satellite

We normally think of a satellite as an object in outer space that is in orbit around another, larger object, such as a moon around a planet. But that is not its only meaning in present-day English, nor is it the original sense of the word.

Satellite is borrowed from both the French satellite, meaning bodyguard and directly from the French word’s source, the Latin satelles, meaning attendant or member of a retinue. This courtly sense of the word appears in English by 1522, when it appears in a translation of Sallust’s account of the Jugurthine War (112–06 BCE) between Rome and Numidia. Jugurtha, the adopted son of King Micipsa of Numidia, had, upon Micipsa’s death, usurped the throne in 117 BCE by having his two adopted brothers killed.

This done the sayd Numydyan conuayed these armed men preuyly by nyght into the house of Hiempsall / lyke as he was infourmed by Iugurth. Whan this treatoure satellyte was entred with his company & had broken into th[e] inwarde edifices: diuers of them serched for the prince Hiempsall: som murdred his seruau[n]tes as they lay slepynge in theyr beddys suspectynge no suche treason.

Jugurtha was captured by the Romans in 104 BCE, paraded in Rome as part of a triumph, and later executed.

The celestial sense of satellite is a metaphorical extension of the original sense of a courtly attendant. Johannes Kepler, writing in Latin in his 1611 Dioptrice describes the moons of Jupiter as satelles. He is ventriloquizing Galileo, not claiming the discovery of Jupiter’s moons as his own:

Atq[ue] en inventum Iovi satellitium seniculo vero decrepito duos servos, qui incessum illius adjutent, nunquam a lateribus illius discedentes.

(And behold, I have discovered two servants, a satellite of Jupiter, an old and decrepit man, who help his progress, never departing from his sides.)

Kepler’s satellitium is in the singular, indicating that he is using the word to refer to a retinue, not a single servant. As far as I know, Galileo did not himself use satelles to describe the moons.

This sense appears in English discourse in 1640 in John Sadler’s Masquarade du Ciel, a pageant performed for the court of Charles I about the new discoveries in astronomy. The metaphor of a moon being a courtly attendant is obvious:

Now JUPITER also commeth back again with his Satellites, waiting on the Returne of His Soveraigne PHEBUS; who, in his Return, exalteth JUPITER, His Loyall and most Humble Servant: who, like a Noble Subject, Thought one Gracious smile, one Glaunce, from his Prince; more then enough to reward the most faithfull and Loyall Service (possible) to His Royall Soveraign.

The use of satellite to describe an artificial device put into orbit around a planet predates the capability to actually do so by some eighty years. As with many technological terms, the use in science fiction precedes the use in science fact. And for this one we go to the grandfather of that genre, Jules Verne. In his 1879 novel Les 500 millions de la Bégum, Verne uses satellite to refer to projectile shot into orbit from a cannon. The English translation, The Begum’s Fortune, appeared the same year:

You will hear with pleasure that we saw your perfect shell, at forty-five minutes and four seconds past eleven, pass above our town. It was flying towards the west, circulating in space, which it will continue to do until the end of time. projectile, animated with an initial speed twenty times superior to the actual speed, being ten thousand yards to the second, can never fall! This movement, combined with terrestrial attraction, destines it to revolve perpetually round our globe.

You ought to have been aware of this

I hope and expect that the cannon in the Bull Tower is quite spoilt by this first trial; but two hundred thousand dollars is not too much to have paid for the pleasure of having endowed the planetary world with a new star, and the earth with a second satellite.

But satellite also has a political sense, that of a country or state that is dominated and controlled by a larger one. This sense appears in the late eighteenth century. Thomas Paine uses the word in his 1776 revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense:

Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for kingdoms to take under their care; but there is something very absurd in supposing a continent to be perpetually governed by an island. In no instance hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet, and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident they belong to different systems. England to Europe: America to itself.

Paine is creating the metaphor of a client state being a moon of a larger world, but he is not actually using the word itself in this metaphorical sense. Common Sense was so widely read and such a seminal political tract, that it must have had an influence on this use of the word. For the actual use of satellite in this sense we must look to a few years later. It appears in an anonymous, 1780 letter from American loyalists who implore the Westminster government not to make peace with the rebellious American colonies or England will lose more than just the thirteen colonies:

With so many ready, and natural opportunities for enlarging their territories, it is not reasonable to suppose, that your [e.g., England's] possessions, which they [e.g., the rebellious thirteen colonies] usually call the Appendages, or Satellites of America [e.g., Canada, Newfoundland, and the West Indies], will be free from attack, and it will be absurd to expect that the force which would be insufficient to subdue them, or retain the ground you have in their present shattered and disunited condition, would be able to protect your remaining dominion in those parts, when they shall have gained a firmer establishment, encrease [sic] of power, ampler resources, and closer union.

While satellite has acquired new meanings over the centuries, all of them rely on the metaphor of a servant-master or courtier-noble relationship and thus, at their core, retain a vestige of the original Latin meaning of the word.

Sources:

“Address from the Loyalists in America to the People of England.” Morning Post (London), 29 December 1780, 4/2. Gale Primary Sources: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection.

Kepler, Johannes. Dioptrice. Augsburg: Davidu Franci, 1611, 17. Archive.org.

Lewis, Charlton T. and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879, s.v. satelles, n. Brepols: Database of Latin Dictionaries.

Oxford English Dictionary Online, December 2018, s.v. satellite, n.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. London: J. Almon, 1776, 22. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Sadler, John. Masquarade du Ciel. London: Richard Badger for Samuel Cartwright, 1640, sig. C1v. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Sallust. Here Begynneth the Famous Cronycle of the Warre, which the Romayns Had against Iugurth Vsurper of the Kyngdome of Numidy. Alexander Barclay, trans. London: Rycharde Pynson, 1522, fol. 11v. ProQuest Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Verne, Jules. The Begum’s Fortune. W. H. G. Kingston, trans. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott, 1879, 179–80. HathiTrust Digital Library.

———. Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine; Les 500 millions de la Bégum; Les révoltés de la “Bounty.” Paris: J. Hetzel, 1879, 123. HathiTrust Digital Library.

Photo credit: NASA, 2016. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain photo.