Guardian Shorts: Science that Changed the World by Tim Radford, Chapter 1
Tim Radford’s Science that Changed the World is an eye-opening look
at the revolutionary developments from the 1960s that changed the world
and gave us the world we live in today. This Guardian Short ebook will
be serialised chapter-by-chapter over the next few weeks.
Follow this link to read the Introduction
But Telstar on its own was an unsatisfactory compromise: real, practical communication at a global level would depend either on a network of Telstars, so that transmission could skip from one orbiting satellite to another as it passed overhead, which would mean a much more complex system of ground stations, or on the launch of a series of geosynchronous satellites, each in 24 hour orbit, always above a precise location on Earth. Telstar and its successors relayed film of the assassination of President John F Kennedy at Dallas in November 1963. A year later, a Syncom 3 – a satellite at geostationary orbit – relayed coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. In 1965, the US launched Early Bird, the first Intelsat communications satellite. It could handle either 240 telephone circuits or one black-and-white television programme, but not both at the same time. It could only link Europe and North America, and then only intermittently, because it had no battery and could only function while its solar panels were pointing at the sun. The global communications revolution had a long way to go, but it had begun. You could get a message to the other side of the Atlantic in a second, as long as you tried to do so while the satellite had power. Early Bird was joined by other satellites and in 1965 an enterprising BBC producer, Aubrey Singer, conceived the idea for the world’s first global television show. It took another two years to organise and it needed the support of the European Broadcasting Union but it exploited four satellites to link 14 countries on five continents and featured live broadcasts only, with appearances by the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Maria Callas, Pablo Picasso, Marshall McLuhan (who coined the phrase ‘global village’), trams in Melbourne, subway construction workers in Tokyo, a cattle rancher in Canada, and the Beatles and friends singing All You Need Is Love. Altogether the show was transmitted to 41 nations and was watched by at least 400 million viewers. It was intended to unite the world. Until a few weeks before the broadcast, Soviet and other iron curtain partners had also planned to contribute, but pulled out: the recent six-day war between Israel and the Arab countries had soured the geopolitical mood. The world was one, but it was still divided.
If you would like to read the Science that Changed the World in full now, you can purchase the ebook via the links on the Guardian Shorts website, prices from £1.99.
Science that Changed the World. Photograph: Guardian Shorts end quote from:
How the world was one
The most immediate, most obvious revolution of the 1960s was announced in advance – far in advance, courtesy of another, world-changing piece of technology, developed for unfriendly purposes. The Vergeltungswaffe-2 or V-2 rocket was the world’s first long range ballistic missile weapon: it was fired from Nazi-occupied Europe, reached an altitude of 100km or more than 60 miles, and then fell at the end of its arc to detonate at more than 3,500km an hour. It delivered enormous destructive power and – for at least one intended victim – an unexpected message of optimism. In February 1945, while V-2 rockets pounded London, Flight-Lieutenant Arthur C Clarke, an RAF radar instructor, wrote a letter to Wireless World proposing the V-2 as a vehicle for research into the ionosphere, that invisible, charged layer of atoms and molecules high above the stratosphere. Scientists knew it was there, knew why it was there and knew why it was important in shortwave radio transmissions, but they knew nothing about it. But the V-2 inspired another possibility: a rocket that could reach a speed of 8km a second parallel to the Earth’s surface – something the V-2 could not do – would, said Clarke ‘continue to circle it forever in a closed circuit: it would become an “artificial satellite”.’ He then added with an even bolder idea for the more remote future ‘perhaps half a century ahead’ – an ‘artificial satellite’ at the correct distance from earth would make one revolution every 24 hours: that is ‘it would remain stationary above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the earth’s surface. Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit, would give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet.’ He apologetically added that this suggestion wasn’t going to be of the slightest use to post-war planners. He signed himself not as an RAF officer, but as a member of the British Interplanetary Society. The V-2 rockets continued to drop warheads on London and other cities, arriving unannounced at speeds several times faster than sound, and Flight-Lieutenant Clarke continued to think ahead. In October 1945, he submitted to and published in Wireless World a four-page proposal for a true broadcasting service, giving constant field strength at all times over the whole globe, something that would be ‘invaluable, not to say indispensable, in a world society’. The problem at the time was that intercontinental telephone and radio signals could – though with no great certainty – be bounced off the ionosphere, but microwave transmission of television signals was effectively impossible via the ionosphere. Clarke proposed a ‘second moon’ at an orbit with a radius of 42,000km and a period of exactly 24 hours, an artificial moon that would never rise and never set, a satellite that could be fitted with receiving and transmitting equipment, driven by solar power. In effect, he had described the modern satellite broadcasting station, although only in effect: Clarke’s solar power was a system of mirrors that would concentrate sunlight on the boiler of a low pressure steam engine, and his ‘second moon’ would in fact be a space station provided with ‘comfortable living quarters, laboratories and everything needed for the comfort of its crew, who could be relieved and provisioned by a regular rocket service.’ This was before the invention of the transistor, before the photovoltaic cell, before the rediscovery of the fuel cell, before the first jet plane had gone into civilian service, before any rocket capable of accelerating to 8km a second or faster. However great the initial expense, argued Clarke ‘it would only be a fraction of that required for the world networks replaced, and the running costs would be incomparably less.’ He had, in one short, articulate entertainment for a professional journal, proposed the global communications satellite, and the international space station. Clarke was later to tell some of this story again in his 1992 book How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, and the communications world in which he made these proposals was not very different from the world that still existed at the beginning of the 1960s. At that time most British households did not have telephones (most British houses did not have refrigerators, central heating, double glazing, loft insulation or fitted carpets and a surprising number still had neither bathrooms nor indoor lavatories). Most people still expected to use a public telephone booth (you could make a call for two pennies) and many households that possessed a telephone shared a ‘party line’: an economy measure that permitted one line to serve two households, although only one household at a time could actually use the line for a call. Wireless cellphones existed only in comic-strip fiction: from 1946 to 1964, the cartoon tough guy detective Dick Tracy wore a two-way wristwatch radio. There were computers, powered by valves that recorded and played data on tape: the biggest required a substantial building to house it. International telephone calls were possible but they were expensive, needed to be booked hours in advance, and a brief international call cost a significant proportion of the weekly average wage at the time. In the year that Telstar was launched, the US had only 550 telephone channels, by either radio or submarine cable, to handle four million international calls every year. Since a television signal at the time – black and white pictures made up by 405 scanning lines at 50 fields a second – took 600 channels, it was not possible to transmit a television programme between the US and Europe. Most urgent international communication was conducted by telegraph, at a price per word that varied according to the countries involved, but was so expensive that foreign correspondents and international reporters by then shared a second language known as cablese in which unnecessary words were omitted, prefixes and suffixes exploited and codes employed: ‘ExParis Londonwards smorning’ meant the correspondent was to forsake the French capital for the British metropolis before noon that day. ‘Upstuff job arsewards’ meant that he had resigned. All that began to change on 23 July 1962, with the first formal transatlantic broadcast via Telstar. It wasn’t a simple operation. Telstar, unlike its successors, was in an orbit with a highest altitude of 3,600 miles, which meant that it whizzed around the planet every two hours and 40 minutes, thus national broadcasters had precarious access to it for 20 minutes or so at a time and the satellite had to be tracked by a series of receiving stations. The signal sent up from the ground transmitter was about two and a half watts. By the time it had reached its reflector in space and bounced back to the receiver it had made a journey of 10,000 miles or more and had been attenuated to about a trillionth of a watt, so the receivers were monstrously large: National Geographic magazine at the time described the US receiver at Andover in Maine as ‘the world’s largest ear trumpet.’ But the success of the transmission also depended on a number of other new technologies: without the recently-invented maser (which stands for microwave amplification of stimulated emission of radiation) any such feeble signal would have been overwhelmed by all the other random noise of the universe. The maser became the instrument that could eliminate the interference and amplify the signal that mattered most, about four thousand times. The maser however, had to work at very low temperatures: it was kept at near absolute zero in a bath of liquid helium that was in turn kept cold in a tank of liquid nitrogen. The Telstar experiment was an international, cross-cultural project that depended on Bell Telephone Labs in the US, the Post Office in Britain, the British Broadcasting Corporation and the European Broadcasting Union plus the ingenuity of an army of engineers and scientists, and it tested international amity and understanding in unexpected ways. During a trial in the very early hours of 13 July 1962, before the formal first broadcast, the French received a good picture and the British receiver at Goonhilly, in Cornwall, did not: the problem turned out to be a component that had been fitted back-to-front, because, as a veteran remembered long afterwards ‘it all depended on how one defined left-handed and right-handed polarisation. The Americans had adopted one definition and we had taken another.’ Meanwhile, the British accused the French of having broken an international agreement by transmitting a live broadcast before the agreed date of 23 July 1962. The French responded by saying it hadn’t been a live programme, it had been pre-recorded on magnetic tape and the BBC instead had broken the agreement by reporting ‘live’ from the control room at Goonhilly. The Guardian’s science correspondent at the time, John Maddox observed that the first result of Telstar had been ‘to confirm the suspicions of those who consider that better communications may not be an unmixed blessing.’ That same month, on the formal day of its first public broadcast, Goonhilly picked up the first television pictures, of President John F Kennedy in Washington, talking about the US dollar. Telstar became one of the most famous satellites ever and a record called Telstar, by a band called The Tornadoes, became the first British single to reach the top of the charts in the United States.But Telstar on its own was an unsatisfactory compromise: real, practical communication at a global level would depend either on a network of Telstars, so that transmission could skip from one orbiting satellite to another as it passed overhead, which would mean a much more complex system of ground stations, or on the launch of a series of geosynchronous satellites, each in 24 hour orbit, always above a precise location on Earth. Telstar and its successors relayed film of the assassination of President John F Kennedy at Dallas in November 1963. A year later, a Syncom 3 – a satellite at geostationary orbit – relayed coverage of the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. In 1965, the US launched Early Bird, the first Intelsat communications satellite. It could handle either 240 telephone circuits or one black-and-white television programme, but not both at the same time. It could only link Europe and North America, and then only intermittently, because it had no battery and could only function while its solar panels were pointing at the sun. The global communications revolution had a long way to go, but it had begun. You could get a message to the other side of the Atlantic in a second, as long as you tried to do so while the satellite had power. Early Bird was joined by other satellites and in 1965 an enterprising BBC producer, Aubrey Singer, conceived the idea for the world’s first global television show. It took another two years to organise and it needed the support of the European Broadcasting Union but it exploited four satellites to link 14 countries on five continents and featured live broadcasts only, with appearances by the Vienna Boys’ Choir, Maria Callas, Pablo Picasso, Marshall McLuhan (who coined the phrase ‘global village’), trams in Melbourne, subway construction workers in Tokyo, a cattle rancher in Canada, and the Beatles and friends singing All You Need Is Love. Altogether the show was transmitted to 41 nations and was watched by at least 400 million viewers. It was intended to unite the world. Until a few weeks before the broadcast, Soviet and other iron curtain partners had also planned to contribute, but pulled out: the recent six-day war between Israel and the Arab countries had soured the geopolitical mood. The world was one, but it was still divided.
If you would like to read the Science that Changed the World in full now, you can purchase the ebook via the links on the Guardian Shorts website, prices from £1.99.
| The Guardian | - |
Clarke
proposed a 'second moon' at an orbit with a radius of 42,000km and a
period of exactly 24 hours, an artificial moon that would never rise and
never set, a satellite that could be fitted with receiving and
transmitting equipment, driven by solar ...
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