"This is the long distance call." Paul Simon, "The Boy in the Bubble."
Driving down the Garden State Parkway listening to this song, part of Paul Simon's Graceland album, got me thinking about the true days of miracles, wonders and long distance calls. It was the 1960s and long distance calls were expensive and something to be avoided by any and all means. Long distance was any call outside of the towns in your immediate exchange calling area. Calls to different area codes, when those beauties were introduced, were a dead giveaway that the call was going to cost you more than 14 cents.
My Uncle Lou would call the out-of-town relatives, that is those who lived in Rockland County area code 914, from his company's office on Long Island in area code 516. He was an on the road salesman but was in the showroom at least once a week, so that was the day we got the call.
My father had this early version Dymo Label Maker. It was a hand-held little thing through which you would pass the label tape, move the dial to the sought after letter and squeeze the handle. It looked something like this:
Back to the theme. As a baby boomer in the 1950s, as many others I was attuned to all that was happening in space and science. Nothing seemed impossible, the nuclear powered submarine Nautilus under the North Pole, and the exploits of the Trieste were awe inspiring. Where we lagged was in space exploration.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the talk on the block among the World War II vets was about the commies leaping ahead of the U.S. No one knew how many failed rocket launches the Soviet's attempted before Sputnik, but every American failure was caught on film. Depressing, to say the least.
I remember the excitement engendered by the selection in April 1959 of the country's first astronauts, a new word in the lexicon, to form the so-called the Mercury 7 astronauts. The front page magazine photos of names soon to be known to all, Shepard, Grissom, Glenn, et al, gave us all a new sense of adventure. All their positives were paraded on the front pages of Life and Look magazine (I remember the photo of Life.)
Yet there was a debate surrounding the launch of the first Mercury capsule piloted by Alan Shepard in 1961-- should the launch be watched by school children? After all, what would the reaction be if the rocket blew up on launch? Not to worry though, the launch and the re-entry minutes later was flawless. An American hero in Alan Shepard was created over night.
With Mercury, American scientists proved they could get it right, but it also opened up a whole new field of using outer space to advantage. And that brings us to Telstar.
It's hard to accept the fact that all of what we have today is based on one invention. I'm speaking of the transistor. Others might dispute my choice but they're free to be wrong.
Anyone who has looked into the guts of a pre-1970s radio or amplifier knows what a simple thing it looked like-electron tubes of different sizes neatly aligned in rows of sockets of different configurations. underneath were resistors and capacitors of different sizes that acted as switches. Turn on the power and the the tubes would start to glow and get warm, actually hot, to the touch. Minutes later, the radio would begin to play or the amp would power up the stereo system.
If you can imagine the first computers, they were room sized monstrosities requiring hundreds, if not thousands, of electron tubes, etc in various arrays. The transistor allowed for the miniaturization of electronic equipment and it continues today in circuit board technology.
So Telstar, developable because of the invention of the transistor, allowed for the expansion of long distance calls and the eventual lowering of costs until today we think nothing of calling cross country or around the world.
Progress is good, don't you think?
Well, that's what I have to say. Stephen M. Flatow
