"Ready?" "Sure is." "All right, let's have a look." "Wow." "The team stayed up all night just to get this ready for you." "I expected it to be twice the size." "I know." "It's amazing." "Think the world is ready?" "They'd better be." "That's the future you've got there." "Ladies and gentlemen." "Ladies and gentlemen." "Thomas Edison gave you the light bulb." "Henry Ford gave you the motor car." "But today, April 3, 1973, will also go down in history because today, we present to you the world's first completely portable telephone." "Hello?" "Hello?" "Hello." "Yes, it's Martin Cooper speaking." "And this is the world's first call on a portable telephone." "Actually, that's not true." "Sorry to interrupt, but actually there was a cell phone call made from a portable phone many years before this." "This guy's full of it." "You're coming in clear." "I can hear you." "Invest in Apple, and I don't mean the fruit." "Okay, so, a dramatic intervention back in time." "What is this?" "We're going down a rabbit hole filled with modern day gadgets that we're all accustomed to, but it turns out that these gadgets might have been invented much earlier." "In this White Rabbit Project, we're investigating which invention was the farthest ahead of its time." "It's the future." "In the crosshairs, a monumental music streaming service, 1906 style." "Do you have any Snoop Dogg?" " Go." " Ingenious in-car navigation." "Okay, map says to turn right." "Could this have been dreamed up almost a century ago?" "The narcissist-stick." "Ooh." "As usual, we'll score and rank six contenders using three criteria." "Let's go over our criteria for scoring in this one." "Years before it was invented." "Resemblance to the modern invention and degree of ingenuity." "So, Tory, when was the first cell phone call?" "Check this out." "Cell phones, the defining tech gadget of the modern age." "There's about eight billion of them, more than one phone per person on earth." "And on average, we spend four years talking, texting and generally messing around on them." "So, it's hard to even imagine what the world was like before Martin Cooper's famous call." "I hear you clear as a bell." "But look at this thing." "It is a beast." "It's over a foot long, it weighs almost two pounds, and you had to charge it for ten hours just to get a 30-minute conversation." "It retailed for $3,995, which at the time would have been a quarter of your average annual income." "That's why when the first cell phones hit the streets of America in 1983, they were firmly in the grip of society's high-fliers." "With the DynaTAC system, even rush hours are office hours." "And as dumb as they looked, those bricks were officially the world's first portable telephone." "Why the interruption at the press conference?" "I'll tell you why." "I found a piece of footage that might have Cooper's phone call beat by over half a century." "This film was just rediscovered by the British Pathé film archives." "This was shot in 1922 in New York City." "They call it a wireless phone." "Now, the way it works is you wrap a wire around a fire hydrant, and that acts as the ground." "Then you open up an umbrella that also has a wire in it, and that's acting as the antenna." "That I understand." "Modern-day cell phones have antennas, too, you just can't see them." "All right." "She's making a call and connected with an operator." "There's some hold music." "The operator seems to have put her through and she's having a conversation." "It does appear to be an early phone call made from the street." "But then I took a closer look." "Do you see that?" "I don't think that's a phone switchboard." "I think that's a radio transmitter." "Which means that's not hold music." "And she's just chatting to her friend on the street as she listens." "I don't think that's a phone at all." "I think it's actually a radio." "Oh, crap." "Oh." "Excuse me." "Turns out, it wasn't a cell phone." "It was actually a radio." "I'm so sorry." "I might have been wrong, but your phone looks ridiculous." "Whoops." "Sorry about that." "Went down the wrong rabbit hole." "This looked like it was gonna be a strong contender." "They called it a phone, it looked like it operated like a phone." "But since it was a radio, it'll score low for resemblance to modern invention and ingenuity." "You won't let me claim that it was ahead of its time." "They did use the words "wireless phone"" "in the film to describe the invention." "So, we could give you a little leeway here and say it's 51 years ahead of its time." " That's generous." " I know." "Nowhere to go but up." "Or, alternatively, around in circles." "The Internet and social media are rife with animated GIFs." "Short video clips looped over and over again." "They're incredibly easy to make." "For example, I made this this morning." "And this one." "The question is, when did the GIF begin?" "CompuServe created the first one in 1987, a jet with endlessly scrolling clouds." "Underwhelming now, but the 1987 me could watch that all day long." "And that kick-started a GIF tsunami, peaking with the iconic dancing baby in 1996." "Like I said, it was the Dark Ages." "But you know what?" "Even though these are absolutely ancient by Internet standards, they are not the first GIFs." "It all started in 1879 with this guy, Eadweard Muybridge, and an unusual challenge." "Muybridge set out to settle a bet about whether a galloping horse ever has all four feet off the ground." "The human eye couldn't tell." "Muybridge thought the newfangled invention of photography could." "So, along the edge of a racetrack, he set out 12 glass-plate cameras whose shutters were triggered by tripwires as the horse ran past." "It showed that galloping horses do indeed get airborne." "But Muybridge was about to make an even bigger breakthrough." "He then painted silhouettes of the images onto a wheel." "This wheel, which he called a zoopraxiscope." "This was the first device to project stills in quick succession, creating the first movie, basically, a looping GIF." "And he didn't stop there." "He wanted to make loads of classic GIFs." "Look at this, the falling man." "If this is not a template for the modern GIF," "I don't know what is." "And these." "Again, classic GIFs." "Repeatable loops making seamless little movies." "I mean, look at all these." "That's GIF 101 right there." "And that, my friends, has gotta be a table-topping score." "Criteria one, a massive 108 years ahead of its time." "Resemblance to the modern invention?" "Nearly flawless." "And ingenuity?" "Taking a new technology and repurposing it?" "Eight out of 10, and that's selling it short." "Okay, so, check this out." "The 1990 edition of the Mazda Eunos Cosmo looked like just about any other car, but it was the beginning of a new era." "Car Communication System." "It contained the world's first onboard hands-free navigation system." "But long before 1990, people were looking at ways to track your position while traveling in a vehicle." "I dug around and found a couple of early contenders." "This is the wristlet." "It's some kind of scrolling map, which is pretty cool." "And there's this, an odometer-like disc, which is all fairly promising." "And then I find this from the Milan Trade Fair." "1932." "The Iter Auto." "It looks like a GPS." "It's fitted to the dashboard." "It gives you information about things like crossroads, bridges, level crossing." "So, I'm trying to figure out how this thing works, and when I blow up this photo, I can see there's a cable trailing into the footwell of the passenger side." "That cable must be linked to the front right wheel." "So, every revolution of the wheel would scroll the map forward, keeping it exactly in sync with where you are in the real world." "But could it really have worked?" "There's only one real way to find out." "I gotta build this sucker and test it." "So, we have little drive shafts." "I'm enlisting some help from builder Jon Marcu." "We have to create a device that basically scrolls paper from one side to the other, which is the map and it has to correlate with the speed of the car, so that the map moves as the car moves." "We're gonna have to slow down the rotations." "There's gotta be something inside the speedometer that adjusts according to how fast the car is going." "We're gonna have to get creative." "We're working with black-and-white pictures." "Sounds good." "First challenge:" "The shafts and feeding mechanism for the scrolls." "Screw these up, and we'll be in paper jam hell." "All right." "Now to put all the stuff in it." "Hook up a tiny gearbox." "It's gonna slow down the revolutions of the paper feed so that I can actually see the map coming by." "Otherwise it would just:" "Last time someone tried to find their way using this system," "FDR was president, and King Kong was a new release." "Well, it looks cool." "Yeah." "So, before we hit the road, we're doing a shop test by connecting a motorized wheel to our in-car navigation system." "The moment of truth." "Yeah." "That works." "The wheel and map are synchronized." "Meaning even when driving fast, the map should move slowly enough to read." "So, this is a 1933 Packard Eight Touring." "Now, this is the kind of car that people would take on cross-country road trips so it seemed the perfect car to try out my new scrolling navigation system." "We've made up some maps, complete with turn instructions that will synchronize to our test journey." "Winding back the clock more than 80 years, we head off into the unknown." "Let's see if it gets me where I need to go." "All right." "The mechanics are working." "My map is scrolling." "It's going the right rate." "I'm going down South Broadway." "The scrolls are supposed to direct me to a grocery store a couple miles away." "Looks like it's about to tell me to take a direction." "If I turn here," "I should be on West Olympic." "So far, so good." "Okay." "Awesome, I'm on West Olympic." "But that's as far as I get before I find the inherent flaw in the system." "Oh, really?" "Come on." "The map has run out." "So, I have to pull over, remove it and insert map two." "Okay, scroll's in place." "That is highly inefficient." "Ooh." "Sorry." "I'm starting to think this is why I could only find a couple references to the Iter Auto." "My map's out again." "I reckon it went out of business." "It's not practical at all." "So, in my quest for the first in-car navigation device, it's back to the drawing board." "There has gotta be a better way." "With Kari's nav system recalculating," "I've got a pint-sized creation that could turn out to be the heavyweight contender." "It's a gizmo that most of us now take for granted, the portable, personal music device." "Before there was music on your phone, there was the iPod." "Before that, Gen X had the Discman." "And the daddy of both was the Walkman, the 14-ounce blue-and-silver miracle that kick-started a revolution." "Or did it?" "Was the Walkman really the pioneer that we think it was?" "Or was there an even earlier version?" "Now, this wasn't as slick as an iPod, but it was music on the go." "Way back in 1931 in trend-setting Paris." "That's pretty cool." "And here's one from 1949." "The Man From Mars Hat, and it would have sold for $78 in today's market value." "The trouble was, they were radios so you could never play your own music on them." "But they got me thinking." "So, I started digging around, and I found this photo." "A miniature phonograph built into the case of a pocket watch." "When wound, a small spring mechanism turns the tiny record." "I've looked all over the place." "I have not been able to track down one of these devices." "So, what I'm gonna have to do is build one to see whether or not these ads were true." "To pull this together, I'll need to find or build three basic components." "First is a drive gear mechanism with a speed governor to spin the record." "Next is the reproducer, a stylus and diaphragm which converts the vibrations from the record into sound waves." "Then, we'll need a horn to amplify the sound." "Now, the challenge is I have to make it tiny enough so that it fits in the palm of my hand." "Remember, this thing had to be portable." "To help me achieve this record attempt, I found some groovy guys." "Kris Dorr and Mike Dixon are specialists in vintage vinyl recording." "All right." "And to avoid building from scratch, I'm getting my hack on with Kris." "One idea I had was using parts of a rotary-dial phone." "As you dial forward, then when you let go, it slowly moves back." "That's done with a governor." "We can tear one of those apart and see inside." "It turns out the dial mechanism of an old rotary phone is gonna be a perfect starting point for our mini phonograph." "It's got a driveshaft, the clockwork..." "It even has a governor." "So, it basically has the components we need to move forward." "Hello." "It's the future." "It's saying use semi-conductors." "And there's no need for a big spend on the turntable." "The record will sit on top of here." "The record will sit right on there." "That's great." "And it's a washer." "Yeah." "It's a washer." "It happened to be the right size." "We're gonna run with that." "Now we're moving on to the reproducer." "And you have one from an actual phonograph?" "Yeah, so this is your regular, old-time acoustical phono reproducer, and it has a plastic diaphragm in it." "So, now, we just need to re-create that..." "on a very tiny scale." "Yeah." "So, one idea I had was I found these old connectors I had at the house," "and we're gonna use that." "Just put a membrane..." "across that?" "Exactly." "We're gonna take some x-ray, cut a disc out of it, and sandwich it in between the two." "And that is going to give us our diaphragm." "That's awesome." "It's like a little drum." "Yeah, exactly." "To link the diaphragm to the stylus, we're using piano wire." "I'll see what that does." "You think Steve Jobs was going through this when he was making the iPod?" "Yeah, I believe so." "If you look inside, it's piano wire and duct tape." "That's what I thought." "So, this... is our needle attached to our armature." "Then that is connected to our diaphragm." "So, all we need to do is put the record down here, and the needle will start playing" "whatever we have on our record." "Yeah." "There it is, our miniature gramophone, matching the original." "Now, we need a record the size of a poker chip." "For that, meet Mike, who, I'm told, loves a challenge." "I use a lot of strange materials like CDs, laser discs, x-rays." "Even made one out of chocolate once." "Now, how..." "Wait... how does chocolate stand up?" "It doesn't sound great, but it tastes delicious." "Making a record is like the opposite of playing one." "The sound runs through an amp." "Then the vibrations are sent through to the tip of a cutting stylus." "And if you've ever wondered why they call it "cutting"..." " You can hear it..." " Mm-hm." "and you can actually see it cutting into the record." "Now, what is this stuff?" "This is called swarf." "It's the thing that's being pulled out of the groove itself," "and it's actually really flammable." "Oh, really?" "Like how flammable?" "Pretty flammable." "Like that?" "Yeah, that's pretty flammable." "This is great, but what we need is a tiny record." "I mean, like an inch and a half." "They don't traditionally make lacquer dubs in an inch and a half, but we had some custom-made." "Oh!" "That ought to work." "Oh, my God." "Doesn't give us a lot of time, does it?" "No, at 78 RPM, that's going to give us probably about ten seconds." "Is this the smallest record you've ever made?" "This is the smallest record I've made." "And it took a lot of modifications to get this machine to even cut this small." "Oh, my God." "It's so little." "We've got the turntable, we've got the record." "Now all we need is the amplification horn." "I decided I'm gonna use a 3D printer." "I could have scratched something together, but I mean, that's boring." "This is way cooler." "Besides, I'm using new technology to make old technology." "Printed in thermoplastic," "I've knocked out a design similar to the original." "Oh, awesome." "That's great, look at that." "Perfect." "It's the moment of truth." "It's time to see if this thing works." "It works." "It actually plays music, and this is just a prototype." "Now, it's not that loud." "But remember, this is a personal listening device." "You got to stick it right up to your ear." "As far as I'm concerned, this is what inspired the iPod." "That's the story I'm sticking to." "So, how does it score?" "Criteria one, it was an impressive 70 years ahead of its time." "I'll go with four out of ten for its resemblance to the modern version." "And ingenuity?" "As much as I love the miniaturization, none of the elements were groundbreaking." "There you go." "Music on the run." "I mean, not on the run 'cause it'll skip, but it worked." "And it was adorable." "And if you had seen this back in the day, it would've blown your mind." "My first attempt at building and using an early form of in-car navigation was based on pictures of a device called the Iter Auto from 1932." "Come on." "All right." "We hit a serious roadblock." "My map's out again." "But remember this one?" "From 1909, it's called the Jones Live." "And like the Iter Auto, it's driven by the odometer cable." "But instead of lots of scrolls, a whole map fits on one disc." "And it predates the Iter Auto by over two decades." "Let's wind back the clock a hundred years to see if we can make this one happen." "The key component is its tiny gearing system that syncs the map to the moving vehicle." "It has a 1,000-to-1 ratio." "It's gonna slow down the rotational speed of our disc because all of the directions are gonna happen within one rotation." "And it's just so tiny and cute." "All right." "Time to take it for a spin." "I'm plugging in the odometer cable... and getting the wheel moving to 40 miles an hour." "If the gearbox works, my disc should spin at a fraction of the speed." "All right." "That is a 1,000-to-1 gear ratio." "Hold your hats!" "The final step in reviving this navigation relic:" "Choose a route I wanna travel, measure the distance between the turns exactly and calibrate those figures to the speed my disc is going to turn." "Okay, so this is my version of the 1909 Jones Live." "Now, I've mapped out a route from our workshop down to Pershing Square in downtown LA." "Now, each one of these directions and landmarks and the relative distance between them was precisely measured from the map and then scaled to the rotation of the disc." "That means that as I approach each one of these directions, they should appear in real time." "I'd like to see how this stacks up to modern technology." "I'm gonna grab Grant and Tory, see if they're down for an experiment." "Did you get us new cars?" "What is this?" "So, Tory, you're gonna drive the Lamborghini Huracan and, Grant, you're going to drive the BMW i3." "Seriously?" "Yeah." "Why?" "What are we doing?" "I want you to be part of a test." "Give me your phone." "I'm going to download the latest crowdsourced navigation app, and I'm giving you an address." "And for you..." "A paper map?" "I haven't seen one of these for a million years." "Yes, but I did give you a super high-tech car that can practically drive itself." "So, can I use the onboard navigation?" "Absolutely not." "This is a test." "I wanna see if my old tech, which I believe is super efficient and ahead of its time, can stand up against the paper map and the high-tech car," " and the supercar and navigation system." " How did I get so lucky?" "All right." "So, this is a race?" "Like three, two, one, go?" "Go!" "Three different cars." "Three different navigation systems." "One destination." "Oh, my God." "I can't believe it!" "It's Back to the Future... versus Driving Miss Daisy... versus Ferris Bueller." "Old school." "New school." "And kicked out of school." "It's a Lamborghini party." "Traffic alert." "Douche on the loose." "With four contenders duking it out for top spot, here's a fifth to add to the mix." "This time, the focus is on me." "This invention has taken the world by storm in just the last couple of years." "You'll see it at any tourist landmark." "It sells by the millions, but it's banned at Apple conferences," "Disney parks and Wimbledon." "Why?" "Because it's incredibly annoying." "It's the selfie stick." "Or as some people like to call it, the narcissist-stick." "Ooh." "I mean, the selfie stick was so popular, it ranked TIME magazine's Top 25 Inventions for 2014." "Hashtag "selfie Saturday"!" "Brilliant." "We got promised jetpacks." "We got the selfie stick." "So, the million dollar question, which was the original selfie stick, who invented it and when?" "I guess that's more than one question." "Anyway, first up, selfies themselves aren't new." "In fact, this shot, considered by many to be the first photographic portrait, was a selfie taken by Philadelphia chemist Robert Cornelius in 1839." "He would just start the exposure, jump in front of the camera for a minute, and then put the lens cap back on." "Cornelius was far from alone." "I mean, selfies were quite the rage in the early days of photography." "But we're not talking about selfies as such." "We're talking about the selfie stick." "Who invented the original?" "Well, Canadian inventor Wayne Fromm is a contender." "Hey, Wayne." "When do you claim to have come up with the selfie stick?" "When I was showing consumers in 2006 with their cameras." "And here's a patent filed in 2005 to prove it." "But there's another patent." "And that patent is 1985." "That's 20 years earlier." "It was the work of this guy, Hiroshi Ueda." "He was a keen photographer who worked as an engineer for camera company Minolta." "He invented it after he asked someone to take a photo of him outside the Louvre." "And then they ran off." "Hiroshi's design was manufactured and went to market." "But it didn't sell well, and the patent ran out in 2003." "But was Hiroshi the first inventor of the selfie stick?" "Actually, no." "Check out this photo by one Arnold Hogg in 1926." "See that pole?" "Zoom in." "There you have it." "Stick..." "Camera..." "Remote control..." "Selfie stick." "So, score." "Years before the modern invention, 79." "Resemblance to its contemporary?" "That's almost as good as a modern selfie stick." "Ingenuity?" "It's not rocket science, is it?" "Remember the days when people listened to records... cassette tapes... and compact discs?" "You know, when your music collection was physical?" "Times have changed." "Today, you no longer have to own music." "You can choose to stream it from a remote location." "A music cloud." "You have access to it 24/7." "And you can listen to it over your phone." "In short, streaming has revolutionized the music industry... ever since it was first introduced... in 1906?" " Hello, operator?" " Hello, sir." "Can you connect me to the Telharmonium, please?" "Certainly, sir." "They're connecting us now." "That's right." "Way before Napster, Rdio and Spotify, the world's first streaming service began in New York with the device called... the Telharmonium." "Oh, honey, it's amazing." "Music?" "From the telephone?" "It's the sound of the future." "What a world we live in!" "Whatever will they think of next?" "And the genius behind this invention?" "Thaddeus Cahill." "Cahill was a young inventor who was fascinated with two of the greatest inventions of the time." "Electricity and the telephone." "Now, he was also a music lover." "Hello." "Do you have any Snoop Dogg?" "So, he had an idea." "Not Deputy Dawg, Snoop Dogg!" "Why not use electricity to generate the music directly?" "AC/DC." "Metal, baby!" "Now, Cahill's dream was to create an electronic music machine capable of mimicking the sound of an entire orchestra with sufficient resonance to be played over a small telephone speaker and fill a room with sound." "So, he started experimenting with cogs and magnets." "If you take a cog wheel like this sprocket right here with all these teeth, and you spin it... and you take an electrical pickup, and you bring it close to it... you'll get... a tone." "Now, if you had enough of these cog wheels in enough sizes, you could make an entire musical scale." "Which is exactly what Cahill did." "Using a large array of massive, metallic tone wheels for those notes, and after adding a keyboard..." "You guessed it." "Basically, Cahill created the world's first synthesizer." "Now, it was so complicated, it required two organists." "And it was huge." "No, literally." "Physically gigantic." "A series of control cables connected the keyboards to what Cahill called his music plant." "It consisted of miles of cable, generators, banks of spinning rotors, alternators, transformers and switchboards." "All told, it was 60 feet long, weighed almost 200 tons and it took up the entire basement floor of its building on Broadway." "So the organist played, and electronic music was pumped through the New York telephone system." "The world's first streaming music service had arrived." "Hello, do you have any Jay Z?" "To find out more about this amazing invention and inventor..." "How about Taylor Swift?" "She's a swell dame." "I got on the phone to an expert." "Electricity and electromagnetism were so poorly understood at the time." "So, it's amazing that Thaddeus Cahill was able to create this new, large technology made out of something that was still so mysterious." "It's sort of like coming up with a practical application for quantum tunneling here in 2016." "Sixty feet." "Two hundred tons." "Why did the Telharmonium have to be so huge?" "The amplifier hadn't been invented yet." "And so, when you tried to send anything to 10,000 people across telephone networks, you needed to start with one big signal capable of vibrating" "10,000 little speakers out at the end." "We're talking about a piece of cutting-edge technology the size of a small power plant." "As you can imagine, there's a good reason why there are no surviving Telharmoniums today." "And, unfortunately, no audio recordings." "But there are tens of thousands of mini-me music generators that use the Telharmonium template." "The Hammond Organ." "Hey, Nate, how's it going?" "Hi, Grant." "So, what is it about this organ in particular that makes it the closest relative to the Telharmonium?" "Well, it's the heart of the Hammond Organ that is the most like it." "It's the tone wheel generator." "It uses a bank of 91 rotating discs as oscillators." "Physically spinning disks?" "Exactly." "Just like the Telharmonium had, only on a much smaller scale." "That's right." "The principle behind the Telharmonium and the Hammond Organ is the same." "But the Hammond Organ has the benefit of modern amplification so it can be much smaller." "But in Cahill's day, his tone wheels had to be enormous." "I have a little experiment." "These test leads go to this 1906 telephone." "And I also have an oscilloscope hooked up." "If I clip one lead to ground and one lead to an output of the tone wheel, you can actually see the sine." "I can hear it through here?" "Yeah." "Yeah, I hear it." "It's a sine wave." "Combining those tones with a keyboard, the Telharmonium could synthesize music and play it through the phone." "You do realize this is the first time in over 100 years somebody has tried this?" " Isn't it wonderful?" " It's amazing." "In 1907, the Telharmonium was on the front page of Scientific American, and subscribers range from the Waldorf Astoria to the first private subscriber, an early technology adopter by the name of Mark Twain." "However, by 1908, the Telharmonium had less than two miles of wires installed." "The project was bleeding money." "There were also some technical issues." "Customers would get crosstalk from a conversation on another line." "Remember, this was a telephone-based delivery system." "Ultimately, Cahill's invention was a victim of its time." "It was doomed from the start by its enormous size and cost." "It's time to score Thaddeus Cahill and his amazing Telharmonium using our criteria." "Number one:" "Years before modern invention." "This one's gonna score pretty high." "A hundred and two years before modern music streaming arrived." "Resemblance to the modern invention." "It's a music streaming service available 24 hours a day, by subscription over your phone." "Ingenuity?" "Off the charts." "It was the world's first electro-mechanical instrument." "The precursor to the Hammond Organ and the synthesizer." "Not to mention the enormity of the engineering undertaking to bring this music into people's homes." "Whatever will they think of next?" "Safe to say... the technology... and the world wasn't ready for music streaming." "At least not yet." "All right, here we go." "Oh, yeah." "I'm testing out my 1909 in-car navigation system in a race to Pershing Square in downtown LA." "An elegant American icon is going up against a shining star of Japanese tech... and... a flashy Italian show pony." "But enough about the drivers." "This car's awesome." "I'm in a 1933 Packard Eight Touring." "Top speed, 80 mph, and it's equipped with the Jones Live navigation wheel." "I'm in a BMW i3." "It's small." "It's easy to park." "It's got good range." "It's a cutting-edge electric car." "But Kari's making me navigate with an old-fashioned paper map." "And I'm in a Lamborghini Huracan." "Ten cylinders, 610 horsepower!" "To get to my destination," "I'm using the latest crowdsourced app." "That 1,000-to-1 gearbox is clicking it by nice and slow." "It's good." "Maybe I'm overconfident, but I think my 1909 navigation system will help me beat at least one of the boys." "Okay, map says to turn right." "Yeah, it seems to be working so far." "Good luck with that." "Crowdsourcing navigation is the future." "Turn left onto 6th Street." "The app reviews my route every few seconds using real-time traffic conditions." "User-reported traffic incident ahead." "Recalculating route." "She sounds really nice." "It's so stupid." "But this is what we used to do." "Back in the day, kids." "Trying to read a paper map on these streets?" "Please." "Look at that... all of Los Angeles." "This is ridiculous." "This kind of traffic is supposed to be ideal for the crowdsourced app because it can adapt to conditions." "In 300 feet, turn right." "Oh, my God." "Why are you going this way?" "But it has its flaws." "Are you kidding me?" "Right now, I am literally driving down an alley." "Now I have to cross four lanes of traffic in order to get to the other side of the street and go down the alley." " Sorry." "I'm an hole." " I'm the hole here." "All right, so now it says we go... left." "And it seems to be... telling me to turn when it's time to turn, so..." "So far, I'm loving this." "I think I'm gonna have to pull over." "My biggest problem..." "I don't know where to go next." "I lose valuable time whenever I need to consult the map." "You are a one-way street." "Oh, good." "Thank you, map, for not telling me." "Is this even the right city?" "Time to kick this race into high gear." "Whoo-hoo." "Whoops." "Actually, any gear will do." "New data incoming." "Recalculating route." "I have to do this." "Something that no man likes doing." "Let's find somebody nice." "Hi, can you tell me how to get to Pershing Square?" "Getting close." "I wanna beat the boys." "My tech can do it." "Okay, two lights." "Make a left, make a right." "My hundred-year-old tech has given me a clean run through this 21st century city." "Now who's here first?" "Surely, I couldn't have won?" "Yeah!" "No!" " Oh." " Oh, finally." "I've been here forever." "But, wait, where's Tory?" "Forget this competition." "I'm out of here." "Well, that was fun." "Traditional map came in first." "Yeah, but you cheated." "Oh, what?" "Asking for directions?" "You didn't even show up to the end." "Oh, I win by default." "Because you cheated and because you didn't show up." "All right, let's go over the criteria." "Criteria number one:" "How many years before modern-day GPS was this used?" "Eighty-one years before a satellite navigation system was in a car." "All right." "Criteria number two:" "How close to a modern-day GPS was your device?" "Hang on a minute." "We have to dock you a few points." "You can't enter any destination from any origin and get directions." "You have to do set routes." "True, but it's a precursor." "You gotta start somewhere." "They hadn't invented satellites yet." "Ingenuity." "This one's pretty clever." "It's synchronized in real time to a moving car back then, way ahead of its time." "We've just been on a journey to find ahead-of-their-time inventions." "Familiar, modern technologies invented years before their modern equivalents." "Let's rank them using findings from our three criteria:" "Years before the modern invention, resemblance to modern invention and ingenuity factor." "Hello." "This is the world's first call on a portable telephone." "Actually, there was a cell phone call many years before this." "At number six, Eve's wireless telephone." "Sounded like a mobile phone and looked like a mobile phone, but turned out to be a crystal radio." "Turns out it wasn't a cell phone." "I'm so sorry." "At number five, the portable music device." "Seventy years ahead of the Walkman and a masterpiece of miniaturization, but light on song choice." "Ooh." "Number four, the selfie stick." "Modern narcissism was beaten to the punch by Arnold Hogg in 1926." "Camera..." "Remote control..." "Selfie stick." "But points for ingenuity?" "Hardly rocket science!" "At number three, early attempts at in-car navigation." "We brought the Iter Auto back to life and found the scrolling map system had severe limitations." "My map's out again." "But the Jones Live synchronized map wheel..." "It seems to be working so far." "got me to my destination and was 81 years ahead of its time." "In the number two spot, the Telharmonium." "A music streaming service available 24 hours a day by subscription over your phone line, in 1906." "It's the sound of the future." "A precursor of the modern synthesizer, this scored high in all three of our criteria." "And a close runner up to... our number one invention before its time, the GIF." "In 1879, Eadweard Muybridge set out to settle a bet about horse feet leaving the ground." "In the process, inventing looping video that predated an Internet phenomenon by 108 years." "And that's how our six inventions before their time lined up." "Aha!" "I knew my guy Muybridge would win." "His looping images predate even motion pictures." "But I had a time machine." "How come you didn't win?" "You should be on the top of the list." "Don't need to."