Communications Satellites Documentary - AT&T Archives

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A documentary compilation/overview covering all of the pioneering work that AT&T has done with communications satellites. It starts at Project Echo, moves onto Telstar, and, more vaguely, into how satellites have changed the world between 1962 and the 1980s. It contains clips from the following Bell films: The Big Bounce, Telstar, Beyond All Barriers, more. Foundations of the Information Age... was a series of films from Bell Labs to showcase the technological developments that had come from the facilities.

Communications satellites would never have come to be — or would have been long delayed — at Bell, if not for the efforts of scientist John Pierce. Pierce, who was also a science fiction writer, imagined communicating via space relay around the same time as, but independently from, fellow science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, in the 1940s. Both men are considered to be the fathers of the satellite. But Pierce, as a scientist, was in a position to pursue the actual creation, construction and launch of the projects. He lobbied NASA to make the satellites a joint project with the Bell System, and oversaw the first few tests.

Footage courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ