ANDOVER – In a rural Maine setting resembling an Andrew Wyeth painting, a plaque was dedicated Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of the dawning of satellite TV and transcontinental phone calls.

Retired engineers and technicians were among the few dozen people who gathered in this logging town of about 900 to recall the relay of the first transoceanic TV signal on July 11, 1962, from the Andover Earth Station.

The signal, bounced off the satellite Telstar I, marked the beginning of “live via satellite” television broadcasts such as the recent World Cup soccer matches.

“Forty years ago I was one of those at Andover, watching, waiting, holding our breath, hoping – yes, hoping – that Telstar would be a success,” said Walter Brown, now a retired scientist from Bell Labs, part of Lucent Technologies.

“Then as Telstar came over the horizon, and the command was given to turn it on, there was a ‘whoop’ that filled the [air]. It works! We had done it!” recalled Brown, who came from Berkeley Heights, N.J., to attend Thursday’s event.

Scientists, federal officials and dozens of news reporters from around the world were in Andover in 1962 when an image of an American flag was transmitted to Earth stations in England and France via Telstar I. Millions of American TV viewers saw similar images bounced back to the U.S. networks from the English and French Earth Stations.

That same day the first long-distance telephone call via satellite was carried by Telstar. Calling from Andover, Fred Kappel, then chairman of AT&T, spoke to President Lyndon Johnson in Washington.

“It was the birth of an era that proved instantaneous worldwide communication was practical and possible,” said Joel Snyder, past president of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., which arranged Thursday’s event.

Plaques were dedicated during ceremonies at all three Earth Station sites: Andover; Pleumeur-Bodou, France; and Goonhilly, England. Observances were transmitted via satellite to each of the locations.

Maine’s high-tech observance was held in the pastoral setting of a shady park lined with stately old farmhouses and a New England-style church, and across the road from a white, clapboard Town Hall dating back to the 1800s.

To Bell Labs President Bill O’Shea, the successful 1962 transmission was “a giant leap forward in the creation of the global communications village we enjoy today.

“Telstar erased any distinctions between phoning around the corner and phoning around the world, in terms of the speed and quality of the connection,” O’Shea said.

President Dwight Eisenhower announced in 1960 that he had directed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to take the lead in devising the use of space technology for commercial communications.

The 175-pound Telstar, just less than a yard in diameter and powered by 3,600 solar cells, was launched from Cape Canaveral into orbit on July 10, 1962.

AT&T chose the remote western Maine town of Andover to build a ground station over other eastern locations because it’s located in a natural bowl formed by mountains and is far enough from microwave repeaters to avoid interference.

President Kennedy released a statement on Telstar on July 11, 1962, in which he called its successful operation “an outstanding example of the way in which government and business can cooperate in a most important field of human endeavor.”

Telstar remained in operation until February 1963, but was succeeded by increasingly sophisticated satellites known by the same name.

Telstar became part of the international language, inspiring an instrumental hit song by a British group, and songs by Duke Ellington and even the 1980s group The Bangles. Western Maine’s Telstar High School was named for the satellite and has a model of it in its auditorium.

A 160-foot-high space bubble from which the historic 1962 transmission was sent has been gone since the mid-1980s and the site it occupied now is covered with weeds. But the Andover Earth Station nearby is active, with more than a dozen antennas with diameters as large as 352 yards.

There are 260 active communications satellites today.