Neil McAleer > Quotes

“Clarke remembered having his first experience with global communication when he worked at the Bishops Lydeard Post Office in his teens. “I was night operator for quite a long time at Bishops Lydeard, and one night there was a call from New York—very rare in those days. The call came by radio, of course; it was long before there was any telephonic cable. The operator in Taunton must have detected me listening in, and told me to unplug. I was probably weakening the signal.”
― Neil McAleer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary

“I was night operator at the same time. I slept in the post office, greeted the mailmen when they came in about four o’clock in the morning, sorted the mail, delivered it, which meant riding three or four miles, and then went to school. And I managed to read about two books a day. There was no TV in those days; that made all the difference.”
― Neil McAleer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary

“Nora had worked as a telegraphist at the Taunton Post Office and learned Morse code from her mother-in-law, accumulating valuable experience on the two common telegraphic instruments: the single needle and the”
― Neil McAleer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary

“In several spiral nebulae, including the one called Andromeda, Edwin Hubble had identified a type of star, called Cepheid variables. His observations in 1922 and 1923 proved these star spirals were much too distant to be part of our Milky Way. They had to be entire galaxies outside our own. Many in the astronomy establishment—most notably Harlow Shapley—had opposed this idea. Hubble’s discovery was announced on New Year’s Day 1925. Eventually it changed the prevailing view of the universe. Hubble’s calculations put the distance of Andromeda at about 1 million light-years, several times the distance Shapley estimated for the outer limits of the Milky Way. Back at Harvard, Shapley read Hubble’s letter and remarked to a colleague, Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe.”
― Neil McAleer, Sir Arthur C. Clarke: Odyssey of a Visionary