Sputnik: A Forgotten Alaska First

Forty years ago, the middle of October saw Americans divided into two general classes. There were the people looking up, scanning the sky for a tiny moving testimonial to technological progress, and there were the people looking down for places to hide from what that object threatened. Sputnik was orbiting the earth, and so were innumerable jokes at the expense of U.S. science. ("Soon there really will be a man in the moon," as one quip put it, "and odds are good his name will be Ivan.")

As it turned out, the tiny Sputnik was about as threatening as the washing machine to which commentators compared its size, and American science rallied to the Soviet challenge so well that within a few years the man in the moon was named Neil (Armstrong, that is). Discussions of all that history have clogged the airwaves and filled newspapers recently, in honor of the anniversary of Sputnik's launch. These accounts have been loaded with interesting details and fascinating characters from the early days of space exploration and the hot times of the cold war.

But as I listened to the broadcasts and read the newspaper features, I made bets with myself about a detail that I was sure would be left out. I won, because we Alaskans lost--or at least lost out on a tiny bit of credit due our scientific community. The first scientists on the North American continent to confirm Sputnik's orbit, beeping broadcasts, indeed its very existence---were right here in Alaska, at the Geophysical Institute in Fairbanks.

In fact, for twenty-some years, an institute researcher was considered to be the first North American actually to see Sputnik moving across the sky. As soon as the researchers' radio equipment confirmed the new satellite's location, he had run outside to scan the stars and, sure enough, saw the little speck traveling steadily overhead.

I always doubted that part of the story---I know folks in Nome can be out and about at all hours, and some of them even look up from time to time---but was willing to grant that the scientist might be the first North American to see Sputnik and know what he was looking at. (According to this column's founding author Neil Davis, at least one Fairbanksan did see the new satellite before any local scientist. As Davis reports in his book "Alaska Science Nuggets," Dexter Stegemeyer was the first Fairbanksan known to have seen Sputnik just clearing the western horizon, which was where it entered the view through his open outhouse doorway. Stegemeyer knew he'd seen something unusual, but only realized what it was after he heard a description of the satellite.)

Well, it's no big deal that Alaska and its scientists get no credit in the Sputnik histories; it's not as if we actually launched it from Poker Flat Research Range. But it is annoying to know that we deserve a foonote we don't get, especially when we also know full well that we get dropped from other Firsts as well. This state led the way in using satellite communications, for example, in numerous ways. Does anyone remember when the university's electrical engineering faculty collaborated with the Geophysical Institute staff and others to put together the system that let village health aides confer with doctors in town?

Then there's the pioneering work done at the university's Institute of Marine Science on an electronic mail system, about which no one knows either. During the mid-1970s, IMS was headquarters for an e-mail network spun off from a Department of Defense system. It was primitive, with oversized electric typewriters as the requisite terminals, but it worked. It was a first for civilian use. But honestly, now, have you ever seen Alaska mentioned in anything about the history of e-mail?

Well, maybe a footnote is just too small to contain anything Alaskan. Meantime, our scientists continue amassing Firsts---quietly.