Early Bird was put into orbit by the three-year-old Communications Satellite Corporation (COMSAT) to relay telephone messages and television programs between Europe and North America. The world's first commercial satellite, it was the first link in a global network of space communications planned by COMSAT.
The electronic quartz wristwatch was announced in December by the Swiss Horological Electronic Center. Thirty-one Swiss firms pooled $7 million in 1962 to develop the watch.
The Airbus A300B, assembled in Toulouse, France, began to challenge Boeing for the world jet aircraft market. Airbus Industrie was a consortium of government-owned British and French aircraft makers with some private German companies and 4 percent Spanish participation.
The computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanner, developed in England by EMI, Ltd., with money from sales of Beatles records, gained wide use not only for diagnosing brain damage but also for whole-body scanning.
The Orient Express, which had begun service in 1883, made its last trip into Istanbul from Paris. Most travelers now preferred to cover the 1,900 miles in 3 hours by air rather than taking 60 hours by rail.
The British Post Office inaugurated a Prestel system that gave subscribers access to 160,000 pages, or television screenfuls, of information. Using telephones, computers, and TV sets, subscribers could obtain information such as rail and air schedules and stock and commodity quotations, buy airline tickets, reserve hotel rooms, and book theater seats by remote control. The government spent $30 million to develop the system. A Prestel set, which could also receive ordinary TV programming, cost at least $2,000, and the subscriber was also billed for the amount of time the set was used.
France's TGV train began service from Paris to Lyons. Powered by electricity and capable of going 236 mph, it was Europe's first super-high-speed passenger line.
Superconductivity made news in January as Swiss physicist K. Alex Müller and German physicist J. Georg Bedornz of IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory discovered zero resistivity in a ceramic material that permits superconductivity at -397° F—a much more extreme temperature than was ever before possible.
