Electronics: The Room-Size World

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Goonhilly Downs, Pleumeur-Bodou, Raisting, Andover—the unfamiliar places where big, ground-based stations were relaying programs to Early Bird —became part of the language of the communications industry. And between the best and the worst that TV had to offer, imaginative men could pick out the promise of a dream born more than a century ago, when the first crude telegraph suggested that man might some day far outreach the limitations of his speech and hearing.

Magic Factor. As the telegraph matured into the telephone, the telephone into radio, and radio into television, each successive stage in the electronics revolution was hailed by optimistic prophets as a magic factor that would weld all the world into one peaceful unit. But always some technical problem kept the vision from coming quite true. Telephone talk, for instance, could not cross oceans on early telegraph cables, and the first radio-telephones were noisy and capricious. Television proved even harder to handle because its signals ride on high-frequency radio waves that are useful only over line-of-sight distances; unaided, they cannot travel past the horizon, an average of 30 miles away.

Only a few years ago, before the success of the first experimental satellites, electronic communication was still disappointingly short of its theoretical ideal. Plentiful telephone circuits crossed the U.S. and Europe on improved landlines, or by means of microwave beams that hopped between towers on buildings or mountaintops. TV programs used the same beams or traveled overland by coaxial cable. In 1956 American Telephone & Telegraph the British General Post Office, and Canadian Overseas Telecommunications Corp. laid twin cables under the North Atlantic capable of carrying 36 simultaneous telephone conversations. But the cables were expensive and of limited capacity, and TV could not squeeze itself through them.

All but Impossible. Whatever was needed to make possible a system of truly worldwide communication was still missing, although scientists were reasonably sure they knew what that missing link was. In 1945, British Electronics Engineer Arthur C. Clarke, who later became a first-rank science-fiction writer (Childhood's End), published in Wireless World an extraordinarily far-sighted article spelling out in detail his theory that earth satellites on high orbits could act as relay stations carrying telephone and TV to the entire earth.

The biggest space vehicles in existence then were German V-2 rockets with a vertical range of only 100 miles. Even so, Clarke boldly selected a particularly difficult orbit for his relay satellite: it should circle at 22,300 miles above the earth's surface, he said. At that distance, Clarke's calculations showed, it would take exactly 24 hours for the satellite to complete one orbit. "It would remain," he wrote, "fixed in the sky of a whole hemisphere and, un like other heavenly bodies, would neither rise nor set." Nearly 20 years later, Early Bird follows that orbit.