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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“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
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“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
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