BW - EP144—003: October 1957—Sputnik, Bing, And Current Events

Breaking Walls: The Podcast on the History of American Network Radio Broadcasting

On Friday October 4th, 1957 the U.S. received confirmation of the USSR’s launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial earth orbiting satellite. It was a polished metal sphere twenty-three inches in diameter with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable by amateur radio operators. Its sixty-five degree orbital inclination gave it a flight path that completely covered all parts of the inhabited earth. While traveling at peak speed, the satellite took 96.20 minutes to complete each orbit. It transmitted on the bandwidth of roughly twenty and forty megahertz. These signals were monitored throughout the world and continued for twenty-one days until the transmitter’s batteries died on October 26th. The satellite's success was unanticipated by the U.S., setting the space Race into orbit as part of the Cold War. That same day, Bring Crosby signed on with The Ford Road Show for five minutes over CBS, announced by Ken Carpenter. The next Wednesday, October 9th, The Lovell Telescope was activated in Cheshire, England, while a Boeing B-47 Stratojet bomber crashed in Orlando, Florida killing all four military officers on board. On October 10th, a nuclear reactor fire on the north-west coast of England released radioactive material into the air, as President Eisenhower hosted breakfast at the White House with Ghanese minister to France, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, who’d been recently refused at a Howard Johnson’s in Delaware because of his race. The next day an IBM computer at MIT Computation Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts calculated the last stage of the R-7 Semyorka rocket that carried Sputnik 1. On Saturday October 12th, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, arrived in Ottawa, the capital of Canada, for a royal visit. On the fourteenth, the Queen opened the Canadian Parliament, the first monarch to do so.