In October 1945, a twenty-seven-year-old RAF officer published a four-page paper in a magazine called Wireless World. He proposed placing three manned relay stations in orbit around the Earth at a height of approximately 35,786 kilometres. At that altitude, each station would orbit at exactly the same speed as the Earth's rotation, and so would appear to hang motionless over the same point on the equator. Three of them, spaced 120 degrees apart, would cover the entire planet.

He called the paper "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?" Nobody took it seriously.

The officer's name was Arthur C. Clarke. He was a radar instructor from Minehead, in Somerset, who spent his evenings writing science fiction and his weekends corresponding with the British Interplanetary Society. He had submitted the paper in August, just days after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, and the RAF censor had cleared it with a shrug. Wireless World published it on pages 305 to 308 of the October issue, between articles on valve amplifiers and shortwave receivers.

Clarke's calculations were precise. He specified the orbital altitude. He described the relay equipment. He estimated the power requirements. He even discussed the antenna design. What he did not do was patent any of it. He later explained: "A patent is really a licence to be sued." He also admitted, with less humour, that failing to patent the concept of the communications satellite was the most expensive decision of his life.

Nineteen years later, in August 1964, NASA launched Syncom 3 into geostationary orbit. It transmitted the Tokyo Olympics live to the United States. In April 1965, Intelsat I, nicknamed Early Bird, became the first commercial geostationary satellite. Within a decade, hundreds of satellites occupied the orbit Clarke had described. Today, there are more than five hundred. They carry television broadcasts, telephone calls, internet traffic, and weather data to every corner of the planet. The orbit they occupy is officially called the Clarke Orbit.

Clarke went on to write 2001: A Space Odyssey. He moved to Sri Lanka and became one of the most celebrated science fiction writers of the twentieth century. He died in 2008. By then, the four pages in Wireless World had become the foundation of a trillion-dollar global telecommunications infrastructure.

He was twenty-seven. He published it in a radio hobbyist magazine. And he was right about everything.

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