Did Neil Armstrong Really Say “One small step for man…?”
Or Why Every Textbook in the World Needs to be Corrected
When the first man descended down a ladder and stepped on the surface of the Moon, he said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” These words came to be etched in every living being’s memory, initially thanks to direct broadcasts of the Moon landing and then due to it becoming ever present in pretty much every History textbook on planet Earth.
But Armstrong insisted afterwards that what he actually said was “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” The missing indefinite article changes the whole scope of the statement and it starts making sense. Without the a, the man in the sentence refers to mankind. So the sentence reads “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”
For a sentence that has become iconic, it’s rather strange that we’ve never really analysed it enough.
Armstrong conceded in 1999 that he himself couldn’t hear the “a” in his recording, despite being 100% sure that he said it. You can listen to it yourself here:
However, Australian computer programmer Peter Shann Ford may have proved Armstrong right. Ford downloaded the audio recording of Armstrong’s words, and analysed the statement with software that allows disabled people to communicate through computers using their nerve impulses. The software threw out graphical representations of sounds and words. Here, Ford said he found evidence that the missing “a” was spoken and transmitted to NASA.
That’s one small output for a computer program, one giant change to every History textbook.
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