The Big Bounce

About

Documents the development, technological innovations, and first flight of the first first telecommunications satellite, developed as part of Project Echo by NASA, Bell Laboratories, and Remington Rand.

This film was reproduced on DVD by NYU's MIAP program in collaboration with the Orphan Films Symposium on the “Orphans in Space” DVD, c. 2013, produced by Walter Forsberg, et alia., in collaboration with Megan P. and the Prelinger Archives among other archives. Following is "The Big Bounce" narration script written by Megan Prelinger for the DVD: 1. The Maker This film is a Jerry Fairbanks Production, one of many that Fairbanks produced for the Bell System in their series of sponsored films that were targeted at general audiences. A few Bell System films produced by Fairbanks have become cult classics, including "Adventures in Telezonia" and "Once Upon a Honeymoon". Jerry Fairbanks was born in San Francisco in 1904 and was a cinematographer, aviator and an inventor. As a young man he shot aerial views of cities from his own airplane, and in the 1930s and 1940s founded Scientific Films, Inc. to produce short subjects. He made films in partnership with POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, light treatments of new developments in science and technology, including plastics and television. Fairbanks is credited with the invention of the multi-cam system for shooting television programs in studio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Fairbanks (retrieved 7/24/23)

2. The Satellite Echo One, the first of two satellites launched as Project Echo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Echo (retrieved 7/24/23) was launched in August of 1960. It is historically significant as the first satellite to transmit a communications signal long distance. Echo was a “passive” satellite -- it was a shiny balloon that transmitted a signal through reflection. The communications signal originated on Earth and was received on Earth -- it only bounced off the Echo satellite. Hence the name of this film, “The Big Bounce.” According to Life magazine, Echo was nicknamed the “satelloon” by engineers working on the project. When it launched, Echo was one of 14 satellites in orbit around the Earth. In its deflated state, it was 157 feet long. While it was in development, it was stored flat and rolled up in a large aircraft hangar, held together and prevented from blowing around by devices that looked like giant clothespins. Despite its size, its mylar skin was so thin that it weighed only 136 pounds.

3. The Future of Trans-World Geosynchronous Satellite Coverage The Echo satellite was a short step in time away from global telecommunications. Satellite technology was developing so rapidly in the early 1960s that really significant new developments were clustered together in just a few years. Telstar, for example, was the first active, direct relay communications satellite. A dramatic leap beyond the technology of Echo, it launched only two years later. This film, “The Big Bounce” discusses geosynchronous satellites as a future possibility; the first of those was Syncom 3 which launched just four years after Echo, in 1964. Full global coverage by satellites followed by 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_satellite (retrieved 7/24/23)

4. Political, Cultural, and Technological Context Echo was launched into a complex geopolitical environment. 1960 was a pretty hot year in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In May of that year a United States U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union, and its pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was captured as a spy. This led to an international incident and a considerable escalation in Cold War tensions. The same week that Echo was launched, Powers was sentenced inside the USSR for espionage and was sent to a Soviet prison for two years. The U.S. was looking for good news in both space and military technology, and found it that summer in both. Echo was launched August 12, and then that same week, the experimental X-15 space plane --a project of the Air Force, the Navy, and NASA -- reached a new altitude height of over 131,000 feet (almost 26 miles). At the time, that was the highest above Earth that any human being had ever traveled. Remember, this is all a year before the first orbit of Earth by Yuri Gagarin. The Naval Research Laboratory was involved in Echo - although unpublicized at the time - as naturally there was strategic military interest in Echo. It was the subject of experiments to refine U.S. telemetric readings on major cities in the Soviet Union for the purpose of better missile aim. That contradiction is characteristic of the often simultaneous military and peaceful uses of space technology. Echo was publicly marketed as peaceful since it was not in itself a weapon and did not carry a weapon, and was not overseen by any military agency. The commemorative postage stamp for Echo issued by the Post Office in 1960 bore the slogan “Communications for Peace.” Yet once in the air, it was subject to appropriative use by the Navy and did result in improved missile sightings on Moscow.

5. A Few Words on Echo’s Technology Project Echo was headed by NASA, with guidance technology provided by Bell Laboratories and Remington Rand-Univac, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC (retrieved 7/24/23) who built the ground-based navigational computer. This was the same command guidance system that had placed NASA’s Tiros I weather satellite into its orbit three months earlier, in May of 1960. The Echo satellite itself was structurally very simple -- basically just a big balloon. What was technologically innovative about Project Echo as a telecommunications experiment was the computer designed to navigate its launch, and the radio receiver developed to handle the signal reception. That radio receiver had three parts: - a 50-foot long horn-shaped antenna, which had been previously developed for use in overland radio relay - a highly sensitive ruby amplifier; called a “maser” amplifier, it was cooled by liquid helium to negative 456 degrees Fahrenheit to enhance its sensitivity https://physics.aps.org/story/v15/st4 (retrieved 7/24/23) - Not mentioned in the film is the third part of that receiver, a special demodulation circuit developed at Bell Labs as part of their ongoing work in formulating new kinds of computer circuits.

6. The Role of Bell Laboratories I’d like to talk about the history of Bell Laboratories, because of the lab’s role in developing the most sophisticated technological elements of Project Echo. https://www.bell-labs.com/about/#Our-History Bell Laboratories was the research laboratory that grew out of Alexander Graham Bell’s own garage workshop for the study of the transmission of sound. The laboratory was informally the research laboratory of AT&T until 1925, when it was incorporated. In the first quarter of the 20th century, AT&T had to work very hard to maintain its dominance over the burgeoning telephone industry. The company had succeeded in transmitting a telephone call over 1,000 miles in 1900, but faced considerable technical challenges in transmitting over longer distances. In 1909 the company publicly announced a goal of transmitting a telephone call coast-to-coast. However the existing line technologies allowed signals to dissipate into static after a thousand miles. AT&T consolidated its research department as Bell Laboratories, a laboratory that was solely dedicated to developing the technology needed to extend -- and extend and extend -- the reach of telephone transmissions. By the time Bell Laboratories was working on Echo, it was a fifty-one year old laboratory with two Nobel Prizes in physics awarded to lead researchers. Perhaps most notably, the transistor was invented at the Laboratory in 1948. The Laboratory’s work in long-distance transmission lent easily to military applications - it was Bell Laboratories that first suggested to the U.S. Army that missiles could be controlled and guided remotely through computer technology. The result of that first collaboration between the Lab and the military was the Nike missile.

7. The Flight of Echo and Its Impact Once launched, Echo orbited at nearly 16,000 miles per hour, one thousand miles above the Earth. It circumnavigated the globe once every two hours! While it was up there, some other things that it did were to facilitate the first long-distance electronic mail, in the form of a fax. A letter was scanned and entered into a facsimile machine in Washington, D.C., which then converted the message to a telephone signal, where it was phoned in to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory at Stump Neck, Maryland, and from there was bounced off Echo to Bell Laboratories communications center in New Jersey. The Laboratory then forwarded the fax to the Newark Post Office via telephone lines. The message was issued by the Postmaster General of the U.S., and was addressed, to “Mr. and Mrs. America, care of Postmaster, Everywhere, U.S.A.” No kidding! Echo was also used to transmit photographic images across the country, another first. The anticipated lifespan of the Echo satellite was one year -- after a year it suffered from a wrinkled surface that caused it to become ineffectual as a signal transmitter. The wrinkling was caused by three factors acting together: partial loss of internal gas pressure; the effect of air drag; and thermal stress on the mylar skin caused by rotating between the hot side of Earth, in the sun’s path, and the cold side of Earth, in the shadow of the sun. Echo lost its usefulness in 1961. It however then remained aloft for seven more years. It re-entered the atmosphere and burned up in May of 1968 -- how revolutionary! ________________ Sources consulted:

Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age by Michael Riordan and Lillian Hoddeson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Bell Laboratories Record: December 1960, p. 471 (“news in brief”) September 1960, “Project Echo Transmits Telephone Messages Via Satellite”

Life magazine: August 22, 1960, pp. 19 - 27 (series of articles gathered under the umbrella “Our Greatest Week in Space”)

all available at the Prelinger Library in San Francisco

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Jerry Fairbanks Productions

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