Technicians work on Telstar before its launch on 10 July 1962 from Cape Canaveral, Florida
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FIRST TRANSATLANTIC TRANSMISSION, 1962
If you think this looks like a football, you wouldn’t be far wrong. The Telstar communications satellite, with its 3,600 solar panels, inspired the now-iconic black-and-white design of the ball. On 11 July 1962, television was transformed forever as the first live pictures were sent across the Atlantic, beamed by the orbiting Telstar satellite. The transmission was received in Britain at 1am, showing a flag outside the Andover station in Maine and a man’s face, but the image quality was poor. That was not the case at the station in France. The first public transmission on 23 July treated European viewers to a press conference with US President John F Kennedy and clips of a baseball game.