust motors, and developed automatically deployed parachutes for recovering his instrumented rockets. Finally, he was the first of the early rocket enthusiasts to go beyond theory and design into the realm of "systems engineering" - the complex and hand-dirtying business of making airframes, fuel pumps, valves, and guidance devices compatible, and of doing all the other things necessary to make a rocket fly. Goddard put rocket theory into practice, as his 214 patents attest.