History
Nikola Tesla In the 1870s while spending a year recovering from malaria had some ideas for inventions and one of those was a ring around the equator, it is recounted in 1919 in his autobiography My Inventions.
"Another one of my projects was to construct a ring around the equator which would, of course, float freely and could be arrested in its spinning motion by reactionary forces, thus enabling travel at a rate of about one thousand miles an hour, impracticable by rail. The reader will smile. The plan was difficult of execution, I will admit, but not nearly so bad as that of a well-known New York professor, who wanted to pump the air from the torrid to the temperate zones, entirely forgetful of the fact that the Lord had provided a gigantic machine for this very purpose."
Arthur C. Clarke published a book called The Fountains of Paradise about space elevators, but which in an appendix referred to an idea to launch things off the Earth using a structure based on mass drivers. The idea apparently did not work, but this inspired further research.
Paul Birch published a series of articles in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (JBIS) in 1982.
Anatoly E. Yunitsky also published a similar idea in 1982.
Read more about this topic: Orbital Ring
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In every election in American history both parties have their clichés. The party that has the clichés that ring true wins.”
—Newt Gingrich (b. 1943)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)