#6477 #6478
#9 - JRL 6476
From: "Albert L. Weeks" <AWeeks1@compuserve.com>
Subject: Sputnik 1
Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002
My own recollection of Sputnik 1, 45 years ago, has an odd twist (in re JRL 6474)..
I was working on Newsweek's Science Desk that memorable October afternoon day in 1957 as the old AP machine tock-tock-tocked with the amazing news of the Soviet launching of an artificial satellite. As an editorial assistant, I tore off those vibrant pages and immediately passed them on to Managing Editor Manning He immediately called an emergency editorial-staff meeting. Since I was the only one in the N.Y. office who knew Russian (Newsweek correspondent Leon Volkov was in Moscow and unavailable so late at night, Moscow Time), Manning asked me, "Weeks, what are we going to call this thing, anyway? What does 'ISZ' mean?" I explained to him that these initials, repeated in the AP wire, meant "Iskusstvennii Sputnik Zemlyi"--or "Artificial Earth Satellite. "
"So, what can we call it for short?" he asked me urgently. I answered that, well, we could go with the initials. Or, maybe just "sputnik," small "s." Pronouncing it "sputtnick" instead of "spootnik," Manning then asked me, "What does that mean?" I answered "fellow-traveler, in the non-political sense, or in the context of the launch, 'satellite.' " "So, we'll go with 'sputnik,' " Manning decreed.
So, Newsweek came out that Monday with "sputnik" as a common noun, the only publication, so far as I know, to do so on that early date.
Years later Webster's International Dictionary, under "sputnik," credited Newsweek with first usage of this term as a common noun.
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