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Comment by soofy | Hacker News Reader

That's BTW an old Russian idea. The key concept of the space elevator appeared in 1895 when Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris to consider a tower that reached all the way into space, built from the ground up to an altitude of 35,790 kilometers (22,238 mi) above sea level (geostationary orbit).[6] He noted that a "celestial castle" at the top of such a spindle-shaped cable would have the "castle" orbiting Earth in a geostationary orbit (i.e. the castle would remain over the same spot on Earth's surface). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

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I learned something from this, but isn't it kind of like saying that cruise missiles are an old Indian idea? http://www.brahmand.com/general/missiles.php?satid=1

Well, yes, but with a liberal interpretation of the word "cruise", that would be 100% accurate. Indians were indeed the first to employ self-propelled artillery in a truly effective military capacity. Probably not in Vedic days, but certainly against the British: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysorean_rockets.

It's interesting to note that much of the tradition of western rocketry is descended from captured and reverse-engineered Mysorean rockets. And most of the rest of the western tradition of rocketry is descended from half-crazed Russian mystics and Egyptian ceremonial magicians. But that's another story entirely...

> much of the tradition of western rocketry is descended from captured and reverse-engineered Mysorean rockets

I find it hard to believe. Any references?

Did you read the Wikipedia article they linked to? It was experience fighting against rockets in India that led the British to develop the Congrave Rocket, which was made famous in the "Rocket's Red Glare" line in the US National Anthem. Britain might have had military rockets at some point before that, but they hadn't used them for at least a century before that point.

India wasn't as backwards as you might suppose, there were lots of areas of technology they were very good at such as chemistry and metalurgy. After the Battle of Plassey, I believe, the British captures a number of Indian cannons and found that they were better than the guns that the British had. Of course, they all had different bores and it was too logistically difficult to keep that many different kinds of ammunition, so the British just destroyed them. Which, I think, goes a long way towards illustrating the actual reasons the British ended up ruling India.

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