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:
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)