Week 19: Telstar

Telstar was the first successful commercial communications satellites. Telstar 1 was launched on July 10, 1962. It successfully relayed through space the first television pictures, telephone calls, fax images and provided the first live transatlantic television feed. On July 23, Telstar relayed the first publicly available live transatlantic television signal on NBC, CBS, and ABC. The first public broadcast featured CBS's Walter Cronkite and NBC's Chet Huntley in New York. The first pictures broadcast were of the Statue of Liberty in New York and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The first broadcast included remarks by President John F. Kennedy, who discussed the value of the American dollar. During that evening, Telstar 1 also relayed the first telephone call to be transmitted through space, and it successfully transmitted faxes. In August 1962, Telstar 1 also allowed the United Kingdom and the United States to synchronize time, which had previously differed slightly.  Telstar 1, which ushered in a new era of commercial satellite technology, was accidentally destroyed when the United States tested a high-altitude nuclear bomb called Starfish Prime. This vast increase in radiation, combined with subsequent high-altitude blasts, including a Soviet test in October, overwhelmed Telstar's fragile transistors; it went out of service in November 1962, after handling over 400 telephone, telegraph, facsimile and television transmissions. Besides its contributions to satellite communications, the Telstar satellite also lent its distinctive color pattern to the modern soccer ball.  First developed in 1968, the Adidas “Telstar” quickly became popular. Today the  “Telstar” pattern has become the archetypal style.