Moscow Hotline Sends Baffling Pangram

The first message transmitted over the Moscow-Washington hotline was sent by Washington on August 30, 1963: "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG'S BACK 1234567890." The pangram and digits tested the equipment's ability to print every letter and number, while the all-capital format was necessary because the system did not support lowercase. Soviet diplomat Andrei Gromyko later asked U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk what Americans meant by the strange sentence.

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