Text by Candace Kanes
Images from Maine Historical Society and the Margaret Chase Smith Library
The revolution of satellite communications relied on the small town of Andover.
In 1962, the first satellite telephone and television communications made news worldwide. The signals that allowed those messages to happen went through the Earth Station in Andover, which communicated with the privately owned Telstar satellite.
The experiment begun July 11, 1962, to transmit telephone signals wirelessly and to broadcast live television pictures to and from Europe succeeded.
For more than two decades, until technology moved on, the giant dome in Andover that housed a huge and extremely sensitive antenna helped usher in space age communications and brought a lot of attention to a small Oxford County community.
