The Sound Heard Around the World

As an impressionable fourth grader at the height of the Cold War, the faint sound that was broadcast via Radio Moscow on October 4, 1957 might has well been the shot heard around the world:

Beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.

Indeed, the sound from the radio transmitters aboard tiny Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, did herald enormous changes.

It shocked a complacent U.S. into a paranoia-tinged space race with the Soviet Union and humankind into a new era of science and technology that promised to be liberating but with the hindsight of 50 years has been, in my view, an enormously expensive and only qualified success because it turned the attention of world's powers away from pressing needs here on Mother Earth.

John Noble Wilford, The New York Times' laureate science writer, takes a more sanguine – and wordier – view.

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