A Sputnik Sighting at New Haven State

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By: Jason Smith

 Early on the morning of October 10, 1957, atop the roof of Engleman Hall at the New Haven State Teachers College, three star-gazers of the local branch of the Smithsonian Institute’s Astrophysical Laboratory program spotted an object moving at eighteen thousand miles per hour. “I got it,” cried New Havener James Plato, who saw something that looked like a faint star moving through the clear night. Moments later, NHSTC earth science Professor Robert Brown, accompanied by his son, caught a glimpse for himself. It was the first confirmed sighting of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in the continental United States. The Cold War space race had begun. Months later, NHSTC president Hilton C. Buley used the accomplishment to advocate for more STEM funding for colleges such as his own, which would train the next generation of teachers and their students.

Launched on October 4, 1957, Sputnik was the first human-made satellite to orbit the Earth, a key moment in the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. It also proved a moment that shocked many Americans who assumed the United States, with its vast technological prowess, would best its Communist adversary in matters of space exploration. In fact, the Soviet Union maintained the initiative, launching the first manned space mission in 1961 and the first spacewalk in 1965. Sputnik, writes historian Zuoyue Wang, “brought the world into the shrinking global village.” For Americans, it was a “rude awakening to the nation’s vulnerability.” It also marked a cultural touchstone for many Americans who “tuned to their radios to listen to the sharp beeps emitted by the satellite” while “amateur astronomers from coast to coast gazed into their telescopes,” Wang writes, “searching for the artificial moon.”

This was how Plato, Brown, and Brown’s fifteen-year-old son Richard came to be on the Engleman Hall roof early on that autumn morning. As part of the so-called “moon watch” team, one of about one hundred fifty such stations around the nation contributing observations to the Smithsonian program headquartered at Cambridge, Massachusetts, the group had set up a number of 5.5 power field telescopes trained toward the north sky. The three “were almost ready to quit,” a commemorative article in the New York Times related, when Plato, an equipment engineer for the Southern New England Telephone Company, cried out the sighting at 6:23am. “Where? Where?” the younger Brown remembered his father responding. He “had a very loud voice” and “almost knocked me over.” Plato pointed to a point in the sky about forty degrees above the northwest horizon. “Nervous as we were when we first spotted it,” Plato told the Hartford Courant, “it was nothing compared to the excitement when the Smithsonian Observatory confirmed it.”

The men had actually spotted the final-stage rocket carrying Sputnik, rather than the satellite alone, the former appearing as a shiny object in the night sky and therefore easier to spot. The rocket remained in Plato’s view for thirty seconds and Brown’s for about ten. Richard, who was then a junior at Milford High School, apparently only caught a fleeting glimpse. He was at first doubtful of the sighting, having experience one false alarm. “We had to look twice,” Brown assured the Courant with an appropriate degree of suspicion. Four hours later, the Cambridge station informed Plato that it “had checked” with the expected position of the satellite. The group had been the first Americans in the continental United States to sight Sputnik. The men “belong to history now,” remarked the Hartford Courant the following day. New Haven State Normal School and its amateur observers made the front page of the New York Times on October 11.

The event had extended a degree of celebrity to the two men. Professor Brown, who died in 1979, commonly invited groups of undergraduate students to his Milford home “at all hours” to view the stars. After the sighting, however, Connecticut school children traveled to New Haven State College to meet Professor Brown.

College president Hilton C. Buley also seized on the moment not only to tout the accomplishment of one of his faculty members, but to use the newfound anxiety over Sputnik and America’s subservience in the space race to fiscal benefit. Buley cited the accomplishment as “dramatic evidence of the need for improved training of science teachers,” at a time when his institution still existed primarily to train educators for Connecticut’s public schools. “The people of the U.S. are asking: how can the U.S. get the trained scientists to regain and maintain our position of leadership in missile and satellite development?” Buley told the student newspaper in December 1957. “Professor Brown and his work in astronomy at this college is one very important answer.” For Buley, the Sputnik sighting provided an opportunity to raise the profile of his state college and to prove, “contrary to the opinions of some,” that “teachers colleges do have competent faculty members with the knowledge, imagination and drive to make constructive contributions to the latest scientific developments.” He also raised the example of the college’s new one-million-dollar astronomical observatory and planetarium, Morrill Hall, as evidence of wise investment and prescient collegiate leadership.

At the end of the 1957-58 school year, the student yearbook, the Laurel, echoed Buley’s sentiments. “At no time in the past has the educator received the attention that Sputnik and the teacher shortage afforded him,” illustrating just how gendered science, science education, and the space race was in late 1950s America. “And,” the yearbook continued, “at no time in the past has the importance of a Teachers College become so evident in the United States.” Certainly, the sighting of Sputnik marked an important moment in the history of New Haven State Teachers College, of the City of New Haven, and of the United States more broadly.

New Havener James Plato shows that Sputnik appeared the size of a pin needle (Courtesy of Hartford Courant)

Earth Science Professor Robert Brown led the Moonwatch team at New Haven State Teachers College 
(Courtesy: Farnham, Southern Connecticut State University: A Centennial History)

Bibliography 

“Dr. Buley Comments on Sputnik, Science Teachers,” The Laurel Leaf, December 4, 1957. 

Farnham, Thomas J. Southern Connecticut State University: A Centennial History (New Haven, CT:
          Southern Connecticut State University), 1993.

Laurel Yearbook, Southern Connecticut State Teacher’s College, 1958.

“New Haven Watchers Sight Russian Rocket,” Hartford Courant, October 11, 1957.

Wang, Zuoyue. In Sputnik’s Shadow: The President’s Science Advisory Committee and Cold War 
          America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).

“Yes, Yes, It’s Sputnik! (And He Was There.), New York Times, October 21, 2007.

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