July 23 · This Day in America
For all of human history, a continent could not watch another continent in real time. On this afternoon, that ends. The American satellite Telstar, the first of its kind, catches a signal bounced up from Maine and throws it across the Atlantic, and suddenly more than two hundred million people in two hemispheres are watching the same thing at the same moment. The first image sent to Europe is the Statue of Liberty. Walter Cronkite and the BBC trade live pictures over the curve of the Earth. The planned ceremony runs late, so engineers fill the silence with a baseball game from Wrigley Field, the Phillies and the Cubs flickering across an ocean by accident. It is mundane and it is staggering. After today, distance would never again mean what it had meant the day before.
Source: airandspace.si.edu
Also on this day · 1903
The Ford Motor Company is nearly broke, down to its last few hundred dollars, when a Chicago dentist named Ernest Pfennig buys a Model A runabout for the price of a small house. It is the first car Henry Ford ever sells. The eight-horsepower machine tops out around twenty-eight miles an hour. Within a generation, the company that almost folded that summer would put America on wheels and remake how the country lived, worked, and wandered.
Source: corporate.ford.com