Remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary of global satellite communications

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16 April 2008 News

Information from ITU

Science fiction writer and visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke died on 19 March 2008 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, at the age of 90. He was born on 16 December 1917 in Minehead, Somerset in the United Kingdom and moved to Sri Lanka – then called Ceylon, in 1956.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke

The international telecommunication community will remember Sir Arthur for making popular the concept of using the geostationary orbit for communications. In October 1945, Clarke published in the British magazine Wireless World a technical paper entitled ‘Extra-terrestrial Relays — Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?’ The paper established the feasibility of artificial satellites as relay stations for Earth-based communications. Clarke predicted that one day communications around the world would be possible via a network of three geostationary satellites spaced at equal intervals around the Earth’s equator.

Nearly two decades later, in 1964, Syncom 3 became the first geostationary satellite to finally fulfil Clarke’s prediction. Later that year, Syncom 3 was used to relay television coverage of the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo to the United States — the first television transmission over the Pacific Ocean. Now, there are hundreds of satellites in orbit and providing communications to millions of people around the globe. In 1954, Clarke had also proposed using satellites in meteorology. Today, we cannot imagine predicting the weather without using dedicated meteorological satellites.

Looking back on these developments, in his book ‘How the World Was One — Beyond the Global Village’, published in 1992, Clarke wrote: “Sometimes I am afraid that you people down on Earth take the space stations for granted, forgetting the skill and science and courage that went into making them. How often do you stop to think that all your long-distance phone calls – and most of your TV programmes – are routed through one or more satellites? And how often do you give any credit to the meteorologists for the fact that weather forecasts are no longer the joke they were to our grandfathers, but are dead accurate 99% of the time?” Apparently the meteorological systems he refers to are more advanced than those employed in South Africa.

Valery Timofeev, Director of the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) Radiocommunication Bureau, who met Clarke in 1979 at an INTELSAT Exhibition, remembers him “as an extraordinary man of great warmth and scientific vision, who devoted all his writings and predictions to the positive development of humankind”.

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Remembering Sir Arthur C. Clarke, visionary of global satellite communications

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