19631776 Club
The Moscow-Washington hotline goes live; the first line is about a fox and a dog
A Cold War teleprinter link opens with a typing-test sentence, not a treaty term.
Ten months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when a single Kremlin cable took nearly twelve hours to decode in Washington, the two superpowers had a faster channel between them. On August 30, 1963, the Moscow-Washington hotline went into operation, its Teletype circuit run from Washington through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki to Moscow. The first message sent was not a warning or a demand but a printer's test: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG'S BACK 1234567890, transmitted in capital letters because the equipment had no lowercase. A Soviet diplomat, baffled, later asked the Secretary of State what the sentence meant…
