Satellites casting all communications barriers aside, and making television and radio available to the world’s most inaccessible settlements are about to become a reality, according to Mr Fred Adler of the Hughes Aircraft Company, who presented the main lecture at the 6th International Television Exhibition and Symposium in Montreux last week.
So started a story in the May 28 1969 edition of Electronics Weekly.
‘Plans are already under way to place a 500lb satellite over India in 1972 which will relay information through some 5,000 ground stations on such subjects as family planning and agricultural improvements’, continued the story.
‘Adler concluded by quoting Arthur Clarke, the British scientist and writer who first conceived the idea of synchronous satellites in 1945: “What we are building now is the nervous system of mankind, which will link together the whole human race, for better or for worse, in a unity which non earlier age could have imagined”.’
In the same issue of EW, a debate in the House of Lords is reported in which Lord Ritchie-Calder argued that putting a satellite in orbit over an area of the world could deliver the power to dominate its political and cultural outlook, and therefore controls on an international basis would have to be established before these satellites were launched into space.
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