Telstar Beams Live TV Across the Atlantic
On this day · 23 July 1962
In 1962 a beach-ball-sized satellite carried live pictures across an ocean for the first time, shrinking the world overnight.
On July 23, 1962, the satellite Telstar 1 relayed the first publicly available live television signal across the Atlantic, linking North America and Europe in real time. Launched by NASA on July 10, 1962, the spherical, transistor-studded craft weighed about 170 pounds and measured only 34.5 inches across, yet it did what undersea cables could not: move a live picture between continents.
The coordinated broadcast opened with a split-screen image of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, carried in North America by NBC, CBS, ABC and the CBC, and in Europe by Eurovision. Anchors including Walter Cronkite appeared on screens an ocean apart, watched by hundreds of millions of viewers.
A beach-ball-sized sphere had, for an instant, stitched two continents into one audience.
Telstar could only relay during the few minutes its low orbit kept it in view of both ground stations, but it proved the concept of global satellite television and pointed directly toward the always-on networks that followed.
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