We had some visitors last fall, a
TV crew from the Japanese network NHK. They were doing an episode about
communications satellites for Cosmic Front,
a show devoted to space technology and space exploration. Since my father John
R. Pierce played a major role at Bell Labs in the development of communications
satellites with Echo and Telstar, they wanted to interview me. The show was
broadcast Dec. 13, and here’s how the English language NHK site described the
pioneers it celebrated:
Two extraordinarily talented
men, communications engineering expert John Pierce and aeronautical engineering
specialist Harold Rosen, put all their weight behind the program, and achieved
enormous leaps in communications satellite technology in only three years. They
also embarked on developing groundbreaking satellites that allowed stable
communications: geosynchronous satellites that from the ground seem to hover
over the Earth, as depicted in the science fiction novels of the time. In 1964,
Syncom 3, the world's first geosynchronous satellite, relayed television images
of the Tokyo Olympics from Japan, in the Far East, to the rest of the world. In
this episode of Cosmic Front, we explore the dramatic story of the engineers
who used meticulous calculations and unlikely ideas to turn space into a
communications highway.
I was in college, or home for the
summer, during the run-up to Echo (which was just a balloon, off which test
phone calls between Goldstone, California, and Holmdel, New Jersey, were
bounced in 1960); and Telstar (an active satellite, over which the very first
intercontinental broadcasts were transmitted in 1962). I remember witnessing
both, but I really didn’t know a lot of the background because my father didn’t
talk about it much, and he and my mother broke up in 1961. I actually knew a lot more about two
other people who promoted the idea of communications satellites – George O.
Smith and Arthur C. Clarke.
During and just after World War
II, Smith had published a series of stories called Venus Equilateral in Astounding Science Fiction. These were collected in a 1947 book edition, which
has a cover diagram showing the location of the
communications satellite, placed at the Trojan position in the orbit of Venus
to relay radio messages between Venus and Earth. This was a manned space station, and the problems that it faced – such
as reaching a ship in space instead of another planet – were treated as
practically insuperable. This was before masers. It was also before
transistors; “high” technology in sf was still giant vacuum tubes. Clarke and
my father both read Smith’s stories in Astounding, and I remember my father
having a the book – I ordered a copy of the same edition to show the NHK
people, and a shot of that made in into the episode.
Clarke was inspired to write a
piece for Wireless World in 1945,
proposing a geosynchronous communications satellite. I was familiar with that,
because Clarke has referred to it in other writings, including a magazine piece
(for Playboy, I think) about how he lost a billion dollars by inventing Telstar
but failing to patent the idea. I wasn’t aware of my father having done
anything of the sort before Echo until I read The Idea Factory,
a history of the Bell Labs by Jon Gertner, in which John R. Pierce figures
quite prominently. It turned out that he’d drafted a short proposal in 1954,
and a longer one in 1959. But it was only when we watched the DVD of the NHK
show Jan. 17 that we got to see the first, dug out of the Bell Labs archives,
dated July 26, 1954, and signed by my father. That was the high point of the
DVD for me.
I may have been a disappointment
to Chinami Inaishi, Los Angeles representative of NHK, and the crew she brought
to our home Oct. 18. They wanted more of the “inside story” of Echo and Telstar
than I knew, and wanted me to talk about what it was like to be the son of such
a famous man. The thing is, when I was a child, I didn’t think of him as a
Famous Man – famous men were presidents and movie stars and people like Albert
Einstein. And my father didn’t talk shop much at the dinner table; I remember
hearing about traveling wave tubes, but not
about transistors, although he gave them their name and was the supervisor of
the team that created them – Walter Brattain, John Bardeen and William Shockley.
I remember we visited the Brattains once or twice when I was a kid, but I
didn’t have any idea at the time who he was. Just a friend of my father’s.
Anyway, I ended up with maybe
fifty seconds on the screen at most; from the visual context (my voice was
overdubbed, like the voices of nearly everyone else interviewed, by the
Japanese translation), it must have been mostly about how we had the first TV
in our neighborhood in 1947 because of our Bell Labs connection. They asked me
about science fiction, and I think I spoke well about that, but there wasn’t
room for it. But I can’t complain: how many people get on national TV (here or
in Japan) at all? There were amusing things in the show as it aired, such as
re-creations of crucial events that involved my father and others – only the
actor playing my father looked nothing at all like him.
But there was another key player,
who kept showing up in archival photos and re-created scenes, some with my
father. I didn’t know who he was, but could make out that he must be the man
behind Syncom, the first geosynchronous communications satellite. After
watching the DVD, I did a Google image search for “Syncom and Inventor” – and
up popped one of the stills used
in the show. It was Harold Rosen, born in 1926. I knew he had to be pretty old,
yet in amazingly good health, because there are scenes of him shot by NHK
working out at Muscle Beach and on a rowing machine, as well as talking about
his part in communications satellites. Wikipedia says he still consults for
Boeing on design of new satellite
systems. What a man!
Isn’t the Internet wonderful!
After the Oct. 18 interview,
Marcia and I had dinner with the NHK people at a local Japanese restaurant. I
wanted to show my appreciation for Japanese culture; among other things, I
mentioned Twilight Samurai (2002), set
about the time of the Meiji restoration, when the one-time warriors had gone
into business. Of course, the NHK people didn’t know what I was talking about,
based on the English title. But one of them got out his mobile and looked it up
(the original title is Tasogare Seibei (たそがれ清兵衛).
Aha! He liked it too.
Isn’t the Internet wonderful!
