Engineer - Goonhilly teething troubles : Mr Neil White

Transcript

It was quite tense because it had never been done before we were doing something for the first time ever. We were using the Telstar satellite. (It) was an active one, you tried to send a signal to it, it amplified it and sent it back down again. Now that type of technology had never been never been tackled before and so we were worried and I can remember sitting there waiting for the satellite to come up. We certainly could see some signals; we saw some very flickery pictures, which vaguely could you could see the shape of an American test card but not very good. We found out that the French had received it all right. We were slightly annoyed, the usual French/British rivalry that always there. We arranged for the BBC cameras to be plugged into our transmitters so that when our turn came we actually beamed pictures of ourselves back to America and we congratulated the Americans on the achievements that that they'd made in producing this wonderful new Telstar satellite and in effect we'd transmitted the first live trans-Atlantic pictures ever.