A motor roughly the size of a thermos, clamped to a stand on a dry riverbed above Pasadena. That was the Arroyo Seco crew in the late thirties — borrowed chemistry, almost no budget, and Jack Parsons mixing propellant by hand until one of them held together. He was born in 1914, and Frank Malina, who helped found JPL alongside him, in 1912. Same calendar day.
Malina ended up in Paris making light machines — painted surfaces with lamps and moving shutters behind them, so the picture changes while you stand there. He kept the engineering and swapped thrust for flicker, and the Lumidyne panels still need someone to check the motors.
Parsons' way out of the hand-mixing was GALCIT 53 — roofing asphalt as the binder, potassium perchlorate as the oxidiser, poured hot into the case and left to set. Ugly stuff, and it stored and cast where the old pressed powder charges cracked.