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
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“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)