As part of my 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 package, I mentioned a disc that Aldrin and Armstrong left on the moon which had microscopic messages from world leaders etched on it. It has a very tenuous New Hampshire connection – it was made by Sprague Electric in Massachusetts, and some engineers from Concord NH probably worked on it.
I was surprised I had never heard of this disc, since I followed Apollo closely as a kid, but I don’t think most people had heard of it, or remembered it.
So I was happy to see this article about it, part of a big New York Times special section for the moon landing anniversary:
The disc, about the size of a half-dollar, was crafted at the Worcester, Mass., plant of Sprague Electric Company. Messages from four American presidents and the leaders of 73 countries, solicited by NASA and the State Department, were photographed and then shrunk 200 times so that each was not much bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. The “dots” were then etched into a silicon disc using the same photolithographic process as integrated electronic circuitry.
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