Arthur C. Clarke died today, age 90. You can read CNN’s obituary about him now:
Mr. Clarke had been one of my favorite authors, and was one of the few last living Science Fiction greats. I own every book in the “Space Oddessy” series, all of them being first edition Hard Covers:
For those who didn’t know, he was much more than a writer. Here are some nice tidbits about this great man that many don’t know (taken from CNN and Wikipedia):
As a Royal Air Force officer during World War II, Clarke took part in the early development of radar. In a paper written for the radio journal “Wireless World” in 1945, he suggested that artificial satellites hovering above fixed spot above Earth could be used to relay telecommunications signals across the globe.
He is widely credited with introducing the idea of the communications satellite, the first of which were launched in the early 1960s. But he never patented the idea, prompting a 1965 essay that he subtitled, “How I Lost a Billion Dollars in My Spare Time.”
Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, emigrating there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club; living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise, in which he first described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete.
Clarke was the first Chancellor of the International Space University, serving from 1989 to 2004, and also served as Chancellor of Moratuwa University in Sri Lanka from 1979 to 2002.
Following the release of 2001, Clarke became much in demand as a commentator on science and technology, especially at the time of the Apollo space program. The fame of 2001 was enough to get the Command Module of the Apollo 13 craft named “Odyssey”.
Clarke was knighted in 2000. Clarke’s health did not allow him to travel to London to receive the honour personally from the Queen, so the United Kingdom’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka awarded him the title of Knight Bachelor at a ceremony in Colombo.
The 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter is named in honour of Sir Arthur’s works.
In 2003, Sir Arthur was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology where he appeared on stage via a 3-D hologram with a group of old friends which included Jill Tarter, Neil Armstrong, Lewis Branscomb, Charles Townes, Freeman Dyson, Bruce Murray and Scott Brown.
On 14 November 2005 Sri Lanka awarded Arthur C. Clarke its highest civilian award, the Sri Lankabhimanya (The Pride of Sri Lanka) , for his contributions to science and technology and his commitment to his adopted country.
Sir Arthur was the Honorary Board Chair of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, founded by Carol Rosin, and served on the Board of Governors of the National Space Society, a space advocacy organisation originally founded by Dr. Wernher von Braun.
An asteroid was named in Clarke’s honour, 4923 Clarke (the number was assigned prior to, and independently of, the name - 2001, however appropriate, was unavailable, having previously been assigned to Albert Einstein).
A species of ceratopsian dinosaur, Serendipaceratops arthurcclarkei, discovered in Inverloch in Australia.
The Learning Resource Center at Richard Huish College, Taunton, which Clarke attended when it was Huish Grammar School, is named after him.
Clarke was a distinguished vice-president of the H. G. Wells Society, being strongly influenced by H. G. Wells as a science-fiction writer.
In Clarke’s book, “Rendezvous with Rama”, the initial search program that detects Rama in the first two chapters of the book, Project Spaceguard, is a program to detect near-Earth objects on Earth-impact trajectories. It was initiated after a fictional disastrous asteroid strikes Italy on September 11, 2077, destroying Padua and Verona and sinking Venice. A real Spaceguard project, named after the project in Rendezvous, was initiated some years later. After interest in the dangers of asteroid strikes was heightened by a series of Hollywood disaster films, the United States Congress gave NASA authorization and funding to support Spaceguard.
The world will be a sadder place without him… I hope today’s young people take a page from Sir Clarke and study science more than they seem to now. Of course, seeing as how this was barely passing news from most of the news channels, I doubt it will happen any time soon.
