The most-watched TV event in American history
The invention of the television revolutionised the way that people consumed media, allowing anyone with access to a screen to watch the news and see videos and images of events across the world. Before this, people relied on radio and newspapers, and while these still remain popular today, television provided the benefit of attaching moving visuals to breaking stories. This had a profound impact on audiences, and by the 1950s, having a television set was a staple feature in American homes.
Televisions also allowed people to watch movies and television shows from the comfort of their own homes, changing the way people socialised, interacted with family, spent their evenings and even structured their whole days.
In countries like America, possessing a television is basically considered a human right. Allowing easy access to both mindless entertainment and documents of life-changing moments in human history, for most people, it is hard to imagine not having at least one television in their home.
Over the years, television has brought people together for live broadcasts of events, most notably football matches, award ceremonies, and speeches. However, the most-watched television event in American history was also a landmark in human history – the Apollo 11 moon landing.
While the event didn’t even make the top ten most-watched list in the United Kingdom (football matches and royal ceremonies dominate that list), over in the United States, the moon landing welcomed 125–150million viewers on July 20th, 1969. This staggering number of people is indicative of the sheer excitement of Americans ready to witness humans step foot on the moon for the first time.
The space race significantly shaped pop culture, with the Soviet Union and the United States battling it out to reach outer space first. While Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to enter outer space in 1961, the United States were the first country to successfully land humans on the moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were on board the Apollo 11 mission, with the former taking the first step, achieving the late President John F. Kennedy’s aims of doing so before 1970.
Of course, the astronauts couldn’t bring a cameraman with them to the moon, so NASA made sure the perfect camera was brought along for the journey to capture the momentous moment. There were many challenges that had to be overcome in order to broadcast the moment back to Earth, but luckily, with the help of a camera made by Westinghouse, Armstrong was able to capture his first steps on the moon for all to see.
