There are so few gentle geniuses left. One more has passed: a man who could not only dream magnificent new things could come about, but who had the competence to actually make his dreams reality.

When most people I know think of Arthur C. Clarke, they think of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and almost immediately, they conjure images and sounds of HAL the computer, spaceships landing in overlit, white parlor rooms, dancing orangutans, Johann Strauss music intertwined with Richard Strauss music, and innocent young fetuses hanging in space. That's generally when I say they're confusing Clarke for Stanley Kubrick.

A much more practically minded, ironically "down-to-earth" free thinker on the topic of exploring the cosmos, passed yesterday after a long bout with polio -- strangely not at all like the metaphorical, allegorical man the movie most associated with him would have you believe Arthur C. Clarke was. I was introduced to Clarke in my youth as someone who had brought about, from the envisioning stage to the engineering stage, one of humanity's greatest achievements: the global satellite telecommunications system.

In 1951, over six years before the Soviets would try it themselves, Clarke -- then working as an assistant editor for the house organ publication of the forerunner of the IEEE, and inspired by the response to a 1950 treatise on interplanetary travel he's published there -- wrote the simple book that served as the blueprint for the world's space program: The Exploration of Space. There, he connected the dots between the multi-stage rockets the US had acquired from having captured Werner von Braun's V-2 team, and the mechanism necessary to take men to the moon for the first time.

It would have a massive booster for escaping the Earth's field of gravity, but mostly in order to carry into orbit the fuel load required to blast the landing craft to the moon. That craft would be a surprisingly non-aerodynamic structure designed to help brake its descent.

It was not exactly a snapshot of Apollo. But for many scientists and laypersons, it was their first exposure to the concept of "G-force" -- a term some say Clarke may have coined, though he'd deny it -- as the resistance we experience whenever we attain such a velocity that we broach the idea of leaving the ground behind. And it was the first time anyone had actually, realistically drawn a picture of a lunar voyage, using the "figure-8" diagram that became affixed in our minds through the 1960s and early '70s, as a real-world map rather than a fantasy drawing.

The Exploration of Space was noteworthy for one other very important contribution: It was the very first published treatise anywhere on the idea that an orbital satellite could achieve a velocity that placed it at geo-station with the Earth below: that a device could be fixed in orbit. That led Clarke to conclude immediately that it could be used as a permanent, worldwide communications relay.

The global telecommunications network as it exists today was germinated, quite literally, in the mind of Arthur C. Clarke.

Next: The view from space...