From page 164 of Arthur C. Clarke's How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village:
... I have sometimes been credited with the discovery of the stationary orbit itself, which of course is ridiculous. No one could have "discovered" this, since its existence was perfectly obvious from the time of Newton (if not Kepler!). I will be astonished if it has not often appeared in astronomical literature - perhaps when Asaph Hall discovered the satellites of Mars in 1877. The small outer moon, Deimos, is not far beyond the stationary orbit, and Phobos is well inside it.
The Russian pioneer Tisiolkovsky took the concept for granted but did not develop it; radio, of course, was in its infancy when he was writing around the turn of the century. Not until 1928 did the somewhat shadowy
Austrian captain H. Potocnik, writing under the name Hermann Noordung, develop the engineering aspects of the manned space station in great detail - and place it in the stationary orbit! He naturally assumed that there would be radio links between Earth and station.
List of references Arthur C. Clarke cited in his article published on October 1945 in Wireless World (pages 305-308), titled "EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL RELAYS - Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?"
- Radio-Relay Systems, C. W. Hansell. Proc. I.R.E., Vol 33, March, 1945.
- Rockets, Willy Ley. (Viking Press, N.Y.)
- Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums, Hermann Noordung.
- Frequency Modulation, A. Hund. (McGraw Hill:)
- London Television Service, MacNamara and Birkinshaw. J.I.E.E., Dec., 1938.
- The Sun, C. G. Abbot. (Appleton-Century Co.)
- Journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Jan., 1939.
Links
- kanabona.com: science: the geostationery orbit - herman vs clarke
- Scanned pages of Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raket
- English Translation: The Problem of Space Travel: The Rocket Motor
- An HTML version of Clarke's paper published in Wireless World, Oct 1945 prepared by Kavan U. Ratnatunga
- First to notice GEO?