Arthur C. Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, in Minehead, Somerset, England. He was brought up on a farm by his parents Charles Wright Clarke and Norah Mary Willis Clarke. Just before his ninth birthday, Clarke took his first airplane ride and was thrilled by air travel. He combined his interest in flying with rocketry and, by the time he entered his early teens, he was making homemade rockets, fireworks, and experimenting with communication devices. Clarke built his own refractor telescopes from old lenses, cardboard tubes, and miscellaneous spare parts. At age seventeen Clarke built a light-beam transmitter, which used light to transmit sound. It formed the basis for Clarke's later design for what became the communications satellite.

As a child, Clarke briefly attended an Anglican Church Sunday school. He later recalled that after a few months he concluded that it was "a bunch of nonsense" and...