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markhb writes "40 years ago today, the first trans-Atlantic TV transmission made it out of the Maine woods and into history, via the original Telstar. The IEEE and Lucent plan to commemorate the event at three events today in Pleumeur-Bodou, France, Goonhilly Downs, England, and Andover, Maine."
Was it an ad for TVs?
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Oh, wait...
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
47 Channels, and there's still nothing on.
?
the Slashdot editors have been a tad late in reporting this one ;)
Love u guys.
40th anversary, celebrate!
What country is main?
it's beside part?
damn americans
that this should follow a discussion about the digital dark ages and my mental edit of this line: ....by having the original broadcasters arrested for not paying their fees for 10 years retroactive from the original broadcast.
The IEEE and Lucent plan to commemorate the event
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
All well and nice to commemorate this first signal and all....
But didn't the Blair Witch Project come outta those woods too? They must be cursed, cause the utter shite that movies was still gives me nightmares.
I won't ever go back in the woods again.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Andover? I thought Andover went under?
Here's Telstar I saw a real clip of the pictures arriving at the BBC a while ago but I can't remember the URL, anyone? I know my father said he watched it.
Has it been that long? I thought they started with this in the 80's... But then again, everything started in the 80's according to my memory. Now guess my age :-)
-- Cheers!
40 years ago today, the first trans-Atlantic TV transmission made it out of the Maine woods and into history, via the original Telstar. .. 5 people could watch it ;)
If they're celebrating this, shouldn't they broadcast it the same way as it was back then? I'm sure a good
Fucking brilliant!!! Do you have a record deal? ~Audiogalaxy
Where does the monkey go?
It's all good.
The newer ones are smaller, and often fixed, pointing to satellites in geo-stationary orbit.
There there are a pair of microwave dishes (in and out?) that look small, but carry all the terrestrial traffic to/from Goonhilly.
At the time (12 years ago ?) Goonhilly carried almost all Europes transatlantic traffic.
Cheers, Andy!
Andy Rabagliati
Quoth the NASA site, "Frequencies used were 6,390 MHz uplink and 4,170 MHz downlink".
Is this a typo? How were such frequencies possible in the early 1960s? And using less than 15 watts to boot!?
yeah, can you imagine a world where tv newsreels where send via airmail to the broadcasting station?
weird thought. we've come a long way in 40 years...
http://www.lucent.com/minds/telstar/telstarsat.jpg
It sickens me that this is hosted by Lucent, but it does the job. Too bad more neat "online" photos wern't at this resolution...
"The IEEE and Lucent plan to commemorate the event at three events today in Pleumeur-Bodou, France, Goonhilly Downs, England, and Andover, Maine "
That's great news! Goonhilly Downs needed a second big event to add to their annual "Laughing At Our Town's Name Festival".
------
Today's Top Deals
Were they transmitting /. headlines to europe? Hey... wait a minute...
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
it's just GOONHILLY DOWN - there's no extra "s"
That was classic intercourse!
It looks like ATT in the early 60's pretty much invented our whole world. And now, it's pretty much just 5000 minute calling plans and crappy stock performance.
Technology has come a long way. Three hundred years ago, it took months, years even, to send a letter to loved ones across the nation. Missionaries and adventurers, people who moved to different countries, different states even, would likely never hear the voices of their extended family again. Now, even residents of the jungle can connect to the internet via satellite, use vidcams and microphones for a direct conversation with their families, or call them up via cell phone. Communication has come a long way with the advent of satellite communications, among other things.
It makes me wonder, though. What would happen if a massive solar flare or some such space phenomena took out all of the satellites? Would earth communications still function?
I'm sure the ingenuity of the human race would reinstate communications soon enough. After all, one of the most important things in life is talking with the ones you love.
If you ever make it to northwestern france, be *sure* to check out the communication site at Plemeur-Boudou! It's very cool, you drive through a forest in a hilly landscape, and all of a sudden huge satellite dishes pop out like mushrooms ... and you can still visit this very first satellite. all in all, very impressive.
It's interesting to note that domestic television satellites didn't reach North America until 1972, 10 years after Telstar. Here's a link to a Communications Satellites Short History. From that page:
In 1965, ABC proposed a domestic satellite system to distribute television signals. The proposal sank into temporary oblivion, but in 1972 TELESAT CANADA launched the first domestic communications satellite, ANIK, to serve the vast Canadian continental area. RCA promptly leased circuits on the Canadian satellite until they could launch their own satellite. The first U.S. domestic communications satellite was Western Union's WESTAR I, launched on April 13, 1974.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Three hundred years ago, the population of the colony was about 275,000 (all located in the northeast). They didn't have any loved across the nation to send letters to.
I assume you're talking about the United States in your post.
The televised transmission on July 11, 1962, showed an American flag waving in front of the Andover Earth Station ... That same day the first long-distance telephone call via satellite was carried by Telstar. During the call, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to Fred Kappel, then chairman of AT&T.
Kennedy wasn't shot until November 22, 1963. This article claims LBJ was President on July 11, 1962. Then later the article mentions President Kennedy making a press release. It MUST be a conspiracy.
Keeping on topic, someone mentioned earlier about what would happen if all the satellites went away... Well, I would guess there wouldn't be much on TV and a lot of pagers would not work but our domestic voice telephone network should continue to work ok, as well as communications with most of Western Europe. The only trouble I could imagine for the domestic voice network would be very remote stations linked via satellite instead of microwave and COs using GPS as an accurate time source without a backup. I'm fairly sure most of the voice network is terrestrial in nature, be it fiber or microwave.
I rather suspect that many transatlantic calls were made by test engineers long before anyone was bold enough to hand a phone to the President of the USA! <grin>
When I was but a lad, we used to vacation in Rangeley Lakes, ME. My father (who worked for AT&T at the time) took the family over to Andover to see the ground station. I remember it as being this fantastically huge globe with a microwave transmitter inside it.
Also, I remember my father taking us outside of our home on Long Island to see Telstar going overhead. Nowadays, you can see satellites just by looking up and waiting ten or fifteen minutes.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I'm imagining a bunch of people all conferenced up, trying to get ancient equipment up to send a trans-atlantic signal but meanwhile able to problem solve in real time with each other. Bizarre.
Either that or they're going to do a videoconference that shows little more than a flag flying in front of the Earth Dome thing. ("Let's try to dumb it down some more, people, this isn't a re-enactment until the signal's a hazy, fixed frame. Oops -- our conferencing software heard the flag snapping in the breeze and automatically zoomed in a little to center on the speaker...")
It's a brave new world.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I was attending summer school at the time. In 1962, like most college students, I did not have television sets in my dorm room; television sets were still fairly big, fairly heavy, and fairly expensive--and there were certainly no cable jacks in dorm rooms. It took a little searching to find a lounge somewhere in the university that had a TV set. And then I had to convince the people in the lounge to let me tune to the channel that was carrying it.
I felt at the time that this was a turning point in history--like the first transatlantic broadcast over that technological wonder, the "coaxial cable," which I had seen as a kid. _I_ was fairly excited by it. But the general lay population hardly knew or cared about it. Some years before, when my family and I went into the schoolyard on a summer evening to view the Echo satellite, we had plenty of company. In contrast, the Telstar broadcast went virtually unnoticed.
Well, of course, it WAS utterly boring. Speeches by dignitaries and some miserable scraps of French Ed-Sullivan-show-type entertainment--I think I remember some singers and some dancers.
Yes, it WAS an historic moment--yet utterly forgettable.
Later that year, an instrumental number named "Telstar" (for no apparent reason) made the top forty. Lots of people knew that tune. I'm not sure what percentage of them knew that "Telstar" was the name of a communications satellite.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
This apparently commemerates the first official US-to-Europe transmission. I clearly remember that as soon as Telstar came up the French sent the first Europe-to-US program, a wonderful last-minute little program with a singer and live shots around Paris. This was the day *before* the officially planned "first" program from Europe. Tweaked the proper British authorities a bit as I recall. I saw it on network TV in the US. Yet I've never found any reference to it in TV histories or web sites. Doesn't someone else remember it?
This Nation has traditionally followed a policy of conducting international telephone, telegraph, and other communications services through private enterprise subject to governmental licensing and regulation. We have achieved communications facilities second to none among the nations of the world. Accordingly, the Government should aggressively encourage private enterprise in the establishment and operation of satellite relays for revenue-producing purposes. Putting satellites into government control would have been the equivalent of "closing the source", privatizing them meant many people working on many problems...sounds familiar. Ike was obviously a visionary, wonder what his opinion of Open Source software would be? Karl
The first worldwide TV program was 5 years later (June 25, 1967) - the Beatles in their Magical Mystery Tour mode doing "All You Need is Love." Covered 24 countries, 5 continents via Echo II (?) a satellite which had no transmitter, just a reflector.
:( )
I'm sure some worthy celebs would like to commemorate this event - how about it Sir Paul/Mick?
(Unfortunately, though alive I think I was probably tuned to Listen with Mother instead
For those of you too young to know: It was a great big silvered balloon. They blew it up when it reached orbit and bounced (as opposed to relayed) signals off it.
Wrong! The first transatlantic television transmission was via a satellite named ECHO. ECHO was nothing more than a reflective bag of gas that reflected the TV microwaves back to Earth.
The first public transmission from Europe to the US "featured" Conrad Adenauer making a short, forgettable speech.
I thought that was an instrumental by The Ventures..?
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
In 1978, PBS became the first North American broadcaster to use satellite transmission for the primary distribution of its programming.
Before then, most broadcast networks used point-to-point connections such as AT&T's terrestrial microwave system to deliver content to sattions. Satellite was only used to acquire content for networks, not to distribute it to stations.
What I find interesting is that the development of long-distance fiber optics could make a large fraction of satellite use obselete. Already, the majority of international telephone and increasingly television signals are transmitted through fiber optic lines on long distance and undersea cables.
Given fiber optics' HUGE data capacity, the day that fiber optics achieves the last mile data connection into the home residence cheaply is the day small satellite dishes become obselete.
Essentially, satellites in the future will primarily used for communications beyond the reach of fiber optic lines, primarily in remote regions.
And for those of you interseted in the local pseudo-news coverage, the Lewiston Sun-Journal has it here.