Voices from the Sky (Author Portal Arthur C Clarke) by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780575121836
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2011-09-29T03:00:00+00:00

A Short Vre-History of Comsats, Or: How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time

It is with somewhat mixed feelings that I can claim to have originated one of the most commercially valuable ideas of the twentieth century, and to have sold it for just $40. This cautionary tale begins in May 1945, when I was a flight lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, stationed a few miles from Stratford on Avon. Here I was peacefully engaged—the whole of my war was a very peaceful one—in training airmen to maintain the Ground Controlled Approach radar gear used to talk down aircraft in conditions of bad visibility. Though this work was fascinating (and has since formed the background of my novel Glide Path) it left me plenty of time to think about space flight, my chief interest since I joined the British Interplanetary Society in 1935.

Owing to the war, the B.I.S. was in a state of suspended animation, not that this made much difference as far as the rest of the world was concerned. The society had been founded in 1933, and at its peak had achieved a membership of little more than a hundred.1

(Today, it is several thousand.) A hard core of a dozen enthusiasts kept in touch, by correspondence and occasional private meetings, throughout the war. By early 1945 the European conflict was over and peace was dimly in sight; so we began to make plans for our postwar activities. I was thus simultaneously immersed in electronics and astronautics; the fact that I was .also writing science fiction at the same time probably helped.

As a serving officer, working with highly classified equipment and bound by the Official Secrets Act, I could not submit technical papers for publication until they had been passed by a reviewing board at the Air Ministry. That board had already received two mathematical papers on television waveforms, duly published in Electronic Engineering and the Wireless Engineer, and now forgotten by myself and everyone else. I would give a good deal to know what it thought when, in July 1945, it received my third epic, which I had boldly entitled “The Future of World Communications.” Perhaps they thought it was harmless nonsense; anyway, they gave their approval in a suspiciously short period of time. I then sent the paper to the journal Wireless World, which published it in its October 1945 issue under the title “Extraterrestrial Relays.”

The proofs arrived a few days after Hiroshima, and I added a perhaps overenthusiastic postscript about the impact of nuclear energy upon astronautics. It actually took nineteen years before the first atomic rocket was run under full thrust, for this was not achieved until 1964.

The paper, which is given in full in the appendix, ran to four pages and four diagrams, and though most of it is quite understandable by those not versed in electronics, I will summarize its main points here in nontechnical terms.

It opened with a short discussion of the problem of long-range radio and TV, pointing

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.