Sputnik: The Shock of the Century

by Paul Dickson

Book Overview

On October 4, 1957, the day Leave It to Beaver premiered on American television, the Soviet Union launched the space age. Sputnik, all of 184 pounds with only a radio transmitter inside its highly... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802713653
• ISBN13: 9780802713650
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: Walker Books
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.5" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

If you buy books on line, you should read this one

If you are buying books on the internet and reading reviews posted in cyberspace, this is a book you must read, because both the information technologies that enable you to read this review, and the culture that values such forms of expression, can be traced to events that followed the launch of Sputnik in October 1957. As Paul Dickson describes, Sputnik was "the shock of the century." It was an event which put processes in motion that have shaped our society for half a century. America was a different place in 1957, preoccupied with returning to the cultural norms that had existed before the disruption of World War II and the rise of communism. Government was small and largely uninvolved in education, research, or social change. Public schools emphasized the "three Rs" and local values. Colleges and universities had swelled in size to meet the needs of WWII veterans, but remained largely focused on intellectual pursuits. Industry had turned its attention from building weapons, to meeting the seemingly insatiable demand for consumer products. The military was shrinking, confident that America had a commanding lead in technology, which could neutralize any threat from the larger military forces of communist nations. All of that changed the night of October 22, 1957 when the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik. It would be months before the United States could do the same. Americans no longer felt secure. In response to the ascendancy of communist technologies, Congress rapidly put in place new programs that would ultimately transform American society. The Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA) was created to lead massive new initiatives in advanced technology, computing, and applied research. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was established to coordinate America's push into space. Hundreds of billions of dollars would be invested to build great research centers that would bring together military, industrial, and academic interests to assure America's technological supremacy. Also, Congress would also pass the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) to ensure that public schools produced an new generation of scientists and engineers. The results were dramatic. In a little more than a decade, America would launch hundreds of satellites and win the race to the moon. America's universities, defense establishments, and commercial enterprises would invent microchips, computer networks, and new methods in chemistry, physics, and biology that would provide the foundation for an age of technology. Perhaps even more important, traditional education would be reformed to emphasize independent inquiry, invention, exploration, and expression and sow the seeds for the Age of Aquarius. Fifty years later, we live in a world of ubiquitous personal computers, the world wide web, MySpace, and YouTube, all of which can be traced directly to the ideas and initiatives that were a response to the "shock o

Shock, Fear, Challenge, Mistakes and Successes!

To date in my life there have been just a few events that caused me to sit back and rethink everything. The earliest of those events was the launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The latest was September 11, 2001. In between, the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., President Johnson's decision not to seek re-election, and Watergate had large impacts. Reviewing those events now, the Sputnik launch clearly had the largest impact. I was already space crazy, and had been following the plans for launching satellites as part of the International Geophysical Year with great interest. I had a photograph of the Vanguard rocket in my bedroom. I also knew that the Soviet Union planned a satellite, but assumed that it would come later than Vanguard. Then, pow! Sputnik is sailing around the globe, visible at sunrise and sunset. I also knew that even if we launched Vanguard the next day, it would be puny compared to Sputnik. Clearly, the Soviet Union was years ahead in space. How could that be? Soon, the curriculum in my school was enriched with math and science and a lot of my friends decided to become engineers. Since I was good in both areas, there was a lot of pressure on me to do the same. Of the people with these talents, I was the only one who did not pursue a technical career or teaching science. I was very impressed with this book because it captured the popular reaction to the event at the time, detailed the decisions that led up to the U.S. falling behind, and spells out what happened later (for good and bad). Although over 90 percent of what is in the book was known to me before, I found it helpful to see the pieces all put together in one place. As a result, I feel a sense of closure over Sputnik now for the first time in my life. In directly, I also got a new appreciation for the character of American Society. While reading the book, I compared the reactions here to how the U.S. handled the Gulf War and the terrorist bombings this year with the many mistakes of the Vietnam era. Like all people, we make our share of mistakes, usually when we are feeling overconfident. But we don't like making mistakes, and we then do whatever it takes to do better the next time by not repeating the old errors. For us, once is enough. For those who are old enough to have teenage or adult children, I would recommend that you share this book with them. I do not recall a better book for capturing the mood of the late 1950s and early 1960s in terms of what we were thinking about in the Cold War. This book can help create a link between generations. I'm sure that many young people do not know that many of today's technologies, such as packet switching for the Internet, came as byproducts of the Cold War competition. This book can also help create a connection from the present into the past through observations such as that one. My only quibble with this book is that the subtitle seems over

Oprah forget Jonathan Franzen.. put your stamp on this book!

I was 11 years old when Sputnik beeped across the sky and I stood with my father in our back yard, night after night, staring at the stars. It was a time full of wonder. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century, took me right back to that little girl staring at the sky, to the awe and excitement I'd felt but had forgotten. But even more than that Paul Dickson's book has given me the facts: The information I didn't understand as a child and didn't bother to learn as an adult. This isn't a book just for space 'nuts' ...although mind you, every Space-nik (!) will be thrilled... it's a book for every man woman and child who wants to know just how we came to be where we are not only in space, but on earth. Sputnik put us on a wonderful path that changed the world forever. Buy this book for your mom... then read it yourself.

Sputnik is Still Flying

On 4 October 1957, the world woke up in the space age. The first artificial satellite (people were originally calling it an artificial moon) had been successfully launched by the Soviet Union. It weighed less than 200 pounds and was only as big as a basketball, its batteries died after three weeks whereupon it went silent, and after three months aloft it disintegrated upon reentry into the atmosphere. This tiny and ephemeral ball made huge differences in science and the world political climate, and in Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (Walker & Co.), Paul Dickson has reviewed them all. He has also given a history of what led up to successful launches of satellites in both the Soviet Union and the US, so that his book is a useful review not just of the first satellite but of twentieth century space exploration in general.The Russians already had a relatively long history of thinking about space before Sputnik went up. The visionary Tsiolovsky was a self-taught scholar who in 1898 created the first formula to specify what sort of power would be needed to send an object up so as not to fall down again. He described that this could be accomplished by a "reaction machine," which we know as a rocket. He never got to use models, but his first sketch of a spaceship had fuel tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, just as the shuttle uses. He described the use of booster rockets to attain escape velocity. Of course, Dickson tells the fascinating story of our own neglected rocket man, Robert Goddard, who made real rockets and gained over 200 patents, but mostly got only posthumous credit for his accomplishments. And then there was Sergei Korolev, a Red Army Colonel, who, as "chief designer" of the Soviet rocket program, was the man responsible for Sputnik, and for Gagarin's 1961 spaceflight. Little was known about him at the time, because the Soviets wanted their space efforts to be seen as a communal, rather than an individual, effort, and they thought that if he were known, he would be a target for CIA assassination. He had also been imprisoned in the Gulag when Stalin came to believe that rockets would be used to overthrow the government. Dickson reviews the worry with which Americans viewed Sputnik, and how Eisenhower (who was criticized for not worrying enough) actually was pleased that it opened up space for spy satellites.American science and technology were in trouble in some ways. Dickson details the rivalry between the services to claim space as a theater of operations, and the rivalry between military and civilian agencies. There were problems of underfunding of basic research. Science within education needed higher priorities, and for many schools, the Sputnik era was the first time that Darwin could be mentioned. Sputnik resulted in a meaningful American space program, and Dickson's readable and informative re-evaluation of the repercussions of the little aluminum ball shows that it affects us still.

Paul Dickson's Topical New Book about Sputnik

I read Paul Dickson?s new book about Sputnik a few days after the events at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The book is very topical, because it portrays a period from the 1950s that has many distressing similarities to our current political climate. Dickson describes a time when America felt that it was under siege -- by Communists rather than terrorists. One even finds phraseology from the period that we are hearing today, with people during the Cold War talking about ?cells? of Communists just as people now are talking about ?cells? of terrorists. One of the major lessons from Dickson?s book is the danger of developing national policy based on knee-jerk public reaction. Dickson describes how after Sputnik was launched, President Eisenhower was under intense pressure to respond quickly. Yet Eisenhower was willing to take the heat in the short term in order to achieve some of his broader long term policy goals vis-à-vis the Russians. I wonder whether Eisenhower would have been able to stay the course in the face of widespread immediate criticism had he been forced to deal with the barrage of public opinion polls and instant analysis that we have now. Dickson?s book is a great read. I was born in 1952, so I do not have any memories of the initial Sputnik hysteria in the 1950s. Dickson makes the characters and events from that period come alive. The book is carefully researched, but information about the details and sources are put in an appendix so that readers of the main text will not become bogged down. While the book was written and published before the tragedies of this past September 11, it provided a very useful context to help me better understand some of the responses we are now witnessing.