An Irishman's Diary

BY ONE MEASURE, at least, the modern world could be dated from an event that happened 50 years ago this week: the launch into space over Florida of what looked like an oversized beach-ball.

Telstar 1 had only the diameter of a truck tyre and weighed no more than an average man. It operated on a modest 14 watts of power, a fraction of what a laptop now needs. And it had an elliptical orbit, meaning that it was serviceable for less than half an hour of every circuit, as it crossed the Atlantic.

Even so, at full capacity it could handle 600 phone-calls and the signal for a black-and-white TV channel. Walter Cronkite was soon being beamed into space and back, at a different angle, into European living rooms. Richard Dimbleby went the other way. The term “live by satellite”, and with it the communications age, was born.

The debutant’s career didn’t last long. Launched on July 10th 1962, Telstar 1 operated until November, when radiation knocked out its electronics. It was restarted briefly in 1963, before resigning permanently. Thereafter it was succeeded by Telstar 2 and later many others: bigger, better, and with geosynchronised orbits, ensuring 24-hour service.

But the 1962 model had bravely gone where no working communications satellite had gone before, and it caught the popular imagination. Among many earth-bound tributes, a British pop group called the Tornados had a huge hit (transatlantic, appropriately) with a single named after it.

The tune featured an electronic organ called the clavioline. And at the time, it must have been cutting edge: a musical response to the space age. Now, it sounds like somebody humming through a comb.

Sport played tribute too. A football club formed in Holland in 1963 called itself Telstar, after the second satellite, launched at the same time. (The club still plays in the Dutch second division and recently signed an Irish under-21 international, Rhys Murphy.) But there was also to be another, much more widespread legacy to football. One which, in its own way, could be said to have marked a new era.

It happened too late for the 1966 World Cup, when England’s Geoff Hurst scored three goals – according to the Russian linesman – with a ball that was orange in real life, but that was rendered a grey blob by television and, compared with today’s designs, looked like an inflated pig’s bladder.

By 1970, however, the new ball suppliers to the World Cup, Adidas, had introduced a new model called the Telstar. A homage to the satellite, it was a 32-panel polyhedron: featuring 12 black pentagonal panels and 20 hexagonal whites. One effect of which was to accentuate, at least visually, the spinning of the ball.

The Telstar football burst onto the global stage at the Mexico World Cup: the first – thanks to satellites – to be televised live in both Europe and the Americas. The tournament also coincided with the advent of colour television – although still of very limited availability then – and with a Brazilian football team that may (until the current Spanish side, anyway) have been the best ever.

IT PROBABLY wasn’t a priority in the Brazilian game plan. But their exuberant style – together with the satellite-ball – powerfully illustrated Newton’s Laws of Motion, and in particular a phenomenon that the scientist had noticed while watching tennis players 300 years earlier.

Now known as the Magnus Effect, after a 19th-century German, it refers to the way a spinning object creates a whirlpool of air or fluid around itself, and so doing experiences a force perpendicular to the line of motion.

David Beckham is among the best-known modern masters of the effect, which in football is typically used to bend a free kick around a wall. But the 1970 Brazilians were the pioneers. Or at least they were widely considered as such, due to the ball’s exaggerated motion and the mass TV audiences that the thing the ball was playing tribute to allowed.

It is sometimes claimed that the Telstar satellite and its various influences advanced the cause of world peace, by turning the space race away from the military obsessions of the early Cold War. Maybe that’s overstating it. On the other hand, my favourite football free kick ever was one taken by Brazil’s Rivelino in the 1974 World Cup against East Germany.

With Pele and others retired by then, the Brazilians had temporarily abandoned their sexy, samba football in favour of a more robust approach that included kicking lumps out of Johan Cruyff’s Holland. But Rivelino’s goal was a piece of sublime skill, facilitated by another Brazilian, Jairzinho, insinuating himself into German wall, and then ducking at the last moment, leaving a Jairzinho-sized hole in the structure.

The gap wasn’t much wider than the ball. Yet Rivelino threaded the Telstar Mark 2 through it, with a Magnus-Effect bend, and without hitting the masonry on either side. Call me a romantic. But in sapping the morale of the communist bloc, I like to think that was the beginning of the end for another wall made in East Germany.

Footballs have undergone many innovations since the 1970s. In the pantheon of classic designs, though, the Telstar polyhedron is still up there. Meanwhile, according to Nasa, the satellite that inspired it is still up there too. It hasn’t been much use to communications for the past 49 years or so. But in more senses than one, it set the ball rolling.