How We Got to Now

RADIO ANNOUNCER

The forecast is for sunny,

mild conditions... JOHNSON

Imagine a world without the ability to capture or transmit sound. Every word we speak would be lost forever. There would be no phones, no radio, no stadium rock concerts. So how did we conquer sound? It was an unknown printer who created the first ever recording of the human voice, though no one heard it for 150 years... It sounds kind of like a horror movie soundtrack, I have to say. and a beautiful movie star who helped give us privacy on our mobile phones. She'd rather spend the night at home reading Scientific American than going out to some glamorous party. These are classic examples of the kind of people who actually made the modern world. And their stories are probably ones you've never heard.

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They're hobbyists and garage inventors, maverick characters doing extraordinary things. The thing about these pioneers is that they didn't just give us mastery over sound, but they also set in motion an amazing chain reaction of ideas... Resulting in innovations that would go on to affect every aspect of our lives, from the world of work to race relations...

clarinet playing jazz tune

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saving lives...

heart beating

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and changing our cities. I want to show how the link between all these apparently unconnected worlds starts with the unsung heroes of sound. I'm Steven Johnson. I write about ideas and innovation. And this is the untold story of How We Got to Now.

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How We Got to Now was made possible in part by It's almost a sacred experience, the desire to capture and share another human voice.

woman singing Italian opera

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But the art and science of manipulating sound is actually an old story, one that takes us back to prehistoric times.

opera aria continues with echo

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Here at the Arcy-sur-Cure Caves in France are traces of human activity over 30,000 years old. This is one of the most magical spaces I've ever been in. I'm standing just inches away from one of the very first traces of our desire to record our experiences. Researchers now believe that these caves were not just used by our ancestors to express themselves with their hands, but also with their voices.

man throat singing

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These incredible sounds are coming from Professor Iegor Reznikoff, a specialist in the sonic acoustics of ancient spaces.

singing continues

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He believes it's no coincidence that the wall paintings are located in specific areas.

singing

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It's a space for the eyes, but it's a space also for ears. The more you have echoes, the more you have paintings. So the most acoustically interesting parts of the cave turn out to be populated by the most images. Yes. So they would sit in this space, look at these images, make these amazing reverberant sounds. It was like the IMAX theater of the Paleolithic era. - Yes, yes. Can I try the chanting for a second? Let me give it a shot, okay? You be my instructor here. I've never done this before.

sings deep note

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That sounded pretty good. - Yes. I feel very manly when I do that. Try to push your sound.

singing deep notes

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Of course, Paleolithic tribes couldn't record their own voices the way they could capture their visual experiences in painting. But by chanting and making animal sounds here, they were experimenting with a very early form of sound engineering using the natural acoustics of the cave to enhance and amplify the human voice.

mild conditions... JOHNSON

But over the next 30,000 years, not much happened. Sure, cave painting became Impressionism... But even by the late 1800s, our best attempts to share and amplify the sound of our voices basically amounted to shouting in big, echo-y rooms! But in the late 19th century, that was about to change. Because an idea emerged that would transform everything from how we respond to emergencies to how we build our cities, thanks in large part to a failed invention from a forgotten Frenchman. In the middle of the 19th century,

there's a new technology that has everyone excited

photography. It's a medium that allows us to go beyond the painted impression of the world and for the first time to capture...

shutter clicks

there's a new technology that has everyone excited

a mirror image of our lives.

there's a new technology that has everyone excited

One instant convert to photography was a young would-be inventor called Edouard-Lon Scott de Martinville. Scott saw how photography was able to freeze time, to immortalize what we could see, and this got him thinking. Scott is a printer by trade, so it's his job to reproduce and share the written word. He starts to wonder, what if there were a device that could capture the spoken word? A kind of camera for the ear and not the eye.

there's a new technology that has everyone excited

Scott writes, "Will one be able to preserve for future generations some features of the diction of those eminent actors, those grand artists who die without leaving behind them the faintest trace of their genius?" To make this high-minded dream a reality, Scott has a brilliant idea. Just as the camera creates images by mimicking the function of the eye, Scott plans to build a device that mimics the human ear, recording the vibrations caused when sound waves reach our eardrum.

drum beating

there's a new technology that has everyone excited

Today the results are held in the Academy of Sciences in Paris. Okay, so here's Scott's actual, hand-drawn design for a contraption he calls the phonautograph. It's basically a device for visualizing sound. You vocalize into a funnel with a thin membrane at the narrow end. Sound vibrations trigger a needle that makes lines on paper blackened with soot wrapped around a spinning drum. And this is the result. Scott called it a phonautogram. It's impossible for me to overstate the importance of this document, because these squiggly lines represent the very first audio recording. For the 100,000 years since language developed, every word ever spoken by anyone was immediately lost to the air. But finally, thanks to Edouard-Lon Scott, we had a way to immortalize the human voice. It was an epic achievement. So why has nobody heard of this guy? Because, unbelievably, Scott's design

was missing one crucial feature

playback.

MAN

Isn't that crazy? I mean, it's a little bit like inventing the car but forgetting to add the feature where the wheels turn.

laughing

MAN

In 2008, audio historian David Giovannoni discovered a series of Scott's phonautograms in the Paris archives, where they'd languished in obscurity for years. Why do you think that key final feature was missing from his plan? Well, a couple things here. The phonautograph was ahead of its time. I mean, way ahead of its time. Scott's singular contribution to the science of acoustics was to take sounds out of the air, write them on a piece of paper automatically, the phone autograph. And he thought, "Well, now that I have a visual representation of the sound, if I can just learn to read these squiggles and interpret them and know what was said..." Did he try? Did he spend a lot of time trying --? He did, and others did, but he quickly found out that was really hard to do.

MAN

Giovannoni and his colleagues created history by using new software to translate the squiggles into audible sound. For the first time ever, Scott's recordings could be played back to the world. Edouard-Lon Scott himself, the inventor, sitting in his room in Paris, April 9, 1860. And he's turning the crank, he's singing slowly, carefully. He's probably watching these squiggles being made. These are humanity's first recordings of its own voice. Okay, so you've completely whetted my appetite here. I want to hear the actual recording. Can we do this? Cool, let's hear it. - Okay.

scratching noises, then low buzzing

MAN

It sounds kind of like a horror movie soundtrack, I have to say. But it sounds -- appropriately, it sounds ghostly, and here we are, we're bringing this voice back from the dead. He didn't send his voice a great distance, but he was the first human being to send his voice -into the future. -Right. Over time, not just distance, and that's the ghostly part. Because once you've fixed voice, it does become a ghost, and ghostly after the maker is gone. [ Tragically, Edouard Lon Scott could never convince anyone of the importance of the phonograph. He even wrote a book advocating its merits, but no one listened. He lived out his years as a librarian and bookseller and died receiving no acclaim for his remarkable invention. As a commercial proposition, the phonautograph is a complete failure, but Scott's device will ultimately succeed as a kind of inspiration that spreads around the globe, because now his invention is about to trigger changes in society that go far beyond recorded sound.

MAN

The phonautograph has a groundbreaking legacy. It was the vital trigger for not one, but two inventions which transformed our lives. In 1877, across the Atlantic, American Thomas Edison patents the phonograph, a machine that allowed us to finally defy time. Now we could not only capture the human voice, we could also play it back whenever we liked. But the second invention is even bigger and will completely revolutionize the way we communicate. A man experimenting with Scott's phonautograph discovers that the process of recording sound can be reversed, and that sound vibrations can be turned back into their original state.

record scratching and electric buzzing

MAN

And so the human voice could be sent along a telegraph wire. Alexander Graham Bell had just invented the telephone.

telephone ringing

MAN

It catches on like wildfire. By 1904, there's over 6,000 independent phone companies in America and almost 5 million miles of telephone wire connecting us all.

telephones ringing and telegraph clicks

crow caws

MAN

It's hard to imagine it now, but just over a century ago the idea of our voice extending beyond the range of natural earshot would have been almost unthinkable. I mean, think about it, I'm here in London, and just by dialing a few numbers, I can hear the voices of my family an ocean away. It's one of those miracles of everyday life that we're too quick to take for granted. But the telephone would do far more than just transform how we talk to each other. Within a few years of its invention, telephone switchboards create a revolution in job opportunities for women. The telephone collapses distances. Emergency services can now respond much faster to alarms raised by phone calls.

fire bell ringing

MAN

And as customers can now communicate easily with businesses many miles away, the need for a shop front in every town becomes less important. Businesses begin to consolidate and cluster in the booming cities, building upwards.

telephones ringing and people chatting

MAN

Now, you might think that the elevator was the key technology in building skyscrapers, but you can make the argument that the telephone was just as crucial in creating the modern city skyline.

MAN

The phone bridged great distances between us. The next big challenge for sound was how to send the human voice out to millions of people all at the same time. It would transform everything from popular culture to organized protest.

RADIO ANNOUNCER

The forecast is for sunny, mild conditions, afternoon temperatures 60s to low 70s...

ANNOUNCER

KCBS news time, 9:28, first for traffic... This is KCBS, America's oldest broadcasting radio station, based in San Francisco. It's been hitting the airwaves for a century. We're like a cat, we're in about our seventh life now. We've been pronounced dead so many times, we've forgotten how many times. I'm speaking to news anchor Stan Bunger on-air. So this is actually an historic radio station. There's an important history to what happened here. It happened really fast. I mean, very shortly after they started these transmissions in San Jose, they realized that lots of people were hearing it. Within a seven-year period, 60% of the families in the United States bought a radio set. And what do you think the cultural effects of radio -- how did it change the country? Well, think of it as the very first time in American history, and really in world history, that that many people -- hundreds of thousands or millions -- could simultaneously experience something. You know, a radio program. What's the effect of kind of radio today? We have all these different technologies now, but radio continues to be a vital part of our culture. The reality is more people in the United States still use the radio every week than use the Internet.

ANNOUNCER

This gigantic cultural force of mass news and entertainment would owe a great debt to one of the most error-prone inventors in history. In 1900, Lee de Forest, a young, would-be inventor, is broke and desperate to make his mark on the world. He writes to his mother, "The only footprints I will leave will be my inventions."

transmitter tuning and static

ANNOUNCER

De Forest dreams of transmitting and receiving the human voice, not with wires like the phone, but invisibly using electromagnetic radio waves. The idea of radio communication has been around for a while, but only very weak signals could be sent. The lack of amplification was a massive problem.

buzzing

ANNOUNCER

In 1903, de Forest thinks that the solution to delivering a powerful radio signal to millions of people can be found by experimenting with gas and electricity.

buzzing

ANNOUNCER

After three years of frenzied activity, he comes up with this strange object. It's a gas-filled bulb with three electrodes designed to amplify radio signals. He calls it the Audion.

ANNOUNCER

The initial tests of the Audion are very encouraging. De Forest plans a grand public demonstration to showcase his marvelous new invention.

woman singing Italian opera

ANNOUNCER

On January 13, 1910, at the New York Metropolitan Opera, de Forest hooks up a telephone microphone to a transmitter on the roof... to broadcast his beloved opera for the first time. Anticipating wonder from his audience, de Forest invited hoards of reporters and VIPs to listen to his radio receivers scattered all around the city.

woman singing over radio

ANNOUNCER

De Forest imagines a wave of invisible notes flying above the city. He sees it as a triumphant moment in his career, calling himself "the father of radio," and he tells The New York Times, "I look forward to the day when opera may be brought into every home." But the thing is, no one is impressed with the historic broadcast because, well, de Forest has promised his listeners this...

singing in Italian

ANNOUNCER

What they actually heard was this...

loud radio static and clicking over tinny singing

ANNOUNCER

The broadcast was a disaster. The press laughed at him, and later, de Forest was even arrested for fraud, accused of overselling the value of the Audion to his shareholders.

ANNOUNCER

The truth is the Audion just wasn't that good. And it did amplify radio signals, but not nearly enough... to launch a broadcasting revolution.

ANNOUNCER

In 1913, de Forest sells the Audion patent at a bargain price to pay legal bills. It's snapped up by the R&D department at AT&T, who discover something startling. What they find is that de Forest had been flat-out wrong about almost everything he was inventing.

buzzing

ANNOUNCER

But lurking behind de Forest's accumulation of errors, there was a beautiful idea waiting to emerge.

ANNOUNCER

He was actually on to something with his three-electrode design. But de Forest's big error was believing that the gas inside the Audion could amplify a radio signal. Over the next decade, researchers experimented with his basic design. They took the gas out of the bulb, and suddenly it worked a whole lot better. That was the birth of the vacuum tube. And now a device conceived as a way to amplify sound by a man who didn't even understand how his creation worked turns into one of the most transformative inventions in history. The vacuum tube could boost the electrical signal of any technology that needed it, triggering... an electronics revolution.

electronic sounds

ANNOUNCER

Radar, television, VCRs, sound recording, amplifiers, x-rays, and microwave ovens all become commercially viable thanks to the vacuum tube. But its first success comes in making Lee de Forest's dream a reality, as the vacuum tube powers the transformation of radio into a mass medium for popular entertainment.

playing upbeat tune

ANNOUNCER

The ability to broadcast inside people's homes captures the country's imagination. Secretary of State Charles... By 1936, three-quarters of Americans consider owning a radio a necessity, even in times of hardship. Radio quickly becomes a vital source of news and information, but it also creates a national passion

for a new kind of music

jazz.

playing "When the Saints Go Marching In"

for a new kind of music

Originating in New Orleans, jazz had been around since the turn of the 20th century. And it was more than just music, it was an African-American cultural movement.

for a new kind of music

Not that anyone in white America knew much about it, because society was still heavily segregated.

playing jazz tune

for a new kind of music

And now, thanks to radio, jazz can step out from the basement clubs and inner-city ghettos and reach America's white youth, who can't get enough. As radio takes off, the intoxicating rhythms of jazz become the most popular form of music on American radio.

Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit"

for a new kind of music

The heady sound of jazz is unstoppable, and the music becomes a vehicle for African Americans to share their experiences. Songs such as "Strange Fruit" by Billie Holiday reflect the terrifying realities of racism and segregation in America. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees...

MAN

"Strange Fruit" was the first recording that really spoke directly to the horrors of lynching and the abuses that African Americans were subject to at any time, and so I think that kind of reality, a stark reality, for many white Americans, who maybe have never seen a lynching, maybe have heard faintly of it, it forces them to look at America as it is. Music historian Ray Briggs has studied the impact of jazz on American culture. That song particularly became like a mirror I think for a lot of people. "This song actually speaks to my humanity, and I see these people as being human. Maybe I've been wrong, maybe my parents are wrong. Maybe they haven't understood it in the way that I understand it." And so I do think that the technology allowing jazz to be kind of disseminated more widely definitely made it accessible to a lot of people. They may not have gone to a political rally, they might not have read a book dealing with African-American history, but they'll listen to a song. And so when those artists who understand that power begin to utilize it, they speak to, I think, the power of technology and the power of music. That those two things coming together are just beyond understanding. That's a fascinating point in the sense that technology is one of the first steps of integration. You're bringing these voices and this culture into a white household. Most definitely. The interesting thing about jazz, and any music for that matter, that once it enters your space, once it gets in your head, it becomes a part of you. If you like it, then it becomes something that you value. So then if you think, "Well, this music then is made by these people, then maybe they have value."

playing "When the Saints Go Marching In"

MAN

Radio helped democratize America through entertainment. Martin Luther King would later say that "much of the power of our freedom movement in the United States has come from this music." What's also amazing about the vacuum tube is not only did it help us share music, but it then revolutionized the very sound of music itself.

playing rock tune

MAN

What I really love about the vacuum tube is it was such a versatile device that even when it malfunctioned, it still managed to change the world.

playing rock tune

MAN

In 1960, a bassist discovered that a faulty amplifier could cause distortion and create a whole new sound. And so, thanks to the sonic properties of a broken vacuum tube, discovered entirely by accident, by the mid-1960s, the sound of popular music had gone from this...

plays chords

MAN

to this...

reverberating, distorted chords

music stops

MAN

Distortion defined the sound of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols and Nirvana. And without broken vacuum tubes, the last half-century of popular music would have sounded completely different. Thanks to our growing mastery of sound, life in the 20th century was getting a whole lot louder.

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

noise pollution.

wheel rattling

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

Okay, so I'm here in New York City. It's still a very noisy place. Imagine what it would have been like in the 1920s, when amazingly enough, it was even louder than it is today. So what are the sounds we would have heard? We would have heard the sounds of cars honking, just the way we do today...

honking over speakers

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

but on top of that, we would have also heard the sound of policemen directing traffic with their whistles and trams and horses everywhere...

whistling and horse hooves clopping

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

and you would have heard the elevated railway, which was around us making this huge noise constantly.

train rumbling over tracks

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

We would have heard the whistles from the steamboats in the river...

deep honking

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

and of course this is the era of construction of the giant skyscrapers, and so there's people building these huge buildings...

drilling

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

and on top of that, the final straw for most New Yorkers, the newfangled inventions of the gramophone and the loudspeaker blaring from shop windows and people's apartments throughout the day. It would have been absolutely overwhelming.

cacophony of sounds overlapping

It was creating an offensive new phenomenon

So you can see why they called it the Roaring Twenties, right? I mean, we've created all these technologies to enhance and broadcast the sounds we liked, but we were starting to realize that we needed other technology to measure and even remove unwanted sound.

And that's where this guy comes into the story

Harvey Fletcher.

And that's where this guy comes into the story

Fletcher was a technical genius, a committed Mormon, and an all around do-gooder who believed in using his skills for the benefit of his fellow man. He'd spent years developing ways of measuring sound intensity and its effects on the human ear. Now, Fletcher was part of a growing number of people who felt that the noise of city life was just getting too overwhelming, that it was causing high blood pressure and anxiety and decreased productivity. And so, in 1929, he offers his services to the newly formed Noise Abatement Commission. This is an organization that was so serious about combating noise that they actually held meetings to measure and test the offensiveness of different kinds of car horns.

squeaking

And that's where this guy comes into the story

But Fletcher's grandest experiment was his decision to create a kind of roving noise laboratory, a truck loaded with cameras and state-of-the-art sound equipment that drove around New York City's noisiest streets taking sound measurements. The Noise Abatement Commission used Fletcher's newly invented audiometer to measure the volume and intensity of noise in New York City. 40, 41, 42. Parkinson, make it 42. The noise in Times Square deprives us of 42% of our hearing. Their pioneering work helped establish the decibel as a unit of measurement. I'm standing with sound historian Emily Thompson on the corner of 34th Street and 6th Avenue, once the noisiest place in the whole of New York City.

horn honks

And that's where this guy comes into the story

At what point do we start measuring in decibels? The decibel is defined in 1929. They kind of standardized their procedures, standardized their equipment, and came up with a unit that represented the hugely varying energy difference from the faintest, barely perceptible sound, which is zero decibels, to the point at which sound really is perceived more as pain than as sound. Right, right, right. And that's around 120 or 130 decibels. I went to a couple of those concerts when I was younger. So we're standing at 34th and 6th here. What would the decibel reading have been like around 1930 for this spot? According to the Noise Abatement Commission, the average value here was approximately 74 decibels, and it got as high as 90. Ninety, okay. It's funny, I just happen to have here in my pocket a decibel reader. What a surprise. - Yeah, it's weird. I just carry these around just with me. So we're going to get a reading here right now. That's interesting, it's like 64 or 65. So, if you think about it, you said the average in 1930 was 74... Seventy-four. - and it went up to 90. So it's actually quieter now than it was in 1930, so it must have been incredibly loud here. I think so.

whistle blows

And that's where this guy comes into the story

Thanks to Fletcher and the Noise Abatement Commission, new codes and regulations are passed in New York City.

horns honking and whistles blowing

And that's where this guy comes into the story

Whistle-blowing traffic police are replaced by traffic lights. The city begins handing out fines for playing loudspeakers too noisily.

brass band plays jazz tune

And that's where this guy comes into the story

The elevated railway is sent underground. And all across America, highways are soon built with walls designed to shield out noise from nearby homes.

birds chirping

And that's where this guy comes into the story

Modern offices are designed to absorb sound, minimize noise, and protect workers' health as soundproofing becomes a new industry across the Western world.

typing, chattering, and phone ringing

And that's where this guy comes into the story

Of course, the sound you're most likely to hear on today's city streets is someone talking too loudly into their cell phone. I mean, if Edouard-Lon Scott could time-travel to today, he would be completely amazed. Not only can we record our voices, but we can project them through space and have a private conversation with someone on the other side of the planet. So how did that come about?

And that's where this guy comes into the story

In the early years of radio communication, privacy simply didn't exist. All frequencies were open, so any transmission could easily be eavesdropped, recorded, or jammed. Up until World War II, opposing armies assumed someone was always always listening in. But then an innovation comes along that changes everything and leads to one of the most important technologies of the 21st century. Only this innovation doesn't come from a corporate research lab or some struggling entrepreneur in a garage somewhere. It comes from a movie star. Back in the 1940s, Hedy Lamarr was one of Hollywood's biggest stars, described by the press as "the most beautiful woman in the world." She starred in films with Clark Gable... You are the first American I've ever met with a soul. and played Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, the biggest grossing movie of 1949.

ANNOUNCER

But Samson was ensnared by the seductive beauty of Delilah. Daughter of hell. His lust became a trap that led to his downfall and capture. She was a screen goddess who landed all the top roles. But the thing is, Hedy Lamarr's life outside the movies is stranger than fiction.

ANNOUNCER

Born in Vienna, Lamarr established herself in 1930s European cinema and married a wealthy armament manufacturer called Fritz Mandl. In 1937, she dumped Mandl and fled to America to find stardom. Lamarr signs a contract that brings her here, to what was then MGM Studios. It's a movie factory, and it turns her into an icon. She's a rich and famous movie star, but despite all the success, Lamarr isn't happy. Because, you see, Hedy Lamarr has brains to match her beauty. She finds Hollywood dull and shallow. She'd rather spend the night at home reading Scientific American than going out to some glamorous party. Lamarr even becomes an inventor to kill downtime on the set. She comes up with innovations like a dissolving tablet that turns into cola when placed in water.

fizzing

ANNOUNCER

But it's war, not boredom, that will spur Lamarr to change the world. As World War II rages, the U.S. Navy are struggling to effectively use torpedoes against the Japanese fleet. Radio guiding systems can only use a single frequency, which has no privacy, so it's easy to find, jam, and send the torpedo off course. Lamarr decides to help the U.S. Navy strike back. Now, it might seem like a big leap from a Hollywood studio backlot to military hardware, but it turns out, from her marriage to the arms magnate, Lamarr actually knows a lot about cutting-edge weapons research, and she's got a brilliant idea. It's a remote-controlled torpedo operated from a plane overhead with -- and here's the brilliant part -- a frequency-hopping signal. Her vision is for both the plane and torpedo to synchronize continuous frequency changes so the enemy can't intercept and jam the radio signal. But turning Lamarr's crazy idea into reality won't be easy, and that's where this guy comes in, George Antheil, an eccentric polymath who no Hollywood screenwriter could dream up. Antheil had been a U.S. weapons inspector during World War I before becoming a renowned avant-garde composer. He was known as the bad boy of music. Just looking at these two smoldering faces, it wasn't surprising that they were going to cook up something remarkable together. And so the glamorous movie star and the experimental musician, one of the most unlikely duos in the history of technology, put their heads together, and they come up with this.

player piano playing jazz tune

ANNOUNCER

Okay, okay. So it's not an awesome death ray or something like that. It's a player piano. It's actually an old piece of technology. But what made it so interesting is the fact that it plays itself. You see, every player piano has this kind of scrolling punch card inside of it, where these holes correspond to one of the 88 keys on the piano. And as the paper scrolls along, the piano hops from note to note based on the information encoded in the paper.

ANNOUNCER

Antheil had already toyed with player units in his experimental music, making multiple pianos play exactly in sync. His crazy idea is to use the same technique for Lamarr's remote-controlled torpedo. Just as his pianos hopped between a keyboard's 88 notes to play a tune, the transmitter airplane and the receiver torpedo are programmed to make split-second synchronized hops between 88 different radio frequencies. It was a truly revolutionary idea. The enemy couldn't possibly intercept a transmitted message being spread across the frequency spectrum, which meant that no one could stop a remote-controlled torpedo from hitting its target. It's the first ever means of secure radio communications.

ANNOUNCER

It sounded too good to be true, and unfortunately that's exactly what the U.S. Navy thought. Lamarr and Antheil succeed in getting a patent for their invention, but it's dismissed by the military and never pursued. But despite the fact that Lamarr's guided missile scheme would never see the light of day, the core idea behind it was destined to have a major impact on how we live today.

ANNOUNCER

Prompted by the prospect of all-out nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military dusts off Lamarr's proposal and develops it not for remote-controlling a torpedo, but to secure communications between ships. It works, and it signals the start of a technological revolution. By the 1980s, the technology is declassified, forming the backbone to a new era in secure wireless communication, enabling cell phone users to share frequencies and talk in private. So today, any time you make a cell phone call or send a text or an email via Wi-Fi, it's partly thanks to an ingenious idea from a Hollywood actress that helped launch a digital revolution.

ANNOUNCER

From our earliest experiments with recording and broadcasting human voices, the journey of sound has been all about extending the range of our voices and ears. But the most surprising twist of all would come nearly a century ago, when we first began to realize that sound

could be harnessed for something else

to help us see.

could be harnessed for something else

It's 1912, and the world reacts in horror to the news that the RMS Titanic had struck an iceberg and sunk, taking over 1,500 people with it to a watery grave. It's one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history. Like millions of others, the Canadian Reginald Fessenden is devastated by the loss of life, but he's also an inventor and obsessed with sound technology. He resolves to try and prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again using his knowledge of sound. Fessenden already knows that sound travels very effectively through water, so he's got this idea for a maritime technology that could be used to detect icebergs. And strangely enough, it's the exact same approach that evolution came up with for a completely different species. To understand how Fessenden's idea would work, I've come to a dolphin aquarium in northern California. Okay, I'm out here in the middle of the aquarium. But you guys aren't going to prank me and let the great white out, are you? That wouldn't be funny at all. - Not today. Not today, okay, good. Trainer Holley Muraco knows all about how dolphins use echolocation to navigate. Listen for a sound that's sort of like a zipper or a squeaky door. And that'll be the sound? That'll be the sound of echolocation. So they're sending out a sound wave through the water, and it's going to bounce off of me, and then it's going to bounce back to their ear, and their brain will process that spatially, so they'll get a sense of "weird guy in the pool over there"? Exactly. Release the dolphins! Okay, listen now.

flittery squeak

could be harnessed for something else

There's some echolocation. - Yeah, I heard that sound.

zippery buzzing and squeaking

could be harnessed for something else

I can totally hear it. - Cool, huh? Yeah, that was amazing. There's nothing quite like it. It's hard to describe. They have something we totally don't have.

laughing

could be harnessed for something else

Hello. Little wave. Fessenden had no idea that dolphins can use sound echoes to visualize both the size and distance of an object underwater. This wouldn't be established until the 1950s. Oh, he's hugging you now. You're getting a dolphin hug. Hugged by a dolphin. Humans had been interested in echoes since they were chanting in caves tens of thousands of years ago. But they'd never used echoes for complex navigation and discovery the way dolphins naturally do. But Reginald Fessenden is about to change all of that.

could be harnessed for something else

Now, it might not look as aesthetically pleasing as a dolphin, but this is what Fessenden cooks up. It looks more like a giant metal detector, an echo ranging device he calls the Fessenden Oscillator that can use sound to see objects in the water exactly as dolphins do.

flittery squeaking

could be harnessed for something else

The Oscillator was a brilliant idea -- well, actually, it was two brilliant ideas. It can generate a pulse which travels through water...

pinging

could be harnessed for something else

and then it returns if it encounters an object, detecting icebergs up to two miles away. But it's also a receiver converting incoming vibrations into sound, making it an underwater telegraph for communication. It's a huge breakthrough, and Fessenden is convinced it will save countless lives, not just through detecting icebergs, but also, with the outbreak of World War I, by detecting German U-boats in the new reality of submarine warfare. Unseen submarines are launching devastating attacks on merchant vessels, threatening to cut off Britain's food supplies. Fessenden's convinced his idea can contribute to the war effort. You see, Fessenden is a Canadian and a subject of the British Empire, and he's convinced that his technology can help the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, the American company that funds -- and therefore owns -- his research doesn't share the same allegiance to the Union Jack. What they see in Fessenden's invention is a risky proposition. But faced with the financial risk of developing two revolutionary new technologies, the company decides to build and market the Oscillator as a listening device only. Beside himself with rage, Fessenden travels on his own dime all the way to Portsmouth, England, to meet directly with the Royal Navy. But there, too, the top brass are dubious of this miracle invention. Fessenden later wrote, "I pleaded with them to just let us open the box and show them what the apparatus was like." But his pleading goes nowhere.

could be harnessed for something else

It was another decade before Fessenden's echolocation invention was finally taken seriously. It transforms maritime safety for ships navigating in waters with treacherous ice floes. By World War II, thousands of ships are equipped with sonar, and it will quickly become a fixture of every vessel in every sea. But soon echo ranging doesn't just allow ships to see hazards, it lets fishermen spot their catch, it allows scientists to explore the last great mysteries of our oceans, revealing hidden landscapes and resources, helping seismologists chart earthquake fault lines. Sonar was even one of the technologies used to find the Titanic, 12,000 feet below the surface, 73 years after it sank. But Fessenden's innovation has had the most transformative effect on our health. Today, ultrasound technology allows babies and their mothers to survive complications that would have been fatal just a few decades ago.

And we've actually kind of come full circle

we're now using ultrasounds on pregnant dolphins.

JOHNSON

So that's the -- - That's the heartbeat... That's the heartbeat of the baby dolphin. Of the baby dolphin. Do we know if it's a girl or a boy? I think I'm seeing maybe some boy parts. Oh, really? So we're sort of thinking it's a boy. She's not showing much. She's looking good! - She looks really good. Being streamlined helps a lot. So we're just bouncing our sound waves using our advanced technology here. Somewhere in the dolphin womb there is a tiny baby dolphin that may or may not be hearing our sound waves. Right. And kind of like, "What is that noise? Stop! Why are people talking to me?" Exactly. - That is really cool.

JOHNSON

I remember my wife and I found out that our first child was going to be a boy using an ultrasound. If you think about it, it's really incredible. I mean, this is just about as important a piece of information as you're ever going to receive

in your life

the sex of your unborn child. And it comes to us by sending sound waves through and listening to echoes off of the bones and tissue of our bodies. In the 150 years since Edouard-Lon Scott first recorded his voice, the journey of sound has been all about discovering ever more inventive ways of sending it, be it over the airwaves or right inside our bodies. You could argue that the most transformative part of that journey was where it began. In capturing the sound of our voices in song and in conversation, sound recording gives us the ability to revisit the most cherished memories in our lives. I mean, I know I can't separate out my memories of adolescence from the music that I listened to as a teenager, and today, hearing one of those tracks can send me back to the past in a heartbeat. Sound recording becomes a part of who we are.

in your life

And that's why it's fitting, really, when we packed up the Voyager spacecraft in 1977 to send into uncharted space as a gift to unknown civilizations, one of the main objects we included to represent all of humanity was a gold-plated phonograph disc. Recorded on it were greetings in 55 different languages. Just last year, NASA announced that Voyager I had left the solar system. It'll be roughly 40,000 years before it encounters another planetary system, but when it does, it will be carrying the sound of the human voice saying hello. How We Got to Now was made possible in part by To learn more about How We Got to Now, visit us on the web at... How We Got to Now is available on DVD. A companion book is also available. To order, visit shoppbs.org or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS. Captions by LNS Captioning Portland, Oregon www.LNScaptioning.com