Word: beeps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Soviet progress: "If there have been faults in the organization of our missile program (see box opposite), or if arbitrary spending limits have been imposed, it is imperative that we correct them immediately and make a maximum effort." Said former U.S. Ambassador to Italy Glare Boothe Luce: the beep of the Soviet satellite "is an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our material superiority...
...Beep Code. The famed beeps have varied in length, frequency and spacing. These variations concealed in code the observations of the satellite's instruments. So far, only the Russians can have gained much scientific information from the satellite, but the rest of the world is beginning to catch up. Britain's 250-ft. radiotelescope at Jodrell Bank turned itself into an impromptu radar and pinpointed the satellite or its carrier rocket over Britain. As the slowly shifting orbit carried Sputnik over the east coast of the U.S., hundreds of early risers in New England saw the sunlit speck...
Commercial radio stations, too, picked up sputnik's signals. "Listen now," said an NBC announcer, in a voice his listeners would not soon forget, "for the sound which forever more separates the old from the new." And over thousands of earthbound radios sounded the eerie beep . . . beep . . . beep from somewhere out in space...
During the first night, the sputnik's familiar beep-beep must have been heard by radio or TV, by a great part of the world's population tone music-minded Swedish radio listener firmly asserted that the beep is in A-flat). U.S. experts could not tell at first whether the signal, which alternates between 20 and 40 megacycles, is a mere series of beeps, or whether it carries coded information from instruments in the satellite...
...Allen Hynek, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's optical tracking program, revealed yesterday that three major radio installations--one in New York, one in Chicago, and one in Cambridge--which had previously been picking up the satellite's steady beep beep signal lost radio contact with the object late Monday night and yesterday morning...