Today in 1911, “In order to ascertain the speed at which a commercial message could be sent around the world by cable,” The New York Times “filed a dispatch” in the telegraph room of the times building.
The cable, reading “This message sent around the world,” relayed by 16 different operators in San Francisco, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Bombay, Malta, Lisbon, the Azores and other places, and traveling more than 28,613 miles, was received by the same operator in New York 16.5 minutes later.
Exactly 66 years later, on August 20, 1977, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sent a different kind of message–a phonograph record containing information about Earth for extraterrestrial beings–hurling it into space aboard the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II.
“Thanks to the Voyager program, NASA scientists gained a wealth of information about the outer planets,” according to the History Channel. But so far, no word from the extraterrestrial beings.