In the 1960s the evidence for continental drift became overwhelming, and today it is widely taught and part of the standard science curriculum. Gauss, the great mathematician, worked out nonlinear geometry but kept it firmly hidden for 30 years, because he knew that if he published it, his peers would destroy him. And as everyone knows, rocketry did indeed carry men to the moon. Science has a long and unsavory history of severely punishing innovation and new thinking. In the modern world such scientific suppression of innovation is uncalled-for, but it is still very much the rule rather than the exception.
Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.
The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. Everything that can be invented has been invented. Galileo tried unsuccessfully to get the most respected scholar of his day, Cesare Creminino, to look through a telescope to see the moon was not a perfect sphere with no mountains.