In 1945, Arthur C. Clarke, the author of many science fiction works, including the popular 2001 A Space Odyssey

and Childhood's End, among many, many others, began circulating a paper he'd written, in which he

proposed a bizarre concept, placing what he called space stations into orbit around the Earth,

and using these stations to beam

radio waves down onto the surface of the planet. This concept was bizarre in large part

because of when it was proposed. In 1945, World War II had just ended, and television had

recently been invented but hadn't yet been popularized.

The 525-line television standard had only been formally adopted by the U.S. government in 1941.

The same year, that color broadcasting field tests were being conducted by the still-young,

CBS, and NBC networks.

Actual consumer-grade availability of color broadcasts didn't become available until

1952, nearly a decade after Clark's paper was circulated.

And that's important because although the popularity of black and white TV grew throughout

the 40s and into the 50s, the majority of homes in the U.S. still relied on

radio as their primary means of entertainment and as their primary source of news at that time.

Despite that timing, Clark posited in his paper that, among other things, these space stations

up in orbit around Earth could be used to beam

television signals down to Earth, solving the last mile problem of information broadcasting,

which was an issue both then and is still an issue now, though for different types of information

transmission, different media. In other words, it's a relatively simple thing to build a network

of cables that disseminate communication signals. We've been doing that for a while, after all,

with telegraph cables, which stretched across the ocean floor, connecting the continents to each

...