Shrinking the World: Communication Satellites

In 1865, the French science fiction writer Jules Verne produced a new publication in his ‘voyages extraordinaires’ series of adventure tales.1 This one was called De la terre a la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) and featured a gun 900 ft long that shot a capsule containing three intrepid travellers on their journey.2 Five years later, he produced a sequel Autour de la lune (Trip Around the Moon) giving their adventures once they had reached their target. Needless to say, despite the aura of scientific calculation, the gun required would have needed to be impossibly large. It wasn’t practicable.