Background
While teaching undergraduate physics at Princeton University, O'Neill set his students the task of designing large structures in space, with the intent to show that living in space could be desirable. Several of the architectures were able to provide areas large enough to be suitable for human habitation. This cooperative result inspired the idea of the cylinder, and was first published by O'Neill in a September 1974 article of Physics Today.
O'Neill's project was not completely without precedent. In 1954, the German scientist Hermann Oberth described the use of gigantic habitable cylinders for space travel in his book Menschen im Weltraum – Neue Projekte für Raketen- und Raumfahrt.
Read more about this topic: O'Neill Cylinder
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