It’s the evening of July 9, 1962, and in the tiny town of Andover, Maine, a group of “telephone men” are making the final tests on “electronic gear that may or may not find and communicate with a tiny spinning globe thousands of miles in space.”
No, it’s not an episode of The Twilight Zone — despite the overly dramatic voiceover and rather eerie soundtrack. It’s a promotional film for Telstar, the seminal telecommunications satellite cooked up by AT&T, NASA, the British General Post Office, and the French National Post Telegraph and Telecom Office. The Telstar is due to launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida the next day, and up in Maine, those AT&T men are preparing one of the many radio stations that will talk to the satellite as it orbits the Earth.
Sputnik — launched by the Soviets in 1957 — may have been Earth’s first artificial orbiter, but it didn’t provide all that much help with our everyday lives. Telstar — short for “telecommunications star” — was designed to give us a very real boost, beaming telephone and television signals to American homes from across the oceans. Normally, such signals were transmitted via massive microwave towers, but you couldn’t install those on water.