The 1970s in five headlines

1972

A short report about a break-in at an office building. It took two years and two reporters for the story to reach the Oval Office, and Richard Nixon won a landslide re-election five months after this was printed.

1973

Martin Cooper stood on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and rang his rival at Bell Labs to tell him he was calling from a handheld phone. The device weighed over a kilogram and took ten hours to charge for thirty minutes of talk. Commercial mobile phones were still a decade away.

1974

The Rumble in the Jungle, fought at four in the morning in Kinshasa to suit American television. Muhammad Ali spent seven rounds absorbing punishment on the ropes, a tactic later named rope-a-dope, then knocked out an exhausted George Foreman in the eighth.

1976

Two aircraft left Heathrow and Paris simultaneously to begin commercial supersonic service. It never made money, only twenty were ever built, and no one has since flown paying passengers faster than sound.

1977

Twentieth Century Fox had so little faith in the film that it let George Lucas keep the sequel and merchandising rights in exchange for a lower fee. That decision is usually described as the most expensive mistake in the history of the studio system.