Lesson 10. Public Safety, the Military and Global Satellite Services
150 Years of American Telecommunications: The Online Course
Join Section A for FreeA Royal Air Force officer named Arthur C. Clarke described the communications satellite in a British hobbyist magazine in October 1945, twelve years before anything reached orbit. The military built the first ones, and an Army relay package carried President Eisenhower's recorded Christmas message from space in December 1958. Congress chartered a private corporation called Comsat in 1962 to run the American share of a global system, where nearly every other nation used a state agency. The emergency number ran the sequence backward, since AT&T announced 911 in January 1968 and a small Alabama town dialed it five weeks later. Local governments paid to build that system for two decades, and first responders got a dedicated federal network only in 2012.
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