"There's no better place to begin this part of our odyssey than at home." "1900 and a lot of things arme.E year is especially the technology." "Take a look around." "Fresh food is kept cool in the icebox..." "As long as there's a block of ice in there with it." "Although some prosperous houses nearby are electrified the light here comes from gas and kerosene lamps." "Rich folks have running water and toilets and use an outhouse in the back." "To take a bath, you have to pump enough water by hand and then heat it on a coal- or wood-burning stove." "It's a big job, so members of the family take turns in the tub on Saturday night." "There's no telephone to get the latest news but there is one at the general store along with the daily paper full of incredible stories about new inventions." "Why, there's even a story here about two brothers who say they've built a flying machine if you can imagine that." "Osgood:" "One of the most exciting technologies at the turn of the century is the airplane." "Orville and wilbur Wright of Dayton, Ohio become the first to leave earth in this heavier-than-air machine in 1903 but not many people get to see it." "The brothers then work hard to improve their invention and the more successful they are the more secretive they become." "The new field of flight technology is already highly competitive and someone might copy their design." "Out west, the first chance folks have to see an airplane is in 1910." "That's when an international air meet is held e up-and-coming city that's when an international of Los Angeles.D in th man:" "The meet was ballyhooed all over-- posters, signs, special trains from downtown Los Angeles out here to the "aviation field," they called it." "The stands held 30,000 people." "They were really an optimistic group planning this." "Osgood:" "By noon the stands are nearly full." "One of the top attractions is Glenn curtiss a roughneck motorcycle racer with a gift for designing fast machines." "Curtiss is the first American to fly, after e wrights and holds the air speed record:" "A blistering 48.5 miles per hour." "Mcpolin:" "The first plane taking off was curtiss himself on the opening day." "The crowd was silent watching the engine rev up." "There were those who doubted that this could even happen." "And then watch it taxi and take off." "And they let out a cheer." "They... they were just..." "I mean, "it's going, it's happening in front of us."" ""Look at that!" As they watched the plane." "And... and strangers shook hands with one another because they were actually witnessing men free from the earth at last." "Osgood:" "But the show is far from over." "A French circus performer-turned-pilot named Luis paulhan is determined to uphold the honor of France." "Unannounced and out of nowhere, paulhan buzzes the grandstand." "The crowd is stunned, then stands and cheers as he makes a short turn around the countryside." "Over the course of 11 days paulhan and curtiss compete fiercely for over $50,000 in prize money." "The American is first in speed but it's the frenchman who wins the most." "Mcpolin:" "Paulhan went up-- no parachute-- 4,100 feet." "Boy, that was something." "And then paulhan also took the long-distard." "He flew from here to the Santa Anita racetrack and back-- 45 miles." "Osgood:" "Paulhan's success is but the latest round in an escalating competition among flyers, airplane designers and even nations." "The competition will shape the development of aviation." "For years it's been France that has seen itself as the undisputed leader in the field." "After all, the French have been experimenting with flight for more than a century." "It was naturally assumed that the first successful airplane would be built by a frenchman not two upstart Americans like the Wright brothers." "Man:" "Along comes news dribbling in from America about these two guys experimenting out in Dayton, Ohio and it sounds as though if these stories are true these guys have really moved well beyond anybody else." "And it's knowledge that the Wright brothers are out there working and achieving success really lights a fire under the French aeronautical community." "Osgood:" "In 1906, Alberto Santos dumont managed a brief flight." "His aircraft was inspired by accounts of the wrights' machine." "The brothers had declined any public demonstrations until their patents were secured so Parisians were convinced they had just witnessed the world's first airplane flight." "It wasn' that the wrights finally revealed their creation." "For the plane's first flight abroad wilbur Wright brought it to France." "Man:" "And they are stunned that they're flying for more than two hours." "And no one in Europe is flying for any more than a few minutes or a alf an hour." "That is a rude shock in 1908 to be outdone so dramatically in Europe." "Osgood:" "Wilbur Wright took Paris by storm." "His invention was painted by artists and scrutinized by airplane designers." "Europeans had focused on getting a plane off the ground." "The genius of the wrights' Maine is its mobility in the air." "Through a system of wires and pulleys the wings are warped, or bent in such a way that the aircraft can respond to air currents" "despite the wrights' patents wing-warping is rapidly adopted by the French." "Political tensions growing in Europe are making technological innovations increasingly valuable." "The Europeans had to worry about their neighbors." "They didn't know what value this new thing, the airplane was going to have but they did know, if they were French that the Germans were fiddling around with zeppelins and airplanes and so on over here." "'D better with zeppelins and airplanes keep up with what they're doing." "Osgood:" "In America, the incentives to improve airplane technology are fewer, but growing." "Sometimes all it takes is a promotional gimmick." "To build circulation newspaper baron William Randolph hearst offers a $50,000 prize for the first coast-to-coast crossing of America in less than 30 days." "Among those who join the competition is calbraith Perry Rodgers." "He'll fly a Wright machine christened "the vin fiz flyer"" "after a soft drink made by his sponsor." "Rodgers is the descendent of a long line of naval heroes but a childhood disease has left him deaf and unable to follow in their footsteps." "With the airplane he's found something even better for his boundless energy." "Standing six feet four the handsome pilot is an ideal subject for hearst's cameras always flying with a cigar clenched firmly between his teeth." "On September 17, 1911, he takes off from a park in New York-- there's no such thing as an airport yet." "As he heads west, a special train will follow carrying his family, crew, spare parts and an ample supply of vin fiz." "Rodgers finds his way across the state by following railroad tracks." "Keeping his biplane under control requires brute strength and sharp reflexes but the first leg of the trip goes like a charm." ""It's Chicago in four days," he says" ""ifeverything goes right."" "But on the second day" "Rodgers crashes nose down in a chicken Coop while trying to dodge power lines." "His plane rebuilt, he presses on." "Then loses his way at a railway junction." "Worse, the plane proves unstable on all but the calmest of days and the fields used for landings and takeoffs are filled with hazards." "But when the weather is good, and he's back in the air it's as if the mishaps never happened." "Bells from fire stations call out crowds in every town he passes." "By the time Rodgers reaches Chicago o days remain by the time Rodgers to finish the triponly tw e promises, "I mean to get there."" "(Thunder rumbles)" "As Rodgers travels west he's forced to fly blind through rainstorms." "Wear on the engine is taking its toll." "Spark plugs blow out in mid-flight;" "a cylinder seizes up." "Four weeks and four crashes later he arrives in Pasadena, California where he's welcomed as a hero even though the pacific ocean is still 20 miles away." "The following Sunday he sets out to reach the water's edge... finally and once again, there's trouble." "Fers and once aa concussions trouble." "And internal injuries." "One of his ankles is broken." "But with crutches strapped to his plane" "Rodgers still makes the flight to long beach lands on the sand and wets his wheels in the surf." "He's the first man to cross the continent by air even if it has taken him 49 days." "It's a victory of the spirit, widely celebrated a dramatic demonstration that an individual's competitive spirit can capture a nation's imagination and bring a new technology to the forefront." "In Europe, it's the political and military need that has led to the growing interest in airplanes." "Crouch:" "If you look at Europe before the first world war you have really sophisticated flight laboratories popping up in one country after another." "Even in nations like Russia, for example you have major sites where really important aerodynamic research is being conducted." "Again, in the German universities wing theory is being born, for heaven's sakes." "Osgood:" "In August, 1914, the first world war finally erupts." "As troops battle on the ground no one is sure how to use the new airplane." "At first, aviators gather the kind of information every general needs to know-- what's going on over the next hill." "Om the air can then be pounded by ground artillery." "Vulnerability from the air helps change the conduct of the war." "Any forward advance can now be detected so most of the conflict is mired along 400 miles of trenches." "The only true mobility is in the air and aviators are determined to make the most of it." "Morrow:" "The English and French pilots of the time are not really content just to fly and look." "They are often public school boys..." "Public school sportsmen, in fact." "The last thing they plan to be is a taxi driver." "They decide this war needs to be more interesting." ""I'm going to drop bombs and let's see if I can't carry a machine gun."" "(Firing rounds)" "Osgood:" "A German innovation takes the machine gun a crucial step further with a fixed-mount weapon synchronized to fire through the propeller." "The agile, one-man fighter develops into a distinct class of military aircraft." "By 1917, aerial bombardment leads to yet another class-- the heavy bomber." "German planes are the first to carry the war beyond the battlefield ondon.He first to carry the war beyond the battlefield there are few deaths, but it's a taste of things to come." "When America enters the war, in 1917 the airplane goes from a wonder to a necessity." "But the U.S. designs are no longer competitive." "Crouch:" "People ask why America, the home of the airplane has fallen so very far behind the Europeans in only six years." "Well, it's because of the investment that European governments have made in the technology and the American government hasn't." "Osgood:" "With the end of the war in 1918 there's no longer any compelling need for aircraft." "Government contracts are canceled and American manufacturers are left almost where they started." "But there is no turning back." "Future competition among nations, companies and the flyers themselves will force ever-greater improvements in airplane technology." "It may take years to bring aviation to the general public but there's no longer any question that those days will come." "When we think of technology we inevitably think of inventions like the airplane." "But technology isn't just a clever device;" "it's everything that goes along with it and makes it possible." "Take the newly invented automobile, for example." "Good roads are needed for drivers to use not to mention traffic lights and parking lots and road maps." "New businesses have to service cars, like this garage now charging seven cents a gallon for gasoline." "Must be inflation." "Of course, this business wouldn't even exist without cars." "Every part of a system of technology is dependent on all the others." "The birth of an invention like the automobile is only the beginning." "In the early years of the century to own a car like this 1908 packard, you need money to burn." "You also need a trained mechanic to keep it running." "Such a complex invention seems destined to remain an amusement for the rich unless it becomes cheaper and more available." "Amed Henry Ford unless it becomes cheaper says he knows how to do it.N n" "Ford treats work like play and has an uncommon gift for attracting talented engineers." "He builds up a team which-- though largely self-taught like himself-- ranks among the finest automotive talent in Detroit." "In an era when automobiles are handmade, expensive and difficult to repair they set out to design an inexpensive, reliable car." "They know that the secret to success is simplifying the technology-- creating a car that is easy to build and that the owner himself can maintain." "The cars of competitors need more than 8,000 parts but their car will have just 5,000." "The model t is a masterpiece." "It's as tough as nails handles almost any road, and is easy to maintain." "It's a perfect match for the situation in 1908, 1909, 1910." "It hit it..." "It's not often, I think that a design hits its environment perfectly-- just boomp, without any overlap and slippage." "And this one did." "Osgood:" "For owners, it's a love affair from the start and for women, newfound independence." "They call the car the tin Lizzie and make it part of the family." "There was one fellow by the name of tom Ford and we used to go on picnics in Chicago in the open model t." "We ordinarily went to the park in a streetcar but if tom came by and we got into his car oh, boy, that was a big thrill." "He'd put about 12 people in that." "We thought he was way ahead of his time." "Osgood:" "Demand is so high for the model t that Ford can't build enough of them." "By 1912, the highland park plant is turning out 78,000 cars-- double the previous year-- and still the orders are flooding in." "We're now talking of volume of production that no one has ever thought of in history." "So if you're going to really turn out thousands and thousands of units you've got to now get very fine-grained the various subcomponents of a car-- how do you get them to where you want them, when you want them?" "Osgood:" "It's a time when efficiency experts are promoting plans for "scientific management."" "But Henry Ford and his men have already laid out their plant so that materials flow in a logical sequence of fabrication." "Then in a brilliant stroke, they go one critical step further." "They design special-purpose machine tools that require little or no skill to operate or can replace workers altogether." "But one crucial bottleneck remains." "Staudenmaier:" "Getting the parts to fit is the joker in the deck." "The trick of cutting metal so that it's the right shape is handled by manufacturers most of the time until about 1905 with files and vises at the end." "So you have a skilled person who says" ""no, not quite right," put it in the vise so it's called hand fitting and finishing." "It takes a revolution in the strength of cutting tools so that you've got knives to cut metal and they must be strong enough to not keep wearing out." "Then you can begin to say" ""here's a box full of these things." "E has to finish these off." ""Here's a box full of these things."No on" ""just grab any one out of the box and it'll fit right on there the way it has to."" "Once you begin to have genuine interchangeable parts then the concept of flow changes." "Osgood:" "On April 1, 1913 workers in the Magneto assembly department are lined up next to a long platform." "The foreman tells them to add one part to an assembly and push it to the next worker, then to repeat the same action." "After some fine tuning productivity increases fourfold." "Soon there's an engine assembly line then one for transmissions." "Eventually, a new problem arises:" "Parts are being made so fast that they overwhelm the final assembly of the car itself." "As an experiment, a moving line is set up here as well." "At first, a team of assemblers moves along with it." "Then they take fixed positions and the parts are delivered to them." "All told, chassis assembly time falls from 12 1/2 hours to under two." "Between 1913 and 1914 production of the model t nearly doubles." "Assembly-line technology will make possible the consumer society, with its huge number of products-- something we now take for granted." "But for the men on the line, productivity has its price." "The work is achingly hard and numbingly dull." "By 1914, workers at Ford last on average only four months." "The high rate of turnover threatens the production of cars." "So, in a dramatic move" "Ford doubles their wages to five dollars a day-- an unheard-of amount for unskilled labor." "Staudenmaier:" "The moving assembly line cuts you up and spits you out but people will put up with a lot if they're going to make double the money they were making before." "You read letters of immigrants going back to the various old countries in Europe and they'll say, "this is very hard."" "And they don't just mean fords." ""The work here is very hard, the life is very hard." ""But if I don't get injured and I don't get laid off" "I'm making very good money."" "Osgood:" "It's more money than ever before." "For some, it's enough to buy a model t fo family." "The car has a particularly strong impact on youth." "It offers everything they might want and shouldn't have:" "Independence, glamour..." "And danger." "Nowhere is the car more popular than in Los Angeles the first city to feel its effect." "Mcpolin:" "You now could go your own way to any destination you had;" "you didn't have to depend on public transportation and wait for public transporta..." "The big thing:" "No waiting." "It was your car and your transportation." "Osgood:" "The car starts to change the way that cities develop." "Now you can live almost anywhere far from the downtown core." "The car becomes the very symbol of freedom and independence." "In America, there is this concept of freedom that you can reinvent yourself." "You don't have to live in the same town as your parents you don't have to live the same kind of life you don't have to do the job that they had." "I think the first step in making that a mass dream is the coming of an inexpensive car that can..." "The car will go the furthest in reshaping the way we live." "Sometimes we don't even know what a technology is good for." "It can take years to find out." "A good example is radio." "At first, around the turn of the century all you can produce with a radio transmitter is a blast of radio waves created by an electric spark." "(Buzzing when lit)" "You can see what the signal looks like on this oscilloscope." "(Buzzing when oscillating)" "When these waves are switched off and on by a telegraph key the result is wireless telegraphy." "(Clicking and buzzing)" "Radio is first used to transmit sound in 1906." "That's when an American physicist generates a continuous wave signal which he then modulates with sound." "He tries it out on Christmas Eve along the Massachusetts coast." "Wireless operators aboard ships at sea think the when from among the morse code beeps on their headphones there emerges the sound of a violin playing "silent night."" "Osgood:" "In the early years people assume that radio will be used as a wireless version of the telephone-- one-to-one communication between individuals." "It's an appealing idea to anyone living beneat-growing tangle of utility lines." "If you want a radio, you have to build your own." "The largest group using the new medium is amateur tinkerers" ""hams," as they are called." "Often there were men who'd been in the war who learned about radio there, and they came home." "Bes in their pockets as they left because there weren't any vacuum tubes available." "And when they got home after world war I they started building radio sets with vacuum tubes." "Osgood:" "In 1916, in Pittsburgh, an engineer named frank Conrad sets up radio equipment made by his employer, westinghouse." "He talks with other operators about their mutual passion." "Then, one day, he dips into his record collection and starts to play music for his friends over the air." "Man:" "?" "You gotta know, you gotta know how to love 'em... ?" "Osgood:" "With a 100-watt transmitter and an antenna the height of a phone pole he can be heard in Ohio and West Virginia." "?" "Sigh little sighs and lie, lie little lies... ?" "Osgood:" "When a westinghouse executive named Harry Davis hears about Conrad's music, he has an inspiration." "Davis realizes that radio can be a public medium." "?" "You gotta know, you gotta know how to love ?" "?" "You gotta know... ?" "Osgood:" "A radio transmission can be broadcast to a large number of people and if it broadcasts something they really want to hear they're bound to buy radios made by westinghouse." "And so in 1920, on the roof of the westinghouse plant the company's station, kdka, goes on the air with one of the first radio broadcasts." "When the station announces election returns before they can be read in the papers, it causes a sensation." "Man:" "There was a sense that-- like all technologies, I think-- a sense that there were vast opportunities for human improvement." "This would bring better communication it wohen bring people in closer contact with each other they would understand each other better." "The world would be more unified." "Osgood:" "Within two years, 100,000 radios have been sold and 500 stations are on the air." "Mcpolin:" "A kid next door had one." "I couldn't believe I was hearing a voice from someplace no telephone wires or anything." "And it was great." "Go over and listen to music in his back porch to hear, "come on, let me try them, let me try them."" "Osgo and more compan ies set up their own stations as a good way to get free advertising." "Of the cook paint to say hello to all our friends." "Osgood:" "They are joined by universities, churches and clubs." "Even newspapers begin to broadcast." "Smulyan:" "They weren't sure why sometimes, but it seemed like a good idea." "You position yourself as..." "S technological, you posias... cool.Lf as..., a and so people started radio stations for that reason." "They liked the feeling that they were in on the ground floor of this new technology." "The problem was how to fill up these hours so station managers would just pretty much take anyone who wandered in off the street and was willing to perform." "They'd say, "great, thanks." ""Fill up time." ""Uh, how many numbers can you perform?" "We'll take everything."" "To get to hear your neighbors on the radio is fun." "And in some ways that was the favorite radio show." "Everybody in my childhood, like me and everybody spent a lot of time fussing with this little crystal radio." "And you tried to get the farthest distant station possible without regard to what the content of the programs was that you were listening to." "Announcer:" "W..." "O..." "F, Jefferson city, Missouri." "The king of the ivories will play his famous..." "Osgood:" "Gradually, the content of programs starts to attract an audience." "Man (On radio):" "Say, doc." "Man 2 (On radio):" "What is it, bill?" "Do you think I'll live to be 100 years old?" "Well, I don't know." "Let me see, do you smoke?" "No." "Do you drink?" "No." "Do you stay out late?" "No, sir." "Do you run around with the flappers?" "I should say not." "Well, what in the world do you want to live to be 100 years old for?" "Smulyan:" "When radio broadcasting began, it was incredibly varied-- lots of music, occasional dramas, lots of opera some jazz, mostly whitened up-- you don't want any African-Americans on the radio because it's coming into people's homes;" "white people might not want black people in their homes." "So black people were kept off the radio." "Osgood:" "By thspeakers and plug into th e wall." "Marchand:" "Many of the early ads would have rooms that seemed to be glowing with a kind of misty aura that came from this kind of magical sense that something very ethereal and uplifting was coming to you in this magical way, through the air." "Osgood:" "But there are still problems to be solved." "Distant stations often drift away as magically as they appear or they're completely blocked by static." "And there are difficulties with programming, as well." "In big cities and there are difficulties with broadcast eventswell.Ons like the 1924 Democratic convention." "But few other stations can afford such popular programming." "Smulyan:" "People would start these radio stations without any idea that programming costs a lot." "And they started losing money and they started..." "And so programmers, radio station owners started to say, "this isn't working for me." ""It's okay to have our name in front of the public" ""and to be cool but not if I'm going to lose big bucks."" "So who pays for radio beca" "osgood:" "If stations won't pay, then maybe advertisers will but most advertisers are wary." "Marchand:" "Two qualities really caught their attention about radio." "One was the idea of its intimacy and another was its intrusiveness that it intruded directly into the center of the house the center of the family." "You were a guest in somebody else's living room and there was this feeling of, on the one hand" ""isn't this wonderful that we can make this connection?"" "And on the other hand, a kind of" ""dare we say anything that will offend them?" "Dare we mention our product?"" "Osgood:" "Another problem is that advertisers can only reach one small pocket of listeners at a time." "As a result, plans are made for a national system of broadcasting." "If a signal is sent out over telephone lines tations across the country ocal s the size of the audience increases dramatically." "To hold such a large audience, the programming has to improve which in turn should help to sell more radios." "It's an idea that solves a lot of problems and in 1926, the first radio network the national broadcasting company, is formed." "(Brass band playing)" "With a national audience advertisers like the michelin tire company start to pay for musical programs." "(Band playing michelin hourtheme song)" "There's nothing subtle about the costumes but the only mention of the product is the name of the show, the michelin hour." "(Tune continues)" "Palmolive had its stars, its leading tenor and soprano change their names, so that the soprano was given the name... um, olive Palmer and the baritone was given the name Paul Oliver." "Radio show host:" "And for the next few minutes, you are going to be entertained by Rudy vallee and his Connecticut Yankees." "(Music begins)" "Osgood:" "But radio really becomes a commercially successful technology with the arrival of vaudeville stars." "(Playing upbeat tune)" "?" "You'll do it someday, so why not now ?" "?" "Oh, won't you let me try to show you how ?" "?" "Think what you're missing, oh, it's a shame ?" "?" "You'll miss us, Suzy ?" "?" "And the rest the gang... ?" "Smulyan:" "They were perfect." "And they had big names." "People would tune in to listen to them." "They knew they were famous." "They were vaudeville stars." "?" "You'll do it someday, so why not now?" "?" "(Musical interlude)" "I think it's one of the ways that people came to accept these commercials" "took this material, integrated it into entertainment programming, and made it seem not so bad." "Radio actor:" "As the storm breaks around them the sheriff's posse gathers at pine creek forks." "(Device rbles like thunder)" "Osgood:" "By the 1930s, the identity of radio is set." "All right, boys, let's head out." "(Imitating galloping horses)" "(Imitating falling raindrops)" "Osgood:" "A technology that was supposed to replace the telephone has become something altogether unique." "(Sound effects of wind and horses playing)" "Come on, we're gaining on 'em." "They've seen us?" "Ride, fellas-- they probably have fresh horses at the creek." "Osgood:" "When it comes to predicting the future of technology it's best to assume you'll be wrong." "Hold up, there." "We'll set fire to the camp and stop." "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "Slim, you chop a couple of them small trees." "You spread a fire they can't get through." "Osgood:" "As radio helps sell more and more mass-produced goods, like this refrigerator there are more new goods to sell thanks to another technological revolution." "This one has to do with materials-- what things are made of." "In 1930, before the revolution milk bottles are all made of glass." "You can see through them to tell just how pure the milk is but you do have to be careful when you put them down." "They're heavy, too." "This tennis racket is strong and it's flexible because it's made of white maple, but the wood isn't cheap." "The tennis balls bounce just fine thanks to their Malaysian rubber but Malaysia is awfully far away." "In fact, this handkerchief is smooth and lightweight because it's made by silkworms in Japan but in the 1930s, Japan is getting less friendly each year." "All of these materials are natural but all of them are relatively expensive or hard to get." "Then one day a chemist decides to find out just what gives these materials their desirable qualities." "He wonders if it might even be possible to create something like them in a laboratory." "Osgood:" "The story of the first purely synthetic material begins in 1927, at the dupont chemical company in Wilmington, Delaware." "Dupont has made a fortune transforming natural materials like wood into successful products like cellophane." "But chemical director Charles stine believes the company can do even better." "Man:" "There was very little understanding of the fundamentals of what they were doing." "They only knew that things worked because they worked and stine had a real belief that if you tried to understand at a more fundamental level what was going on, what's the chemistry that's going on in these processes, that they would inevitably be able" "to improve what they were doing." "Osgood:" "Stine builds a new laboratory dedicated to pure research." "He's unable to lure established chemists away from universities so he turns to a promising young Harvard instructor named Wallace carothers." "The deal is clinched when stine assures carothers that he can pursue research of his own choosing." "Carothers is assigned a first-rate staff and given the best equipment that money can buy." "Man:" "Carothers' co-workers loved to be around him." "He was not only their scientific leader but he was the one who knew more about music knew more about literature, who read the most and it was a marvelous time." "Osgood:" "Carothers directs research into polymers-- mysterious long stringy substances that give silk its smoothness and rubber its bounce." "Scientists disagree about just what polymers are." "Hermes:" "Carothers wanted to show that these natural materials were just longer chain molecules." "They weren't mysterious." "They could be understood by principles already then known." "Osgood:" "Carothers sets out to prove his point by creating a polymer in a test tube." "After a year, they're still trying." "Hermes:" "And they seemed to stall." "They seemed to be unable to reach beyond a certain chain length." "They were very frustrated." "Carothers, being the very good chemist that he was did some thinking about why the chemical reaction might be stopping." "One of the major reasons was that when you react an acid and an alcohol you get water split out and if that water starts to accumulate in a product the chemical reaction will stop." "Osgood:" "Carothers directs his assistant, Julian hill to use this specially built still to extract the last water molecules interfering with the chemical reaction." "Hermes:" "Julian hill waited for days and days until he thought the chemical reaction was completed." "And then, at the end of this period of time he broke open the apparatus carefully." "He had a warm mass of resin and he stuck into it a glass stirring rod..." "Then he pulled it out, and what he said was that... "I found I had a festoon of fibers."" "What a marvelous word, "festoon of fibers."" "Smith:" "This was a fiber that had enough strength to be a textile fiber like cotton or wool or silk." "No one had ever done this before." "I don't think..." "It's hard to say whether anyone even thought it was possible." "Osgood:" "Unfortunately, the fiber has no commercial value because it can't stand up to solvents or heat." "But with the construction of polymers now understood carothers considers his work complete." "Commerce doesn't concern him." "When dupont's chemical director, Charles stine wins a promotion, his successor, James Bolton, decides that carothers must continue to work on a practical fiber." "Smith:" "Carothers agonized about what he should be doing-- whether he should follow his true interests in purely scientific work or whether he should try to do more practically oriented work and please his superiors." "Osgood:" "Carothers has also struggled during much of his life with bouts of depression." "Now these feelings return, and he begins to drink heavily." "Some days he doesn't show up for work at all." "Hermes:" "One of his friends said that he knew that carothers had carried a small capsule of cyanide in his pocket all the time." "No one ever saw him ready to use it." "Nevertheless it was well understood that he always carried the poison with him that he could eventually use to kill himself." "Smith:" "Bolton dealt with him very delicately but it does seem that for some reason in early 1934" "Bolton was able to convince carothers to go back and take another look at the fiber problem." "Osgood:" "In may 1934, carothers achieves a spectacular success-- a strong elastic fiber that survives well at high temperatures." "Out of the thousands of names considered they choose one-- "nylon."" "Smith:" "Carothers was by now the foremost polymer chemist in the world but success did not help the man." "Success made his problems worse in some ways." "He... he felt tremendous pressure to duplicate his success." "Osgood:" "But nylon will be his last breakthrough." "Carothers' condion continues to deteriorate." "Neither friends nor professional therapy any difference." "Neither friends nor professional therapymake finally, in the spring of 1937, he takes his own life swalloof cyanide he has carried for years." "Because of carothers' death he never wins the nobel prize that many believe his work deserves." "Hermes:" "Carothers' discovery was really the turning point in the synthetic-material revolution." "Having done that, fiber, rubber and plastic became available to us by modifying the techniques that carothers first invented." "Osgood:" "The commercial revolution begins when dupont sets out to mass-produce nylon." "Thanks to the company's pragmatic approach nylon is made from materials as cheap and plentiful as coal." "Smith:" "The thing that stine said in the announcement which was remarkable public relations but I think largely accidental was he said that from materials as common as coal, air and water you could produce silk, and this is magic, this is alchemy." "Osgood:" "First, dupont takes aim at the market for silk stockings." "Nylon is more durable than silk and women find hose indispensable." "Machines can knit hose from a single fiber." "They can be made nearly invisible." "All across the country, stores can hardly keep them in stock." "And nylon is only the beginning." "Other polymer-based synthetics like plastic and synthetic rubber flow from the development of nylon." "With the tools of science applied to the needs of the marketplace a powerful new technology is created." "By the late 1930s, it's taken for granted that science and technology hold the key to a better life." "That belief is made concrete on a thousand acres of New York City marshland." "Franklin Roosevelt:" "I hereby dedicate the world's fair..." "The New York world's fair..." "Osgood:" "Here, broadcasting comes with pictures." "The opening-day ceremony launchs the beginning of commercial television." "Franklin Roosevelt:" "And I declare it open to all mankind." "(Applause)" "Osgood:" "The message of the fair is clear:" "Osgood:" "The wonders of science and technology will provide a world of comfort and plenty." "In the westinghouse pavilion, the crowd is amazed by a talking robot." "A smart fellow." "Osgood:" "But just as popular with overworked women is a dishwashing contest." "...the contest over in exactly seven minutes and 58 seconds." "In that time, Mrs. Martin has washed 50 dishes..." "Osgood:" "The winner-- a new electric dishwashing machine." "It's all over, Mrs. drudge." "You may as well rest now." "(Audience laughs)" "Osgood:" "The most ambitious vision of the future is also the most popular." "General motors' futurama pavilion is the hit of the fair." "And I was the most desirable young man in New York because I could get tickets to the futurama because I was a reporter, and we had..." "I had a press pass." "And my popularity was never higher than the summer of 1939." "Osgood:" "Futurama creates the world of 1960 in miniature." "Anyone who drives to the fair crawling through small towns all the way can't help but appreciate these automated freeways." "There are no traces of the past here." "The designer, Norman bel geddes, has created a world built from scratch." "Staudenmaier:" "Bel geddes is saying, "if you could start fresh" ""and create a city out of a pure plan look at what you could do."" "There's a ogy that says" "Americans didn't come to an occupied country and then overpower it and conquer it." "We came to an empty land with a clean slate." "We started to create from scratch." "That's a powerful American technological dream." ""Wouldn't it be great if we could just sort of start fresh?"" "Osgood:" "But there is always history to reckon with." "At the time of the fair hostilities in Europe are at a flashpoint once again." "Gill:" "There was the threat of war." "Everybody knew that the war was coming." "I suppose a very sophisticated reading of the... of the happiness of the world's fair would be that it was in half-conscious anticipation of something awful about to take place." "Osgood:" "Our faith in the power of technology to make a better world will never be as strong as it is at the fair in 1939." "Osgood:" "World war ii and the cold war after it create a life-and-death need for advanced technology." "Jets, rockets, radar, computers, plastic were all developed in this new and more complex age." "Competition is at a fever pitch among nations for military and political advantage among companies for more business and among universities for more research grants." "And to help fuel it all is the enormous wealth generated by the U.S. in the postwar e." "With Europe and Asia shattered by war and American production capacity expanded by the war the U.S. alone captures more than half of the world's gross national product." "By the 1950s there seems to be more than enough money to go around." "(dean Martin tune playing)" "?" "Money..." "Burns a hole in my pocket... ?" "Osgood:" "After the war is over, Americans are ready to celebrate with a dazzling array of consumer technology." "Martin:" "?" "..." "Just buy pretty presents for you... ?" "Halberstam:" "I don't think black people would look on it as a particularly stirring time." "Women who graduated from college in those days would probably not necessarily look back upon it as a time of equal opportunity." "But never had the wealth of a nation been shared by so many ordinary people." "Martin:" "?" "..." "They wore diamonds instead. ?" "(Music continues)" "Halberstam:" "People were moving to the suburbs." "They were getting washing machines and dryers and magical ovens that you threw something, a frozen roast, in and it would be cooked for you." "I mean, it was the good life." "Osgood:" "But the good life is soon overshadowed by another kind of technology." "When the Soviet union builds its own atomic bomb in 1949 only four years after the United States the psychological and political shock is enormous throughout the world." "(Air-raid alarm blaring)" "In the U.S., the air force looks for help to strengthen the nation's air defense." "One option is a new, unproven technology called the general purpose computer." "In 1950, there are less than a dozen computers in the entire world." "The fastest is called whirlwind at the Massachusetts institute of technology." "The only reason that whirlwind exists is because of a determined self-confident graduate student from Nebraska named Jay forrester." "Forrester:" "We lacked experience with the sorts of things that we were working on but there was no one anywhere who had experience in the things they were working on." "So it was an exciting, pioneering kind of thing that we were developing." "Osgood:" "The story starts in 1943 at the height of world war ii, when m.I.T. Is asked by the Navy to improve its airplane simulators used to train pilots." "The existing mechanical models work well enough but there's a problem." "Man:" "They limited in their flexibility." "In order to change from one..." "Say, the simulation of one airplane to another you would basically have to tear the whole machine down and build a new one." "Osgood:" "Now the government wants a flexible machine that can be used to simulate a number of airplane designs." "So forrester is asked to investigate a revolutionary new technique called digital computing." "The digital appas the advantage that you can change the behavior of the system by reprogramming it, to use a modern term." "You reprogram it and you reconfigure the simulator for a new application-- a new airplane with new, different behavior." "Osgood:" "By the time forrester and his team start the project a mechanical computer called the mark I is up and running at Harvard." "It's highly accurate, and calculates faster than a mathematician could ever dream of but the cams and gears that control the mechanical switches are much too slow for an airplane simulator." "The eniac computer at the university of Pennsylvania is thousands of times faster than the mark I because calculations are carried out by electronic vacuum tubes but each change in a program requires days of rewiring." "Forrester's mission is to build a computer that's faster and more flexible than any other-- not that he knows yet just how it will work." "Ceruzzi:" "If you commit yourself to a project where you already pretty much know what you're going to do you're not going to advance the state of the art." "The real genius consists of someone who knows how to go just far enough out so that they really do advance the state of the art they really do have to make some breakthroughs along the way but they don't reach out so far" "that they look foolish because they utterly fail." "Osgood:" "Forrester decides to make his machine faster and simpler by converting numbers to a binary code that uses only ones and zeroes." "The advantage of using a binary code is that a simple switch can represent "one" when it's on and "zero" when it's off." "A string of switches can represent any number..." "Or any frequency of sound..." "Even images." "Memory gives a computer the ability to operate itself but no one has yet built a good one." "After many attempts, forrester locates a magnetic material that can be negatively or positively charged instantly to represent a one or a zero." "Forrester:" "And I spent several evenings just walking the street thinking about how one might arrange it coming up in two or three weeks with a diagram of how to do it which in fact persisted almost exactly as originally sketched for the next, uh..." "Thxt 30 years." "Osgood:" "Forrester's so-called magnetic core memory is made of tiny rings strung on a conducting grid." "Bits of information can be recorded and retrieved at each intersection." "There's still a great deal to be done." "Forrester and his chief engineer, Bob Everett rely on a crack team of students." "Man:" "There was no such thing as 9:00 to 5:00." "More like 24 hours a day." "I mean, m.I.T. Had a rule that graduate students couldn't work after midnight and those of us who were involved in this thing we would go down and punch out at midnight and then put another three or four hours" "on the machine after that." "Osgood:" "It's as if the whirlwind team has forgotten its modest mission of building a flight simulator." ", they are working from its modest mission the ground up to build a machine of unprecedented complexity and speed." "Gilmore:" "Now that we've got this machine that was lightning fast we had to figure out how to communicate with it." "Osgood:" "Jack gilmore writes some of the first programs for whirlwind." "The fascination for me was that I could actually sit down and write out instructions and then get that stuff that was written in pencil inside that sleeping wizard." "Then all of a sudden you would see your work coming to life." "We knew that we had something very special." "Osgood:" "It's absurd to imagine something as sophisticated as whirlwind used as a flight simulator." "Forrester knows it-- he has his eye on the future-- but the government worries about the bottom line." "Ceruzzi:" "The federal govern that whirlwind be stopped, that the funding be cut off." "The people who wrote that report really didn't see the picture." "They missed it-- they missed what was happening." "They missed the fact that you really had to go back into some very fundamental research and work right from the ground up to redefine electrical engineering to build digital computers." "Osgood:" "Forrester has spent much of his adult life building a computer without equal and apparently without a purpose." "But just as the project is about to be canceled history intervenes with the cold war and the threat of nuclear war." "The air force desperately needs a way to single out enemy planes from the thousands of others flying every day." "The process of checking each actual flight against a log of scheduled flights is far too slow unless it could be carried out by a computer." "M.I.T., eager to develop a new source of funding is well positioned to sell whirlwind to the air force." "Over the next three years, the whirlwind design is adapted for surveillance of the skies, and renamed Sage." "Eventually there will be 26 installations across the country." "The Sage computer may be the largest ever built." "Each weighs 250 tons, contains 50,000 vacuum tubes and is as big as a football field." "Ceruzzi:" "Sage had such complex requirements of tracking aircraft and directing radars and determining whether this was a friend or foe up there and all that kind of thing and doing it all very quickly, reliably." "It had a requirement for programs that were much more complex, much longer." "And out of that came a sense of creating a profession-- a profession of computer programmers." "Osgood:" "Elaborate attack simulations are used for training." "(Alarm rings)" "Ceruzzi:" "The Sage air-defense system used a variation of a television screen ical information something that we take for granted, but Sage was the first." "To query:" "What airplane is that?" "The light pen, of course, is now a mouse, but it's the same idea." "Osgood:" "Sage also provides pilots with data for interception." "When fighters cross into a different radar zone control is passed to another Sage computer." "Ceruzzi:" "The Sage was not just one computer but it was a whole network of computers." "Well, you've got to figure out how to get the computers to talk to one another." "And you send information over telephone lines." "Well, you've got to convert computer data into some kind of data that a telephone can understand and that's called a modem a modem that comes with every computer nowadays." "You wouldn't think of buying a computer without a built-in modem." "That had to come from Sage, too." "Lots of things that had to be invented that we now take for granted, came out of this project that started out with seemingly a very specific purpose of air defense but it turns out that it has a lot of utility for people today" "who may never even think about air-traffic control or air defense or any of these kinds of applications." "Osgood:" "The computer that began life as a flight simulator has been reshaped by history just as history will be reshaped by the computer." "On October 4, 1957, there is shocking news from the kremlin." "The Soviet union has launched the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth." "They call itsputnik." "To the U.S., the threat is clear." "If a Soviet rocket can put a satellite in space it might also deliver a hydrogen bomb to London, Paris or New York." "Staying on the cutting edge of technology seems increasingly a matter of survival." "Man:" "I was a, uh... air-defense command interceptor pilot and we trained daily to protect, in my case, San Francisco from nuclear attack." "If I had had the opportunity" "I probably would have built a bomb shelter." "Osgood:" "In 1961, during his first weeks in office president Kennedy approves the deployment of the minuteman missile." "Minuteman is designed to deliver a nuclear warhead to targets in the Soviet union." "Accuracy is crucial, so for guidance minuteman carries a small, specially built computer made possible by new transistor and integrated-circuit technology." "But there are issues beyond military defense." "Aying) But there are issues beyond military defense.D pl the Soviets are winning the hearts and minds of uncommitted nations with a string of dramatic achievements in space." "In 1961, they celebrate the launch of the first man into earth orbit." "The U.S. is determined to catch up." "President Kennedy galvanizes the nation with a bold challenge." "President Kennedy:" "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." "Osgood:" "Between 1961 and 1966 the Mercury and gemini space programs lay the foundation for a lunar voyage." "Astronaut:" "...Brilliant blue band." "Osgood:" "But as the goals become more ambitious the missions become more complex." "Man:" "When gemini ended, NASA was really on a high, almost-- you know, a feeling of we can do anything." "And, uh, then the fire happened." "During a ground test, there was a flash fire that broke out." "And in, just in seconds, the entire cabin burst into flame and the astronauts were trappde the spacecraft by a hatch that couldn't be opened." "Osgood:" "Three astronauts died that day." "They are the first fatalities in the space program." "Chaikin:" "After the fire, NASA really had to stop everything and figure out what had happened." "Actually, the hidden blessing in the fire was that it did give NASA time to stop and correct a lot of ongoing problems that had been plaguing Apollo all along." "I mean, you've got to think about what it means to design a moon ship, you know and fit everything into this, you know..." "All of these incredibly complex systems into this, really, comparatively tiny package this cone-shaped command module." "It was almost inevitable that something would go wrong in a project like that." "Osgood:" "With only one year remaining in the decade no human has yet traveled beyond earth orbit." "But preparations are underway to do just that." "Is to blast beyond the earth and orbit the moon." "Chaikin:" "You have to realize that no human beings had gone farther than 850 miles from the earth." "I mean, you think about the earth as a peach and flights in earth orbit are basically skimming the fuzz on the peach." "Awell, here you're..." "G you're leaving the earth." "You're really leaving." "Osgood:" "Apollo 8is one of the largest logical undertakings in history." "Everything about Apollo is gigantic." "The program consumes the skills of 400,000 engineers scientists and technicians in fields as diverse as computers, propulsion communications and materials." "To move the saturn rocket requires a transport crawler the size of a baseball diamond." "The moon rocket itself is taller than the statue of Liberty." "To lift its 3,000 tons from earth will require the energy equivalent of an atomic bomb." "Veteran astronaut frank borman is the mission commander..." "Jim lovell, its navigator..." "And bill Anders, the lone rookie will photograph the moon for scientific study." "All three astronauts are seasoned jet pilots." "Anders:" "It was more engineering, in my view, than it was pilotage but NASA felt, I have to agree, that having a flight test or fighter aircraft background generally weeded out people who would freak out under stress." "Osgood:" "Today's mission carries a special risk." "Originallyapollo 8was to run tests in earth orbit." "But the mission has been changed to lunar orbit in order to make up for lost time after the fire." "Kin:" "Everybody knew the chances foof everything going righte.Ai were pretty small." "Each one of them had to know his job, you know like the back of his hand." "Flying that spaceship had to be second nature so that if something didgo w rong they could react." "Osgood:" "With complexity comes increased vulnerability." "There is serious concern about thesaturn 5booster." "This will be its first manned mission and during the last flight it vibrated dangerously." "Only two days before launch, the mission was nearly scrubbed because of a misprogrammed computer." "Time is running out, and intelligence sources report that the Russians are preparing a moon mission of their own." "Mission control (Over radio):" "This is Apollo-saturn launch control." "We are still go at this time." "T minus 10, 9..." "And we have ignition sequence start." "The engines are on." "4, 3, 2, 1, 0." "(Engines roaring)" "We have, we have lift-off." "Anders:" "The noise was unbelievable." "But more significantly the sideways shaking of the spacecraft." "I had the vision of the big fins of the rocket bouncing along the girders of the launch tower." "Imagine you being a small bug on the top of an automobile whip antenna with the bottom of the antenna being driven by these big engines gimbaling back and forth trying to keep this thing going straight without any aerodynamic stability." "Well, the top of this thing was being heaved from side to side." "It seemed like a big distance, but it was, it was violent." "I felt like a rat it seemed like a big distance, bin the jaws of a terrier.." "Mission control:" "Clear, 13 seconds." "Astronaut (Over radio):" "Calling Houston, you are go for staging, over." "Osgood:" "Two and one half minutes after lift-off the first-stage rocket cuts out and falls away." "The remaining two stages will propel the craft into earth orbit for a final check-out." "Determining the exact flight path to the moon requires calculations so complex that a bank of computers is required to carry them out." "During earth orbit, engines must reignite at the right instant and aim the third stage at the moon for translunar injection, or t.L.I., as it's called." "It's a demanding operation." "The moon is a moving target one quarter million miles away." "At last comes the word that the three astronauts have been waiting for." "Apollo 8,houston." "Astronaut:" "Go ahead, Houston." "Man:" "Apollo 8 you are go for t.L.I., over." "Astronaut:" "Roger, understand, we are go for t.L.I." "Osgood:" "The third-stage rocket comes to life with a long push." "For the first time in history, man is leaving the earth." "Chaikin:" "And the velocity is just galloping upwards." "They're going faster than anybody has ever gone." "And finally they get to a speed of about 25,000 miles an hour and that's fast enough to just get out of the earth's gravitational well." "And then the moon's gravity will take over." "Man on radio:" "Okay, how long is that, uh..." "Osgood:" "The journey to the moon takes three days." "Miniature on-board computers are made possible by integrated circuits developed for the minuteman missile." "They are critical for maneuv the moon where radio communication with earth is impossible." "It was a program in one of these computers that threatened the mission." "One of the jobs of these computers is to fire a rocket to slow the command module enough that it drops into lunar orbit." "The rocket must fire for exactly four minutes." "Even a few seconds too long andapollo 8will lose so much energy that it will crash into the moon." "Given the problems with programming borman isn't taking any chances." "At zero, he pushes the shut-off button just in case." "Ground controller:" "We've got it, we've got it." "Apollo 8now in lunar orbit." "There's a cheer in this room." "This is Apollo control, Houston..." "Osgood:" "Apollo 8drifts above the moon while the visitors look down at a landscape never before witnessed by human eyes." "It's a scene of desolation." "Anders:" "It was a rough-looking place." "It was just pockmarked with crater after crater after crater one on top of the other." "Borman turns the spacecraft so that lovell can check their bearings." "When Anders looks out the window he is stunned by what he sees." "Anders:" "To see the earth was really awe-inspiring." "It is the only color .." "The only really pretty thing particularly as it was contrasted by the stark lunar horizon." "It's small and it's fragil chaikin:" "All the men who went to the moon zation chaikin:" "All the men whoon a gut leveloon reali of experiencing the earth's true nature in the cosmos." "There was something about that monumental isolation..." "Looking at the earth and knowing that everything you know everyone you know, everything you've ever done everyone you've ever loved is on that blue-and-white marble." "D:" "With the help bof modern technology.Osgoo science fiction is turned into reality." "Less than a year later, there are footprints on the moon." "As less than a year later, there abeen stunningly expensive.Y h and ironically, these views of a small, fragile earth reinforce the feeling that perhaps our attention should be redirected back home." "(Guitar, harmonica play intro e watchtower")" "There are serious problems on earth being blamed for much of them." "Bob Dylan:" "?" "There must be some way out of here ?" "?" "Said the joker to the thief ?" "?" "There's too much confusion ?" "?" "I can't get no relief ?" "?" "Businessmen, they drink my wine ?" "?" "Plowmen dig my earth ?" "?" "None of them along the line ?" "?" "Know what any of it is worth. ?" "Osgood:" "The promise of modern technology was automatic highways, perfect homes nestled in nature and hotels on the moon." "Instead we got suburban sprawl, traffic jams and urban deserts." "Dylan:" "?" "No reason to get excited ?" "?" "The thief he kindly spoke ?" "?" "There are many here among us... ?" "Anders:" "One of the biggest negative aspects has been the thought that if you can go to the moon, you can-- fill in the blanks-- solve cancer, the trash problem, energy, you name it." "Uh... most of those problems are not technological problems." "They're political problems." "They're much more difficult because they require the body politic to agree and make difficult choices." "Staudenmaier:" "It is not at all surprising-- and I don't think it's particularly unhealthy-- that you have a terrible time getting consensus these days about technological investments and lines of research." "I think it's very healthy." "Technologies are the..." "The big ones, the expensive ones are the places where the culture writes its identity in... in, you know in sophisticated artificial environments that it creates." "Shouldn't those be subject to debate?" "I think so." "Dylan:" "?" "So let us falsely now ?" "?" "The hour is getting late... ?" "Halberstam:" "The fact that we live better than our parents and our grandparents;" "the fact that work is less burdensome;" "the fact that there are more protections for ordinary people than there were 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago..." "Most of that we take for granted." "One of the things that science and technology does because of television is it constantly raises the sense of expectation." "Looking back, we can see just how a technology developed-- the various shifts and turns that took place" "and what was wanted." "But to witness the development of a powerful new technology as it happens is something else entirely." "Nothing is predictable." "Breakthroughs, dead ends and near misses abound." "A prime example is the world wide web the network that links together computers like this one all around the world." "Although it has drawn a great deal of attention already the web is still in its infancy." "This gives us a great opportunity to observe it unfolding before us and even to participate in the process." "Osgood:" "Before the world wide web came the Internet and before personal computers were computers that filled up a room." "During the 1960s, transistors replace vacuum tubes reducing computers to the size of a meat locker." "And there they stay, because of the space required to wire thousands of components together." "But in the 1970s, even that barrier falls when transistors and wiring are combined on a tiny silicon chip into what's called an integrated circuit." "These chips can be mass-produced like so many cars off an assembly line." "The transistors, alonponents are etched onto a small piece of silicon then wired together with a metal film." "By 1972 the 3,500 transistors that make up a computer processor can be housed on a single chip." "Man:" "Moore's law..." "Gordon Moore, the founder of intel, uh, prophesied in 1965 that there would be rapid development in integrated circuits-- basically a doubling every 18 months of their capability." "And he's been right for 30 years." "For 30 years every 18 months, semiconductors have gotten twice as good." "Osgood:" "By the mid-1970s, there is the potential for a small, cheap "personal computer."" "But no one knows who would want one, or why..." "Except, perhaps, for a few avid hobbyists who have been exposed to university computers and who like to play games and experiment." "Whenpopular electronicsoffers a computer kit called the altair it's successful s dreams." "A young Harvard student named Bill Gates drops out of school to adapt a computer language for the altair." "Then Steve Jobs and Steve wozniak start to wormachine-- one that can easily use word processing and accounting programs." "The personal computer is now well on its way into the homes of the world." "But major scientific nd defense work in the 1970s still relies on huge, expensive university computers largely subsidized by a federal defense agency called arpa." "Every year these universities would ask for a new computer because they wanted to do world-class research with world-class computers." "And even arpa couldn't afford to buy computers for every computer science department every year." "So back around 1966 or so, they began asking themselves" ""well, how could we connect these machines together so the various universities could share the resources?"" ""Why don't we get all the physics researchers to use" ""a physics computer here" ""and all the weather researchers to use" ""a big weather simulation computer here?" "And they'll use the network to sort of go there."" "Osgood:" "By the mid-'70s more than 50 computers are wired together by telephone lines onto what is called the arpanet." "Metcalfe:" "The original thought was that the arpanet would be used for resource sharing." "But right after the network started working that was not what it was used for." "It started being used for electronic mail." "Osgood:" "A program for electronic mail is the surprise hit of the net." "Cerf:" "Instead of having to make "n" different telephone calls or write a paper and then mail it to 25 different people you simply typed in a message and sent it to a dozen different people electronically." "It was very, very efficient." "So, the early stages of e-mail showed promise almost immediately and, in fact, most of us in the community were quite stunned to find how slow the rest of and, in fact, most of us in tthe world was to pick this up.D" "osgood:" "But by the late 1970s, a large and diverse group of government and commercial organizations rely increasingly on computer networks to carry out their business." "But, increasingly, they are stymied by the inability of one network to communicate with another." "How am I going to do that if each of the networks is not exactly identical to the other?" "Well, I have to put something in between each network so that it can deal with the variations between the two and yet make it appear uniform to all the computers that are around the edges of all the networks trying to talk to each other." "That was the Internet problem and Bob kahn and I invented the Internet protocol in order to solve that problem." "Osgood:" "On January 1, 1980, the Internet is officially launched." "By 1990, there are 100,000 computer sites dedicated to defense, business and university research." "Information can now be shared instantly by people working around the world." "Many owners of personal computers would also like to venture onto the net if they could but they lack necessary skills." "If you were on the net in the '70s and '80s it entailed typing in a lot of really arcane commands." "And it was very hard to use." "Osgood:" "Until, that is a new generation of computer engineers begins developing software applications that can make the system user-friendly." "Innhers-Lee a software engineer in Switzerland writes a program that allows an electronic document to access any other around the world by clicking on to access any other a word or phrase." "Simply he names his program "the world wide web."" "The connecting links are called "hypertext."" "They can be accessed by a special web "browser" program." "The first two years were a very hard slog trying to persuade people that hypertext was not going to be too complicated that this really would be very interesting and there would be material on it that it was worth putting your material out" "because there would be people who used the browsers;" "it was worth installing a browser because even though the material out there wasn't that exciting that there was more material coming;" "and trying to stimulate that interest and allay the fears of being lost in hyperspace allay the fears of losing control of your information." "And slowly it changed from a need to sell the idea to a need to coordinate the enthusiasm which had now picked up." "Metcalfe:" "There were gazillions of pcs doing comparatively uninteresting things until the web drops into this huge, accumulating infrastructure and suddenly it just spread like wildfires." "Osgood:" "A year later, a program called mosaic adds pictures and sound to the web." "Man:" "Welcome to the moon, Houston." "Man:" "Thank you." "Smulyan:" "It's very exciting to be in on the beginning of something new." "Uh, people talk about it all the time uh, there's articles in the newspaper about it all the time." "That's just how radio was-- it was that kind of excitement." "Osgood:" "New software creates search engines whdex web pages from around the world so they're accessible by author, title or even just a keyword or phrase." "Metcalfe:" "If you've never used the web before the first thing you do when you get on the web is you..." "Is you type in the name of your high school sweetheart and you'll find him or her!" "I mean, they're there!" "Cerf:" "My wife went searching on the network to find out more about cochlear implants-- ths a replacement for the inner ear-- and she discovered a newsgroup that was discussing this thing." "Got onto it to find out how well this was working and ultimately became a recipient herself and now very successful." "She was deaf for 50 years;" "now she can hear and use the telephone and watch television and go to the opera." "So it's this ability to communicate with people you don't know yet that makes the Internet so different." "Osgood:" "Soon, anyone with a computer, modem and a telephone line can create their own web page." "Metcalfe:" "The striking thing about the web is you find many, many things that you would never, ever find in any other medium." "And the reason is that anybody-- any human, a single person, an individual person-- can put content on the web." "Osgood:" "But the web is not without problems." "There are traffic jams when too many people want to see the same thing and questions about freedom ion..." "And privacy." "It's because of the tremendous potential there is to track what people do and how they buy and how they think." "It's those concerns writ large." "Osgood:" "Separating fact from fiction can be difficult." "Advertisers can make their presence known relentlessly." "Ial of the web advertisers can make their presseems so undeniablessly.Nt it continues to draw developers large and small." "The Internet is still very much up for grabs." "It's very much still a wild west where people are still trying to understand how do they use this new communication medium." "Osgood:" "Whatever happens to the Internet it has the potential to happen fast." "Khale:" "It's software that makes it so that we can change this box-- it's the same box that we bought last year-- into whatever kind of device we want." "And that is what's enabling some of the speedup of the distribution of these applications." "The world wide web has only been around for a couple years in any real way, and who knows?" "Maybe it will be replaced by something completely else." "The cost of putting one of these out is often just a few graduate students writing a good code and if it's a good code, then it..." "Whoo, it can go to millions of people." "Haffner:" "Here's the web, which was started in Switzerland by physicists who were figuring out a way to share papers and link footnotes using hypertext and who would have thought that that would have the popular application that it does today?" "You never know where the next invention will come from or what on earth it will be."