Found in the Machine

In the summer of 1939, at the New York World's Fair, a woman sat beneath a three-story mural of a shouting man and shaped raw electricity into a human voice.   

In this episode:

• Homer Dudley: the engineer who reimagined the human voice as a handful of numbers at Bell Telephone Laboratories
• The Voder: The human-driven machine built to imitate the effects of the human vocal tract
• The Voderettes: 24 telephone operators chose...

In March 1965, two Soviet cosmonauts fell out of the sky into a frozen forest in the Urals, trapped inside a cramped capsule hundreds of kilometers from rescue. Their survival, and their journey home, relied on an intricate mechanical computer made of aluminum, clockwork, and paper. 

In this Episode

• Laboratory 47: the branch of the Soviet Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky, run by engineer Sergei Darevsky
• The Globus: the ...

Since the 1890s, we've been building machines that wait in our place, in the dark, for something to move. This is the story of how a thread across a trail became a sensor that can feel heat, and what we learn when we really look. 

In this Episode

• George Shiras: the Michigan naturalist and early wildlife photographer who rigged the first trip-wire camera traps in the 1890s
• Pyroelectricity: the physical property that lets a cry...

Found in the Margins is a series of mini bonus episodes that will be available to Patreon members every other week alternating with the main show. This first episode is being shared here for all Found in the Machine listeners. 

Join the Patreon if you'd like to continue hearing these bonus stories. 

This episode explores the creation of Mortal Kombat, the strange reality of early video game digitization, and the landmark 19...

In 1944 the Allies needed to know exactly what the water would do on a coast called "Position Z." So a deaf mathematician and six young women in a basement near Liverpool calculated the future.  

In this episode

• Arthur Doodson: the deaf mathematician at the Liverpool Tidal Institute, the world's leading authority on tides, who guessed he was predicting a Normandy landing and said nothing
• Six women working as Computers: hired ...

This is the story of how we learned to fake the most natural thing in the world. What it cost us. And the strange places we still go, even now, to steal a little of the real thing back. 

In this Episode

• Bernice Brown: the RAND statistician whose job was to hunt for a pattern inside a million digits and sign her name only when she could not find one
• The electronic roulette wheel: RAND's random number making machine and why its...

A brutalist fortress in San Francisco serves as a vital artery for the American internet. In 2003, AT&T technician Mark Klein started noticing strange things on the sixth floor of that building. Strange things about Room 641A.

This is a story about the infrastructure we look past, government mass surveillance, and why the machine Mark discovered never actually turned off.

In this Episode

• Mark Klein: An AT&T technic...

Sheet music has always been an invisible treaty. A shared language that belongs to everyone and no one. But fifty years ago, as musicians began shaping sound out of raw electricity, that treaty fell apart.

In this episode

• The Broken Treaty: Why early synthesizers from different manufacturers couldn't talk to each other, and the resulting landscape of incompatible voltages.
• The Unlikely Alliance: How Dave Smith in the US (S...

In 1916, a tired chemist in a Berlin laboratory accidentally dipped his fountain pen into a pool of molten tin and pulled out the foundation of the digital world. He had no idea what he had done. 

In this episode

• Jan Czochralski: The Polish chemist whose mistake became the method used to grow nearly every silicon crystal wafer on Earth. 
• The occupation of Poland: The violent suppression of the Polish people by the Nazis ...

She was a copywriter turned marketer who watched focus groups attempt to use computers. She knew the internet wasn't a product you could sell. You needed to give people a way in. Her name was Jan Brandt, and she decided to mail it to them.

In this episode

• Jan Brandt: The architect of America Online's carpet bombing strategy that put a billion discs in American hands
• Omaha Steaks, airlines, and grocery stores: how the discs became ...

In 1965, engineers were building a computer to fly men to the moon. It had to survive a rocket launch and the vacuum of space. It could not be erased by a power failure, a hard landing, or anything short of physical destruction. They needed to make the code permanent. They needed to weave it.

In this episode

• Hilda Carpenter - MIT technician who assembled the first magnetic-core memory plane
• The Raytheon weavers - Textile workers a...

The show has a new name. 

Starting with this episode, Lore in the Machine is now Found in the Machine. Same stories, same voice. The name just finally says what the show actually does. 

If you're subscribed, your feed will keep updating automatically. If you want to share the show with someone new, the new home is foundinthemachine.com.

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Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode.  

You’ve done this so many times you don’t think about it anymore. A box appears. You squint at some blurry letters, type them out, check the box. It takes about ten seconds.

You probably didn’t know that those ten seconds were going somewhere...

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

Two people walk toward each other on a dirt road. One bullet each. In a normal duel, a missed shot makes a sound. But in a silent duel, a miss would be invisible. You wouldn't know if your opponent was holding their fire, or had already taken their one shot. How ...

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

Four times a year, a small group of people fly to a secure facility in either Virginia or California. They submit to retina scanners and palm readers. They enter a metal cage in a signal-proof room. They turn keys in unison.

These people are volunteers, an...

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

Every time you type a web address, you're trusting a directory. A vast, invisible system that translates the names you know into the numbers that actually move data across the internet. You trust it the way a town trusts its well.

In 2008, a security researcher na...

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode.

Every programmer knows 'foo' as the "insert name here" of software development. But where did it come from? And what does it have to do with 'bar'?

In this episode, we trace the history of foo in programming back through three unlikely chapters: a Depression-er...

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

In 1968, a researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage in San Francisco and showed a thousand computer professionals something they had never seen: text editing, clickable links, and video conferencing, all controlled by a small wooden block with a wire tra...

Listeners, please note that this episode was recorded before the show’s name changed to Found in the Machine, so you’ll hear the old name in this episode. 

Every software project has one. It's easy to scroll past. Most of the time it's just a manual telling you system requirements, installation steps, and known bugs. 

But the README file owes a debt to Lewis Carroll, and a quiet trick built into its name that ha...