Today’s podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 30 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcast

My first real job after finishing a degree in engineering was working at a company building space hardware.  I worked for several years on an antenna that is now flying in space on a satellite.

It was fun.

What I didn’t know at the time was the evolution of the word satellite.

I called the thing upon which my antenna sat a satellite because the first man made device flung into the heavens and expected to stay there was sputnik and it had been called a satellite.

That was in 1957.

But speculation about throwing satellites up into orbit had been going on since the 1870s at least and the reason those guys called the things satellites was that astronomers before them had called moons and other heavenly bodies satellites since Johannes Kepler had applied the word back in 1611 to some little dots he noticed circulating around the planet Jupiter.

The world seems a different place back in 1611.

For one thing Shakespeare was alive.

But another thing that was different was that even though the Roman Empire had been long gone for more than a thousand years, people like Johannes Kepler—serious academic types—still thought if you have something important to say you have to say it in Latin.  So when Kepler was casting around for a word to call these little orbiting dots he reached for Latin.

Another thing that was different back in 1611 was that people were more superstitious.

The longer I live the more I realize that people are still pretty superstitious, but I think we’ve come some way in that we no longer assume that a chunk of rock or a ball of gas up there in space has a personality.  But the ancients did and that’s why so many planets are named after ancient gods.

And even thought Johannes Kepler was a serious man of science, he still lived in a time when a planet called Jupiter still had some godlike cachet.

The Roman god Jupiter was after all the head honcho of the gods.

Back in Roman times an important person was followed around by a bunch of bodyguards or helpers. It makes perfect sense that a planet representing an important god like Jupiter would have a few too.  So it was completely logical that Johannes Kepler used the Latin word for “bodyguard” when referring to these moons.

In Latin satellitem was that word.

It isn’t completely clear why the Romans called their bodyguards satelles but some theories point back to an Etruscan word.

The Etruscans had a fair influence on the Romans.

So that’s why we call satellites satellites.

But when Johannes Kepler first called moons satellites he was in a bit of a panic.

It was actually Galileo Galilei who first saw these moons around Jupiter and Kepler started talking about them before he’d actually seen them because the way to see them was with this new invention called a telescope, and Johannes Kepler couldn’t get his hands on one of those.

None of the other astronomers had one either and they were all casting scorn on Galileo’s findings.

Kepler had to find a telescope quick so he could prove he was right in supporting Galileo, or crawl back into his academic hole.  He even asked Galileo to lend him his, but got no answer.

Finally he found a rich nobleman in his neighborhood who had the new toy.

I’m sure he was in orbit himself when he finally saw the things for himself.