Word: press
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Competitive Flight. Last week's space junket took off on a typewriter at 7:52 p.m. Monday in Paris, where Agence France-Presse, on a telephoned tip from its Moscow Bureau Chief Constantin Zar-nekau, flashed: "For the first time, a man has been put aboard a Soviet rocket, it is believed in Western circles." Forty-one minutes later, after communicating with Moscow Bureau Chief Henry Shapiro, United Press put on the wire a wary note to editors stating that there were "rumors" in Moscow of a manned rocket but "no official confirmation." Reuters also sidled...
Then, about an hour and a half after the A.F.P. flash, the Associated Press, biggest news agency of them all, filed a Moscow-datelined bulletin (which was actually written in London): "The Soviet Union has launched an experimental rocket 300 kilometers into the atmosphere with a human aboard, reliable sources said here tonight." So began a competitive stratosphere flight that outdid all competitors in irresponsibility...
...embassy." If the world's biggest wire service had any misgivings about decanting such grapevine, it was not until the three-day-old story had collapsed that the A.P. betrayed them, and finally made an admission that was rare, grudging-and little-played in A.P. papers: "The Associated Press erred Monday...
Three days after the Associated Press's manned missile landed in oblivion, the United Press staged its own excursion into the wild blue yonder. Panted a U.P. bulletin from Helsinki: "The state radio here picked up signals early today which indicate Russia may have launched a moon rocket." European radio stations, said U.P., had picked up a "mysterious beep-beep-beep" which lasted three times as long as the signal from an orbiting Sputnik and "suggested the Doppler effect* that would be produced by a transmitter speeding away from the earth...
...rocket-to-the-moon got a big early-morning play on radio newscasts, but its short life began after U.S. morning newspapers had gone to press, ended before afternoon papers started rolling. More than seven hours after its first moon-rocket bulletin, the U.P. mentioned the teleprinter theory among others, concluded later: "It was anybody's guess." Said a British engineer quoted by the A.P.: "We get strange noises constantly. A noise might be a hair dryer in Cornwall...