Saturday, July 20, 2019

My memory of the first steps on the moon 50 years ago.

On the 50th anniversary of the first step on the moon, I can add my experience that day, which was at 10:30 am Monday 21st of July in Perth (at 9:30 p.m. Houston time,  July 20, 1969). 
I was in first year medicine at the University of Western Australia. I attended math class, but at 10 am was free to watch the moon landing.
I joined a group of about 100 people in the Student Guild common room, and sat on the floor at the front, waiting for the first steps on the moon, watching a black and white 20 inch TV (no colour in those days).  Reception was poor as it had no real antenna, just a wire coat-hanger stuck into the broken antenna connection!  Being a person who likes to fix things, I didn’t want an intermittent antenna connection to fail at the crucial moment.  So I got up and adjusted the coat hanger.  To everyone’s dismay the picture deteriorated even more.  I was heckled and booed.  This got rather tense and I was not sure I could solve the problem.  Time was running out, 10 minutes to go!!  
In fear of being tarred and feathered, I noticed an open window so I climbed out into the garden, then ran about 500 meters across the grass of the Great Court to the Physics/computer science lecture theatre which had six, perfectly adjusted TV’s, on the side walls.  I made it with minutes to spare, in time to see a “perfect” transmission of John Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.  
50 years later, to the people I left in the Guild common room, I say “sorry about all that”.