There are such beautiful stories that it feels like stepping into a Tornatore film. One of the beautiful ones that move you and then win the Oscar. Like the story of the first intercontinental phone call between Italy and the United States, on July 26, 1962, 59 years ago, almost my age. Yet it seems like a century. Two small towns were connected, Alba in our country and Medford in Oregon. In the square there were five thousand people listening to the two mayors who converse in praise of peace in an ever smaller world; and the gang; and American flags on the balconies.
Fifty-nine years ago talking on the phone with the United States was a momentous event. This was reported to me by a reader of Italian Tech, Edoardo Poeta (by the way, write to me at [email protected] for reports); who in one of his blogs – and in a good book – made a very detailed account of it, the result of research in the Press archive where it turns out that the journalist in charge of covering the event was the young Giampaolo Pansa, who later became a journalism master. There is a link to a delightful video that reconstructs everything in less than two minutes and the full audio of the conversation between the two mayors. In short, a story to be enjoyed, of which I report ample excerpts here, by Edoardo Poeta.
“I’m the mayor of Alba, please speak louder because he doesn’t feel excessively well.” These were the words that Osvaldo Cagnasso, 60, mayor of Alba, spoke on the phone on July 26, 1962. It was the beginning of what was called the first “space phone call” from an Italian mayor to his overseas colleague.
“On the other end of the line was John Snider, 45, mayor since 1956 of Medford, a small town in Oregon. Only another call via Telstar in that early 60’s connected the boot with the other side of the Atlantic: that between the rector of the University of Rome, Giuseppe Ugo Papi, and that of the University of Boston, Harold C. . Homes. If the first call lasted almost 12 minutes, the one from the house in via Plinio 7 in the capital did not go beyond two minutes.
“That day 146 people between Europe and North America – for the first time in history – spoke to each other via satellite. It consisted of mayors of 21 links with European cities and rectors. New York telephoned West Berlin, Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania and Bilbao. For Italy the choice of Usis fell on Alba and on the mayor Cagnasso, a DC parliamentarian in the first legislature and a former partisan.
“” Perhaps the request to get in touch with us through the satellite came from our American “twin”, the city of Medford “, Cagnasso wondered (the event was actually promoted by the American association” People to people “) . Twin, then, perhaps only in terms of number of inhabitants. Alba had 22,000 inhabitants almost like Medford, but the 24,000 American twins were on the Pacific coast, in a fertile plain, surrounded by small woods and small hills. «Alba, on the other hand – wrote Giampaolo Pansa at the time 27 and sent by the Press – is in the center of one of the poorest areas of Piedmont: the Langhe».
“Today thinking of Alba as miserable may leave you surprised, but in 1962 this was how a Piedmontese native, the Alexandrian Pansa, described it. The town was filled with a spatial atmosphere. The mayor told of the old woman who apostrophized him for the courage to go to the moon. Or other citizens who feared additional expenses for the municipal coffers or the increase in telephone bills. All tasty circumstances that emerge by rummaging through the historical archive of the Press.
“Medford was twinned with the Cuneo town since 1959. The two mayors who only knew each other by letter and photo. Several Americans had visited the Langhe, but the Albesi had not done the same with Oregon. To put Piedmont and the United States in contact, that July 26, was the technological innovation that did not hesitate to define historical. It was Telstar 1, the satellite developed by the Bell Labs of the Bell System and launched from Cape Canaveral on 11 July 1962. An invention that, in the early 1960s, promised to throw the world into the future – and a future of peace – entire. The posters announcing the event read: “Alba hopes that this last surprising scientific goal can mark a new dawn in the cordial and peaceful coexistence of all peoples”.
“The event was accompanied by the Ars et Labor city band, directed by Maestro Matta. The American anthem could not be missing from the repertoire. The center of the Langhe was sprinkled with tricolor and Oregon flags. A plaque was prepared to be walled on the town hall. Speakers were installed in the streets to allow everyone to hear the exceptional “telespatial conversation”. But unfortunately the attempts to take the line – as Pansa said – were not immediately kissed by the success.
“« The heat – wrote the reporter – makes even the satellites lazy. The “space call” from Medford, scheduled for 0.15 am, came more than half an hour late after dozens of test and warning calls that kept Stipel technicians on alert all evening. There was even an out-of-time trumpet blast, which gave the huge crowd gathered in the square the wrong feeling that the time had come. In the end the longed-for contact was established ».
“It seems that in Piazza Risorgimento there were five thousand people listening in religious silence. About sixty in the council chamber in Medford. The Medford correspondent to attend the event in Alba missed the appointment. Douglas Smith, Oregon long jump champion, had in fact stopped in Mantua where – says La Stampa of 21 August 1962 – he met a girl with whom he was engaged. The Italian one, however, Pino Dutto, arrived in Medford five days after the historic phone call.
“Everything had been carefully prepared. The English teacher Sandra Giglio (who years later would become Cagnasso’s wife) acted as interpreter. The phone call was supposed to have departed from Medford, 10,000 kilometers from Alba, bound for Andover in Maine. From here it would be relaunched to Telstar 1, which would repeat and broadcast it as far as Pleumeur – Boudou and from here to Lannion, also in France. Then the voice of the mayor Snider would have reached, through the normal telephone lines of the Stipel, as far as the town hall of Alba. Cagnasso sits in the spotlight of television and newsreels. Dozens of attempts failed. Then at 12.48 am, civil and religious authorities present (there was also the over-eighty-year-old bishop Carlo Stoppa), the conversation began.
““As the world becomes smaller, my dear friend Osvaldo, let us hope our friendship may become even greater,” disse Snider.
“And Osvaldo Cagnasso, the first Italian voice to officially pass through the frequencies of Telstar 1, uttered a phrase that is a sort of refrain, not only of the 60s and the future. It is the emblematic index of what they expected in those 60s from the binomial telephone and space and more generally from the fact that the world would be connected by planetary communication networks.
“« My city – said Cagnasso – is pleased and proud to have been chosen for this wonderful experiment, the result of studies initiated by Guglielmo Marconi and now completed by the scientists of your great country. Tonight the “Telstar” brings our two cities closer, perhaps the beginning of a new era that will erase borders and see all the men of the Earth living together, as in one great country ». Finally, a closure full of thanks to the United States for its contribution to the Liberation. Also perfectly consistent with post-war Italy which looked to the future.
“The two telephones used for the cosmic phone call – of the same green tone – were then brought to the Town Hall of Alba. But, fifty years later, for the celebrations for the first intercontinental telephone connection via a satellite, the two mayors spoke via Skype ”.
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