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{{Image|Apollo 11 image 2.jpg|right|200px|The first manned landing on the moon was successfully accomplished by the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Astronaut Neil Armstrong took this photograph of fellow astronaut Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin walking on the Moon's surface during lunar landing.}}  
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The '''[[Apollo program]]''' was a series of human spaceflight missions undertaken by the United States, during the years 1961–1974, using the Apollo spacecraft and Saturn space launch vehicle. It was conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and was devoted to the goal, expressed in a 1961 address to the U.S. Congress by U.S. President John F. Kennedy, of "... landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth ..." within the decade of the 1960s. That goal was successfully achieved by the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.
==Footnotes==
 
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The program continued until 1975 with five subsequent Apollo missions which also landed astronauts on the Moon, the last in December 1972. In the six successful Apollo spaceflights, twelve men walked on the Moon. As of 2011, these are the only times that humans have landed on another celestial body.
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Equipment that was originally produced for the Apollo program was used for the later Skylab program during 1973–1974 and the joint U.S.−Soviet mission (Apollo−Soyuz Test Project) in 1975. Therefore, those subsequent programs are thus often considered to be part of the Apollo program.
 
Despite the many successes, there were two major failures, the first of which resulted in the deaths of three astronauts, Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire. The second was an explosion on Apollo 13, in whose aftermath the deaths of three more astronauts were averted by the efforts of flight controllers, project engineers, and backup crew members.
 
The Apollo program was named after the Greek god of the Sun.
 
==Background==
 
The Apollo program was originally conceived early in 1960, during the administration of U.S. President Eisenhower, as a follow-up to America's Mercury program. While the Mercury capsule could only support one astronaut on a limited Earth orbital mission, the Apollo spacecraft was intended to be able to carry three astronauts on a circumlunar flight and perhaps even on a lunar landing. The program was named after the Greek god of the Sun by NASA manager Abe Silverstein, who later said that "I was naming the spacecraft like I'd name my baby." While NASA went ahead with planning for Apollo, funding for the program was far from certain, particularly given Eisenhower's equivocal attitude to manned spaceflight.
 
[[Apollo program|...]]

Latest revision as of 10:19, 11 September 2020

1901 photograph of a stentor (announcer) at the Budapest Telefon Hirmondó.

Telephone newspaper is a general term for the telephone-based news and entertainment services which were introduced beginning in the 1890s, and primarily located in large European cities. These systems were the first example of electronic broadcasting, and offered a wide variety of programming, however, only a relative few were ever established. Although these systems predated the invention of radio, they were supplanted by radio broadcasting stations beginning in the 1920s, primarily because radio signals were able to cover much wider areas with higher quality audio.

History

After the electric telephone was introduced in the mid-1870s, it was mainly used for personal communication. But the idea of distributing entertainment and news appeared soon thereafter, and many early demonstrations included the transmission of musical concerts. In one particularly advanced example, Clément Ader, at the 1881 Paris Electrical Exhibition, prepared a listening room where participants could hear, in stereo, performances from the Paris Grand Opera. Also, in 1888, Edward Bellamy's influential novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 foresaw the establishment of entertainment transmitted by telephone lines to individual homes.

The scattered demonstrations were eventually followed by the establishment of more organized services, which were generally called Telephone Newspapers, although all of these systems also included entertainment programming. However, the technical capabilities of the time meant that there were limited means for amplifying and transmitting telephone signals over long distances, so listeners had to wear headphones to receive the programs, and service areas were generally limited to a single city. While some of the systems, including the Telefon Hirmondó, built their own one-way transmission lines, others, including the Electrophone, used standard commercial telephone lines, which allowed subscribers to talk to operators in order to select programming. The Telephone Newspapers drew upon a mixture of outside sources for their programs, including local live theaters and church services, whose programs were picked up by special telephone lines, and then retransmitted to the subscribers. Other programs were transmitted directly from the system's own studios. In later years, retransmitted radio programs were added.

During this era telephones were expensive luxury items, so the subscribers tended to be the wealthy elite of society. Financing was normally done by charging fees, including monthly subscriptions for home users, and, in locations such as hotel lobbies, through the use of coin-operated receivers, which provided short periods of listening for a set payment. Some systems also accepted paid advertising.

Footnotes

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