O crédito por inventar a idéia de um satélite (isto é, um satélite artificial na órbita da Terra) não vai para Clarke, mas para Edward Everett Hale e sua novela de 1869 "The Brick Moon" que está disponível, junto com sua 1870 sequela "A vida na lua de tijolos" , em Project Gutenberg .
De Wikipedia :
"The Brick Moon" is a novella by American writer Edward Everett Hale, published serially in The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869. It is a work of speculative fiction containing the first known depiction of an artificial satellite.
Synopsis
"The Brick Moon" is presented as a journal. It describes the construction and launch into orbit of a sphere, 200 feet in diameter, built of bricks. The device is intended as a navigational aid, but is accidentally launched with people aboard. They survive, and so the story also provides the first known fictional description of a space station.
Publication history
"The Brick Moon" was first released serially in three parts in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869. A fourth part, entitled "Life on the Brick Moon", was also published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1870. It was collected as the title work in Hale's anthology The Brick Moon and Other Stories in 1899.
O trecho a seguir descreve o satélite proposto. (O autor parece pensar que um satélite lançado ao longo de um meridiano permanecerá naquele meridiano, sua órbita girando com a terra.)
Failing that, after various propositions, he suggested the Brick Moon. The plan was this: If from the surface of the earth, by a gigantic peashooter, you could shoot a pea upward from Greenwich, aimed northward as well as upward; if you drove it so fast and far that when its power of ascent was exhausted, and it began to fall, it should clear the earth, and pass outside the North Pole; if you had given it sufficient power to get it half round the earth without touching, that pea would clear the earth forever. It would continue to rotate above the North Pole, above the Feejee Island place, above the South Pole and Greenwich, forever, with the impulse with which it had first cleared our atmosphere and attraction. If only we could see that pea as it revolved in that convenient orbit, then we could measure the longitude from that, as soon as we knew how high the orbit was, as well as if it were the ring of Saturn.
"But a pea is so small!"
"Yes," said Q., "but we must make a large pea." Then we fell to work on plans for making the pea very large and very light. Large,—that it might be seen far away by storm-tossed navigators: light,—that it might be the easier blown four thousand and odd miles into the air; lest it should fall on the heads of the Greenlanders or the Patagonians; lest they should be injured and the world lose its new moon. But, of course, all this lath- and-plaster had to be given up. For the motion through the air would set fire to this moon just as it does to other aerolites, and all your lath-and-plaster would gather into a few white drops, which no Rosse telescope even could discern. "No," said Q. bravely, "at the least it must be very substantial. It must stand fire well, very well. Iron will not answer. It must be brick; we must have a Brick Moon."