On December 13, 1962, NASA launched the Relay 1 satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was the first of its kind; an experimental communications beacon that would allow for simultaneous television transmission across continents and oceans. It was ultimately successful, its first broadcast being the tragic news of President Kennedy’s assassination, and it was later utilized to enable Americans to watch live footage of the Tokyo Olympic Games of 1964. In terms of how we communicate across the globe, this satellite was the harbinger of a new era.
There is an astonishing and often repeated fact relating to the progression of technology in the twentieth century: It was only sixty years between when the Wright Brothers first achieved powered flight at Kitty Hawk and when Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the surface of the moon. For ten thousand years of human history we were hopelessly earthbound, but in a relative flash of inspiration we broke not just the bounds of gravity, but those of Earth itself, and man achieved something that had until recently been seen as nothing more than a dream.
And this revolution happened not just in the places we could go, but, perhaps more importantly, in the ways we communicate. In 1863, the Pony Express closed down a few days after the first transcontinental telegraph cable came online, rendering it entirely outmoded. This symbolic moment, when for the first time in human history the message could travel faster than, and without, the person carrying it, kicked off a communications sea change we are still watching play out. Yesterday’s story told of Guglielmo Marconi receiving the first transatlantic signal, a simple three-dot telegraph pattern, in December of 1901. While it took sixty six years to get from Kitty Hawk to the moon, it took just sixty one years and a day to go from sitting huddled in a shack on the Newfoundland coast, straining your ears against a wall of static to extract the pinpricks of a message that were coming in, to sitting in your living room and watching a sporting event beamed in via space from another continent in high fidelity.
Today you’re reading this on your computer, perhaps thousands of miles away from where I wrote it, and potentially just minutes after I finished writing it. Or maybe you’re reading this on your phone, downloading it via wireless cell signals as you sit on a train speeding faster than the Wright Brothers flew on that day in Kitty Hawk. Something we fail to appreciate on regular basis is not just how far we’ve come in the last thirty or forty years, but in the last hundred and fifty. Perhaps one of those reading this on her cell phone (although admittedly likely not) is Irene Triplett, the last surviving child of a Civil War veteran still collecting her father’s war pension. She stands here as an example of how little time has actually passed since her father grew up riding horses and marveling at the telegraph. Perhaps a little more marveling is due from us at the notion that we live in hands down the most rapidly improving period of human history ever recorded, and that the world our children and grandchildren one day live in may be as alien to us as ours would be to Irene Triplett’s father.