His most acclaimed achievement is co-inventing along with John Lynott United States Patent 3,503,060, which is entitled “Direct Access Magnetic Disc Storage Device”.
He was to work on similar wind tunnel innovations for a Los Angeles airplane manufacturer at IBM, but shortly after he was hired, the contract for that project was dropped.
Goddard was instead hired as an engineer, and became involved in the magnetic storage disk project when the United States Air Force called upon IBM in order to be “mechanized”.
William Goddard was a member of the San Jose, California–based engineering team that developed the 350 Disk Storage Unit, a major component of the IBM 305 RAMAC Computer.
Goddard's and Lynott's key innovation was the air-bearing head, which “floated” very close to the rotating disks without actually touching them, greatly increasing the speed of access.
This air-bearing head, also known as a magnetic transducer, had the ability to move freely, which enabled the disk to be recorded and read from a vast number of different positions.
[citation needed] William Goddard was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame with John Lynott in 2007 for their contribution to the invention of the first magnetic disk drive.