A Different Drummer

The scene was tense, the room hushed. At a barren table in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., Dr. John Robinson Pierce gulped coffee and nibbled nervously on a doughnut. A loudspeaker clicked on, long enough for a brief, metallic announcement: "Trinidad still tracking." Fidgeting, Pierce waited in the silence that followed, twisting the coffee cup in his hands. Suddenly, the speaker crackled again, and an excited voice relayed a message from Australia: "Woomera has it!" Pierce leaped out of his chair, his glasses bouncing on his nose. "It's in orbit," he cried. "Echo is in orbit." An hour later, a familiar voice filled the room : "This is President Eisenhower speaking." The President's words, spoken into a White House tape recorder months before, had just been broadcast from Goldstone, Calif., and had carried clearly across 2,500 miles of space to Holmdel's horn-shaped antenna. It was a major space-age breakthrough. After one earlier failure, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration had successfully launched an Echo satellite, a huge, metal ized balloon capable of reflecting radio messages from earth. The U.S. thus opened the door to a new system of inter continental communications unaffected by either the curvature of the earth's surface or atmospheric disturbance.

Long & Hard. The biggest man-made object ever placed in space, Echo I is a plastic balloon as high as a ten-story building, with an aluminum coat that refleets radiomagnetic waves of frequencies up to 20.000 megacycles. Its skin is only .0005 in. thick--about half as thick as the cellophane on a pack of cigarettes. Packed accordion-fashion into the nose of a Thor-Delta rocket fired from Cape Canaveral, the 136-lb. satellite was filled with sublimating powders that expanded into gas in the direct rays of the sun and caused the balloon to inflate itself in orbit.

Its orbit was a triumph of precision. Echo I was circling the earth once every 121.6 min. at altitudes ranging from 1,018 to 1,160 miles. It deviated from its planned course by only one-tenth of a degree and four miles of altitude. Visible as the brightest stars in the night sky it was quickly sighted by observers in England. Australia and Japan. After it has been bombarded by meteorites and misshapen by the cold of sunless space, it is anybody's guess how long Echo I will remain on course. But this did not diminish the jubilation of scientists. Said T. Keith Glennan of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: "It has been a long, hard road, but it is awfully nice to come to the end of it with success."

Hardest & Sweetest. The road has been hardest and success sweetest for Bell Telephone's wispy (125 Ibs.) Dr. Pierce. At California Institute of Technology, Pierce. 50, studied chemical engineering, switched to aeronautics and then ("I got bored drawing rivets") to electronics. Holder of 55 electronics patents, Pierce has written three technical books and seven (under the pseudonym of J. J. Coupling), science-fiction stories. His first space-fiction yarn, written in high school, described the abduction of New York's Woolworth Building by aliens from Outer Space.

Pierce proposed the construction of communications satellites back in 1955, two years before Russia launched Sputnik. He found no takers. Then, when he learned three years later that NASA was experimenting with large, inflatable satellites--but to test air resistance, not space communications--Pierce took his case in person to Washington. He persuaded Sputnik-shocked Government officials to set aside funds for a space project that, however practical, was noncompetitive with Russia. Pierce's proposal was pragmatic indeed; in 1927, U.S. overseas telephone calls totaled only 11,000; last year 3,000,000 intercontinental calls were placed from the U.S. Dr. Pierce reasoned that a string of reflecting satellites would provide the U.S. with an all-weather, broad-band communications system capable of handling 1,000 intercontinental telephone, radio and television signals simultaneously.

Making the point that while the U.S.S.R. uses its satellites for propaganda, the U.S. should put its space efforts to practical purposes. Pierce recalled a passage from Thoreau's Walden: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." Added Pierce: "Perhaps we hear a different drummer."

Last week at Holmdel, Scientist Pierce listened attentively to President Eisenhower's brief message from space and allowed with considerable understatement:

"Project Echo seems to be something of practical importance." Then he drove the 35 miles to his home in Berkeley Heights, N.J., rested briefly, and went out to paint his garage--while Echo I. the product of his imagination and initiative, signaled another first in man's space adventures.

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