Early in 1945 he wrote a letter to the magazine Wireless World, in which he proposed a novel idea. If three geosynchronous satellites were placed in stationary orbits above fixed points on the globe, each would act like a radio mast erected 22,300 miles above the Earth. Signals sent from a ground station could be received by the satellite in orbit and then amplified and retransmitted over a third of the globe. His letter persuasively argued that a technology ostensibly developed for war could also have peaceful applications far more beneficial to humanity.
During that summer he expanded the idea into a four-page article, “The Future of World Communications,” which, after being cleared by RAF censors and re-titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-Wide Radio Coverage?”, was published in the October issue of Wireless World. Its publication was the first to outline a geosynchronous communications-satellite network and is now considered one of the landmark technical publications of the twentieth century.
Clarke later jokingly noted that his article was met with monumental indifference and earned him a total income of fifteen pounds. But, in fact, it was read in the right places. Copies circulated in offices of the United States Navy and within a newly created private nonprofit called Project RAND, an American think tank designed to coordinate military planning with research and development.
A second, less historically important technical article written by Clarke had far greater immediate personal impact on its author. Shortly before Clarke was demobilized in 1946, “The Rocket and the Future of Warfare” was published in The Royal Air Force Quarterly. He sent a copy to a young Labour MP, who upon reading it said he wanted to meet its author. Coincidentally, their meeting occurred just after Clarke had been deemed ineligible for a university educational grant. In the course of their conversation at the House of Commons, twenty-eight-year-old Clarke told the MP about his predicament. “In a very short time, my grant was approved and I applied for admission to King’s College, London.” Rockets had not taken Clarke into outer space, but they indirectly propelled the farm boy toward a university education.
In addition to their technical publications and books of nonfiction,Tsiolkovsky, Oberth, and Ley had written works of science fiction to popularize their ideas of space travel. A similar impetus prompted Clarke to begin work on a second novel. Between semesters, Clarke set aside his studies in physics and math to write Prelude to Space. It wouldn’t be published for another five years, but it was his first attempt to articulate his optimistic vision of the coming space age.
The most commercially successful American work of space advocacy published during the late 1940s was an oversized book written by Willy Ley and illustrated by artist Chesley Bonestell titled, in tribute to David Lasser, The Conquest of Space. While its objective paralleled that of Lasser’s book published nearly two decades earlier, the Viking Press volume found a much larger readership curious to learn the fundamentals of rocket science and the promise of the coming space age. Bonestell’s scientifically accurate astronomical paintings were already familiar to readers of Life magazine and Collier’s, another mass circulation weekly. His work was also known to American moviegoers, though his efforts in Hollywood remained largely unheralded at the time: He had created the architectural renderings of Xanadu in Citizen Kane and the futuristic skyscrapers in the film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
For many children growing up in the early 1950s, the imaginary yet scientifically accurate images in The Conquest of Space served as their visual introduction to spaceflight. The book’s success led to public-speaking engagements for Ley, including appearances on the emerging medium of television, where he explained what the recent talk about space travel could mean for the future. In his role as a popular science writer, authority on space, and debunker of pseudoscientific fads and occultist beliefs, Ley served as a voice of avuncular reason amid a flood of sensational UFO reports that appeared frequently in newspapers and magazines during the early Cold War era.
Across the Atlantic, producers at the BBC had similar programming needs. When they wanted someone who could clearly communicate scientific ideas to the general public, Arthur Clarke was the person they repeatedly called upon, and he soon established himself as a minor national TV personality. Now living in North London within walking distance of the BBC’s television broadcast studio, Clarke appeared not only in his role as the spokesperson for the British Interplanetary Society but also as a frequent guest whenever a producer required someone on short notice to speak about astronomy, space science, physics, or even the fourth dimension. These early appearances occurred at roughly the same moment as the publication of Clarke’s first nonfiction book, Interplanetary Flight, a short volume advocating for space exploration.
© Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM 9A13533)
By 1950, Arthur C. Clarke was a frequent guest on the BBC, explaining to British audiences the probable reason for the sudden increase in reports of UFO sightings, how humans might travel to other planets, and differing theories of a fourth dimension.
IN RAHWAY, NEW Jersey, the son of a garment worker from the Ukraine read about Clarke’s new book in an ad published in the latest issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The sixteen-year-old was fascinated by news articles about flying-saucer sightings and became intrigued by the possibility of life on other planets. But he knew little of the fundamentals of rocket science or planetary astronomy, so he ordered a copy of Interplanetary Flight via mail order from an address in the magazine.
Two decades after Clarke discovered The Conquest of Space in the bookstore window, it was his book that fell into the hands of another impressionable teenager. The high school senior, Carl Sagan, would later speak of reading Interplanetary Flight as the “turning point in my scientific development,” the moment that solidified the course of his life, leading him to become not only a noted astrophysicist but the most recognized popularizer of science in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
ON A THURSDAY evening in March 1952, viewers of NBC’s Camel News Caravan were introduced to a man who, in the next few years, would be celebrated as a national hero for ushering America into the space age, becoming his adopted country’s most widely recognized man of science. That only a decade earlier Wernher von Braun had overseen Adolf Hitler’s most ambitious weapons program is among the strangest and most confounding ironies of twentieth-century history.
It’s no surprise that von Braun’s affiliation with the Third Reich was not mentioned on the evening of his national TV debut. The handsome forty-year-old wore a tailored double-breasted suit and might have been mistaken for a crusading district attorney in a Hollywood film noir. But in no screen thriller did a DA ever speak in such a distinctly Teutonic accent or display the fantastic props that von Braun held onscreen. Viewers were told that these were models of space vehicles that would transport humans into the cosmos within a few years and bring an end to threats from Iron Curtain nations around the globe. Von Braun was on TV to launch a nationwide publicity campaign for the mass-circulation magazine Collier’s and, in particular, its latest issue, with a cover that proclaimed, MAN WILL CONQUER SPACE SOON!
In the spring of 1952, television sets were a fixture in one out of every three American households, an increase of 200 percent in the past twenty-four months. The new medium’s first users were predominantly upper-middle-class families living