It was 8.17pm GMT when the unassuming, almost shoddy landing module of the Blue Planet’s travellers appeared on the surface of the moon. Several hours later, the proud representative of the Homo sapiens species emerged: it was the American Neil Armstrong. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” he said when his foot touched the moon for the first time in history.

It was a Sunday night, but humans watching the landing on their television sets hardly thought about the duties awaiting them in the upcoming week. This was also true for the citizens of the Polish People’s Republic, busy with preparations for the grand celebration of the National Day of the Rebirth of Poland, also known simply as ‘22nd July’. The space oddity happening on the TV was, therefore, a worthy culmination of the passing weekend and a suitable introduction to the upcoming holiday. At least to the four million households who had a television set, and perhaps those whose screen-owning friends were willing to have them over for the lunar broadcast. In the 1870s, the pioneering Polish precursor of television, Julian Ochorowicz, predicted the invention of a “telegraphic device for seeing things from a great distance”. He called those hypothetical inventions telephotone and telephotoscope, but even in his boldest dreams, he probably never imagined that such a feat of technology would come true.