A Telstar is born: 'Live via satellite' marks 40 years
hollywoodreporter.com
July 15, 2002
By Chris Marlowe
The galvanizing phrase "live via satellite" was first heard exactly 40 years ago, when researchers in England and France watched a television signal from western Maine. It entered the common vernacular when millions of American viewers watched the signal that then bounced from those European stations back to the U.S. networks.
A group of Bell Labs scientists used Telstar I to make that pioneering broadcast, laying the foundation for most of the television, radio, telephone and other technologies that continue to make new forms of entertainment and communication possible.
Bell Labs is now part of troubled Lucent Technologies, but that didn't stop engineers, technicians, scientists and aficionados from gathering last week to dedicate a memorial plaque in an event organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in cooperation with BT Group, France Telecom, WorldCom, Lucent and Bell Labs.
Weighing only 175 pounds and measuring not quite a yard in diameter, Telstar crept over the horizon July 11, 1962, and instantly captured the public imagination. Record producer Joe Meek, for example, was inspired to write an eponymous instrumental that made the Tornadoes the first British group to top the American charts -- a year before the Beatles.
That original Telstar satellite could handle only one television channel and survived less than a year, but its descendants are the 260 communications satellites active today and whatever may come in the future. |
