Live TV Crossed the Ocean for the First Time. The Satellite Was Already Dying.

On July 23, 1962, Walter Cronkite greeted Europe live from New York via the Telstar satellite, in the first public live transatlantic television broadcast. The beach-ball-sized relay carrying the signal had been launched one day after a U.S. nuclear explosion in space, and within months that blast would fry its transistors.

A few minutes before 3 p.m. Eastern on July 23, 1962, engineers at the Andover, Maine, ground station locked onto a 171-pound, 34.5-inch sphere called Telstar 1 as it crested the horizon on its 124th orbit. They were early. The broadcast was meant to open with remarks from President John F. Kennedy, but the satellite came into range before the president was ready, so the producers filled the dead air with the only live thing on hand: a WGN telecast of a baseball game, the Philadelphia Phillies at the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Phillies second baseman Tony Taylor flied out to deep right off Cal Koonce.

Then Walter Cronkite went on. "Good evening, Europe. This is the North American continent live via AT&T Telstar, July 23rd, 1962, 3 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time." The screen split, the Statue of Liberty on one side and the Eiffel Tower on the other. An estimated 200 million people on both sides of the Atlantic watched, in 16 European nations and across North America. Cronkite and NBC's Chet Huntley anchored from New York; the BBC's Richard Dimbleby hosted from Brussels.

Telstar was no magic box. It was a low-orbit relay, racing around the planet every two and a half hours at 18,000 mph, and it was visible to both Andover and the European ground stations at Pleumeur-Bodou, France, and Goonhilly Downs, England, for only about 20 minutes per pass. So the show was a sprint. After a whistle-stop tour of American scenes, Mount Rushmore to the Seattle World's Fair, Kennedy's press conference came on, and the president happened to deny that the United States would devalue the dollar. The dollar immediately strengthened on world markets. "We all glimpsed something of the true power of the instrument we had wrought," Cronkite said later. Three hours later, on the next pass, Europe beamed back its own postcard tour, Big Ben to the Sistine Chapel to Sicilian fishermen tending their nets, before Telstar slid over the horizon and the picture cut to black.

That evening the machine that had just shrunk the world was already sick. The day before Telstar's launch, July 9, 1962, the United States had detonated a 1.4-megaton warhead 250 miles above the Pacific in a test called Starfish Prime. The blast seeded the inner Van Allen radiation belt with high-energy electrons and raised its intensity by orders of magnitude. Telstar, lofted into that irradiated sky the next morning, absorbed roughly 100 times the radiation its designers had planned for. Its transistors began misbehaving by November, the command channel died, and in February 1963, after just seven months, the first communications satellite went silent for good. It still circles the Earth.

The blast that killed Telstar also helped kill the practice it came from. Starfish Prime's wreckage, and a matching Soviet high-altitude test, drove the superpowers to the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty banning above-ground nuclear explosions, and then to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, whose Article IV forbids placing nuclear weapons in orbit. The satellite that gave the world live global television was murdered by the very kind of weapon the world then agreed to keep out of space.

There was one more echo. The night before the broadcast, July 22, 1962, a London producer named Joe Meek recorded a sprightly instrumental he named for the satellite. "Telstar" by the Tornados) rose to number one in Britain and, that December, became the first U.S. number-one single by a British group, more than a year before the Beatles landed in America. The song outlived the machine. Telstar 1 went dark in February 1963; the record named for it had already spent weeks at the top of the American charts.

Also on this day

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1914: Austria-Hungary hands Serbia the July Ultimatum at 6 p.m. in Belgrade, a 48-hour, ten-point note that Britain's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, called the most formidable document one state had ever addressed to another; Serbia accepted nearly all of it, and Austria declared war five days later anyway.
1952: Egypt's Free Officers, led by Nasser and Naguib, seize Cairo before dawn and topple King Farouk, ending the 150-year Muhammad Ali dynasty and founding the republic.
1995: Comet Hale-Bopp is spotted independently, minutes apart, by Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp in Arizona near the star cluster Messier 70, becoming the great naked-eye comet of 1997.
1885: Ulysses S. Grant dies at 63 in a cottage on Mount McGregor, bankrupt and riddled with throat cancer, having just finished the memoirs Mark Twain would publish to save his widow from destitution.