Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C.Clarke 1917-2008




I apologize to those who are looking for light hearted and frivolous local history stories, but a man just passed away that I greatly admired; Arthur C. Clarke. There are a few people in my life that I have taken great inspiration from. Arthur C. Clarke is one of them.

We all have our hero’s. Kristabel and Keri admire Abba, Ekovox admired all the old country and western singers, and a few good blues musicians. He must have picked up a love of that Eko guitar from someone he greatly admired. Kym loves life, nature, and photography, throw in a few well written poems and stories, and that describes her pretty well. We all have our hero’s, and mine were the great thinkers of the world.



Nicolas Copernicus

Nicolas Copernicus was the founder of modern astronomy. He was the first modern thinker to postulate that the Earth rotated on an axis once daily, and rotated around the sun once yearly. He arrived at these theories without the use of a telescope. He inspired such people as Christopher Columbus. Columbus convinced Queen Isabella of Spain to finance him to find a quicker route to the spices that were on the other side of the world. Columbus wanted to find a new trade route, by going around the world, rather than around the horn of Africa. Much later, by one hundred years, Copernicus inspired Galileo Galilei, and Giordano Bruno. The Catholic church and the rest of the people of the day thought that the world was flat, or if it wasn't, the sun and stars most certainly revolved around us.

Galileo Galilei



Galileo built his own telescope and discovered four moons circling Jupiter, strengthening his theory of the modern solar system. Giordano Bruno, went even further, he speculated that many planets revolved around our sun, and other stars were suns, with planets revolving around them, and that the sky was almost unlimited with stars, suns, planets, and moons. He also speculated that it was almost certain that there was other life in the universe. Galileo wrote a book outlining his theory of the universe. He outlined his telescopic observations, and was eager to prove to the Catholic church that what he saw through his telescope was provable fact.

The Catholics were not amused by these scientific minds tweaking the nose of the church. Through the use of the Spanish Inquisition, Bruno was burned at the stake and Galileo spent the rest of his life in jail.


Albert Einstein




Albert Einstein was an amazing person in that he could visualize in his mind how the universe had to be put together to work. He knew that mass, energy, speed, and time, were all related and effected each other. Imagine how smart he had to be to be able to visualise that without any clues. It's easy to bake a cake once you know how, but the first person to do that must have been very smart. Einstein could visualise escape velocities, to escape the pull of gravity and put a object in orbit.

Issac Asimov

It has been said that Issac Asimov invented the word robot. The word was actually a Czech word for artificial man or slave. Asimov gave it it's modern meaning that we all recognize; a mechanical-man that follows our instructions. Asimov was a brilliant man that was one of the most prolific Science Fiction writers of all time. I've read every book that he ever wrote many years ago, and it is time to start over. If you don't know who Asimov was, but want to read one of his books, read "I Robot" it was the book that put the word "Robot" into the English Language. Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clark were contemporaries. They were the most prolific science, and science fiction, writers of all time.

Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci was not only the man that painted the Mona Lisa, he was the man that visualized the water pump, clocks, cranes, winches, the parachute, and the helicopter. He was a man that could understand how things worked, and knew how to make them. He was an inspiration to many inventors.












H.G. Wells.
H.G.Wells first wrote about putting a man on the moon by the use of a mythical material called "Cavorite". Cavorite removed the effects of gravity, and it was easy to move a spherical vessel to the moon. The book that he wrote "The First Men in the Moon" was pretty far-fetched in 1901, but less than seventy years later men were walking on the moon.



Now, what do all of these people have to do with Arthur C. Clarke and me? These people were all my hero's, and they also inspired Arthur C. Clarke to be one of the most inventive minds of all time. It was Clark that was the first to calculate that there was a specific distance from Earth that a satellite would stay in a geostationary orbit. Geostationary means that the satellite stays in the same exact spot over the equator, and never moves off that spot. It rotates at the same speed as the earth turns. You know it as the place that you point your satellite T.V. dishes. It is the ring around the earth that all of the geostationary satellites stay. It is called "THE CLARK BELT". The Clarke belt is exactly 22,236 miles above sea level on the equator.


Clarke’s three laws:
1-When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2-The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3-Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (I'll bet that you always wondered who said that!)