50 years of satellite TV

It was once a distant dream found only in sci-fi books.
But 50 years on, satellite television pictures are now beamed into millions of homes around the world.
Today marks the half-century anniversary of the first public satellite television broadcast across the Atlantic from the United States to Britain and mainland Europe.
The transmissions using a space satellite launched into orbit revolutionised popular entertainment and sparked an explosion in technological development.

Historic: Television monitors in New York on July 12 1962 show the first images broadcast by satellite from the UK to to the U.S.

'It wasn't actually the first satellite broadcast but because it was seen by so many people when it was on, it had a tremendous impact on people's perception of distance and extension of their consciousness,' said Iain Logie Baird, grandson of television pioneer John Logie Baird and curator of broadcast culture at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

'Their perception of the world had changed. Suddenly you could see across the ocean as easily as you could make a phone call.'

Three years after the first satellite broadcast, a child watched the first televised pictures of the moon in 1965 thanks to the technology introduced a few years earlier

The first transatlantic face-to-face television broadcast from Europe to the U.S. takes place on October 15, 1963. They are discussing 'The Christian Revolution'

The first ever satellite broadcast came against the backdrop of the Cold War, a year after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man in space. In the same year, The Beatles released their first hit single, Love Me Do, Steptoe and Son was beginning on BBC, and Britain's first legal casino had opened in Brighton.
Domestic television - broadcasts on electromechanical signals - had been airing since 1920s and tens of thousands of families had TV sets.
The signals were sent by ground broadcasts from TV towers but satellite was delivered from space.

The Queen's speech in 1988, left, being broadcast by satellite

a football fan cheers as he watches screens showing satellite images of the 1998 world cup

The Ted Bundy execution is broadcast from a jail n Florida in 1989. Before satellite, TV stations had to post recorded footage around the world

One of the most iconic satellite TV channels of the 90s, MTV, broadcast to a string of countries across the globe using signals from orbit first pioneered in the 60s

A Tibetan man proudly displays the satellite TV pictures he's receiving from a dish pitched outside his remote tent in Qinghai Province, China, in 2006

Dozens of colorful satellite dishes decorate the sides of council flats in Berlin, Germany, in 2012 as they pick up signals from across the globe

Footballers in Greece watch this year's Euro 2012 football tournament on a TV set receiving the same footage beamed around the world

But the satellite images were a changing point for British culture, according to Mr Baird.
A Telstar staellite was launched by Nasa into space from Maine in New York and a British receiver was built on Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall.
Mr Baird said that before Telstar, TV stations had to record on to tapes, which would then be flown to the destination country, meaning there could be a delay of hours if not days before they were broadcast.
With live footage beamed from all corners of the globe today, it is hard to grasp how much faster satellite transmissions made delivering news and other images, he added.
The Telstar satellite, which belonged to telecommunications giant AT&T, was launched by Nasa at 4.35am on July 10 1962, and the first television picture relayed from earth to space and back occurred later the same day, with a transmission of the American flag waving in front of the Earth Station in Andover, Maine.

Technology breakthrough: Engineers work on the Telstar satellite, which Nasa launched into Orbit in 1962 in order to make the first ever satellite TV broadcast

Control staff at Goonhilly Earth Station in Cornwall, which used Antenna One

to receive the first live television signals from the U.S. through the Telstar satellite

Advance: The completed Antenna One at Goonhilly Earth Station. It is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first satellite TV broadcast

The first public images beamed from New York to the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station in Cornwall on July 23 should have been of President John F Kennedy, but because of a delay in the United States viewers were first treated to footage of a baseball game which was being shown on US television.
Despite the seeming simplicity of what could be seen, the broadcast was the largest outside broadcast ever surpassing the BBC operation covering the coronation of the Queen in 1953, Mr Baird said.

A television set from the 1940s that would have been able to pick up the first satellite broadcast

An AT&T spokesman said the idea of an active satellite, which does not simply reflect signals but amplifies and retransmits them, was conceived by science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke in 1945.
Ten years later John Pierce, of Bell Telephone Laboratories, published a scientific paper outlining the possibilities for satellite communications.
But it was the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 that really lit a fire under the plans.
In January 1960, AT&T and Nasa agreed to a joint project. AT&T would design and construct an experimental satellite and pay Nasa to launch it in what would be the first privately sponsored space launch.
'The 34.5in (1.1m), 170lb (77kg) satellite fit Nasa's Delta rocket and once in orbit would receive microwave signals from a ground station, amplify them and rebroadcast them," the spokesman said.
'The team calculated an orbital path the rocket could reach, and located an ideal site for the US ground station near Andover.
'Here they built a massive 160-foot-diameter horn antenna, protected from the elements by the largest air-supported structure ever built.
'On that morning in July 1962, the team held its collective breath as countdown led to a perfect blast-off. Telstar was in space.'
That evening vice president Lyndon Johnson, later president of the United States, received the first satellite telephone call and within 30 minutes, Telstar produced several other firsts: successfully transmitting faxes, high-speed data and both live and taped television.
The satellite was used for several television demonstrations before going out of service on February 21 the following year.