In the bedroom of his house in a canyon above Santa Monica, Harold Rosen switches on the high-definition television set. The face of Tom Hanks, who happens to live a few blocks away, fills the five-foot-wide screen, bounced straight from an orbiting satellite to Rosen’s dish antenna poised outside among the hummingbirds and flowers. “I get hundreds of channels for under a dollar a channel,” Rosen says with a grin.
So do millions of others, and they have Rosen to thank for making that possible—and a lot more. It’s easy to forget how miraculous satellite-relayed television would have seemed just a few decades ago. Rosen recalls watching the Tokyo Olympics, the first continuous broadcast by geostationary satellite, relayed live in black and white in 1964. “I was amazed at how good the picture was,” he says. Today when he clicks his remote, channel after channel from around the world appears on the screen: news, talk, politics, science, nature films, and sports.
Rosen, 77, remembers well, because he led the team that invented the first geostationary communications satellite.
