On August 12, 1960, NASA and Bell Laboratories sent a 30-meter aluminum-coated Mylar balloon into space-launching the satellite communications industry. The project would never have gotten off the ground if it weren't for the persistence of John R. Pierce, a visionary Bell Labs engineer who moonlighted as a science fiction writer.

While Pierce was an electrical engineering student at Caltech, he wrote a science fiction story that took second place in a local contest. After he accepted a job at Bell Labs in 1936, he continued writing under the pseudonym J. J. Coupling. Because Pierce was known for his way with words, in 1948 colleague Walter Brattain asked him for help naming a new device that amplified electrical signals. Pierce suggested "the transistor," and the name stuck.