“Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke conceived active communications satellites in 1945. Active satellites would not simply reflect radio signals transmitted from ground stations but amplify and retransmit them” https://twitter.com/ChasingMoonBk/status/1281617836864151558

“Next, John Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories concluded these satellites were a real possibility worth a major effort by the labs. In 1955 he sketched the possibilities for satellite communications in a scientific paper”
https://ethw.org/NASA_Launches_Telstar

In 2018, for the first time, a free-flying CubeSat has successfully completed space-to-ground optical communications
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/nasa-s-laser-communications-small-satellite-mission-demonstrates-technology-first

In 2019, SpooQy-1 cubesat for quantum communication started making entangled signals in orbit, working towards cubesat-to-ground quantum communications for sharing secret encryption keys across the planet https://twitter.com/NanoSpacecrafts/status/1278552555681955840

A record was named after the Telstar communications satellite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar_(instrumental)

But Telstar 1 was short lived, it was knocked as results of the Starfish Prime nuke detonation https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150910-the-nuke-that-fried-satellites-with-terrifying-results