This month in 1960

London is currently the focus of the world’s telecommunications industry, with broadcasts winging their way from the Olympic Park around the world. It’s a technology that we take for granted, but its origins are barely half a century old.

Looking back into The Engineer’s September 1960 edition, the magazine’s American Editor summarised the beginnings of the communications satellite industry, following the news that the Bell Telephone Laboratories had announced plans to launch a fleet of 50 ‘relay spinning sphere’ satellites to beam telephone calls and television signals around the world. You can read the whole article here.

The article talks about Bell’s ‘first telephone terminal to outer space’, which had recently been built at Holmdel in New Jersey. Using the new maser technology developed by Bell Labs in 1957 and a horn-reflector antenna, the facility had carried out a coast-to-coast telephone conversation with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Goldstone, California via a wonderfully named ‘moonbounce experiment’. ‘The voice of William C Jakes, engineer in charge of the experiment, was beamed from a 60ft dish-shaped antenna to the moon, some 240,000 miles away,’ the article says. ‘Although the signal travelled at nearly the speed of light, it took three seconds to complete the trip of almost 500,000 miles to Goldstone.’ This meant a six-second time lag between a question being asked and answered, it added. Previous moonbounce experiments had included a conversation the previous year between MIT  and Jodrell Bank, although the replies had gone via an transatlantic cable.