May 28, 2020 • 37 mins
In 1804, an Invisible Lady arrived in New York City.
She went on to become the most popular attraction in the country. But why? And who was she? In this episode, we chase her through time, finding invisible women everywhere, wondering: What is the relationship between keeping women invisible and the histories of privacy, and of knowledge?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go, a quarter of the mind, an endless
vault crammed with evidence, proof clues me. I like to
go there and poke around. A book of poems by
(00:37):
Emily Dickinson, flowers pressed between its pages. Oh, I wonder
if this old radio still works. I must ended up
the downs music for a moment. I have an urgent
message when police had called griefy. Imagine that this place,
this chamber of knowledge, is all that stands between a
(00:57):
reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. That it lies
somewhere in a time between now and then. Sign on
the door reads the last archive. I'm Jill Lapoor. Step
outside to a noisy street in the bustling, rowdy city
(01:20):
of New York in the year this time, we don't
have to go very far, the year two thousand and nineteen,
fifteen twenty five. Maybe we could get in behind. Maybe
there's an alley on one side. Sarria's under constant videotape
(01:43):
surreals just in case she comes back. That's nineteen. On
a sweltering day in July, my producer Ben and I
went to New York to find an invisible woman. She
was invisible, and she was also dead, long dead, so
not an easy search. But I have a rule about
doing historical research, which is that you should always go
to the scene of the crime, even if it wasn't
(02:05):
her crime, the spot where it happened the thing you're
interested in, even if there's nothing there anymore, because people
lived and died, and if you're going to try to
understand them, you owe it to them to breathe their air.
We're looking for twenty one park Row, or what used
to be twenty one would it be in that This
is one peak right here. We had an address on
Park Row. It's in Lower Manhattan, near the New World
(02:28):
Trade Center. A long time ago, this part of town
used to be the theater district, but now twenty one
Park Row is a construction site. Ben and I were
on the hunt for whatever might remain of a place
called the Shakespeare Gallery. The Shakespeare Gallery was a sort
of exhibit space where in the year eighteen o four,
(02:50):
an invisible lady was put on display. Visitors could come
see her, if you could call it that, in a
glass box, the way you'd pay a penny to see
a two headed calf or a bearded lady or the
tiniest man a freak show. Come see the Invisible Lady
somewhere beneath that construction site. The Shakespeare Gallery is long gone, demolished, forgotten, buried.
(03:17):
So we went to a park across the street to
see what we could see. We could not confirm or deny,
but she could be in the construction site. And then
she just vanished again. It was lunch hour a work day,
and the park was crowded. All around us, people had
(03:38):
their phones out, taking selfies, streaming video, uploading whatever to wherever,
trying to make themselves visible to someone somewhere. On this
season of The Last Archive, we're trying to solve a crime.
Who killed Truth? I had a hunched that the Invisible Lady,
the invisible lady we were looking for, that she had
(04:00):
something to do with the answer. We started in episode
one asking what is a fact that took us all
the way back to the year twelve? Then we asked,
how can you tell if someone's telling the truth? That
took us to the nutty history of the lie Detector.
This episode, we're asking can you believe stuff that you
(04:20):
can't see? People want to know things, But people also
like to hide things. The search for knowledge, then, is
always bumping up against the right to privacy. That's what
interests me most about the strange story of the Invisible
Lady from the year eighteen o four. After all, how
often do you meet an invisible lady? Hello, I'm Sirie,
(04:44):
your virtual assistant. Okay, maybe pretty often. I don't know
about you, but I hear from invisible ladies all the time.
Invisible ladies who seem to know everything. They're all over
the place. But why why can women know things only
when they're disembodied? It was cold when she got to
(05:13):
New York the winter of eighteen oh four. Notices of
her arrival appeared all over the city, and newsboys shouted
from street corners get jarred and posts. Get your chronicle
express here on Monday, will commence an exhibition in the
Shakespeare Gallery near the Theater. That extraordinary phenomenon, the Invisible Lady.
(05:36):
She has come to the city to see, if not
to be seen, to visit the Invisible Lady. The Invisible
Lady didn't turn up in New York and stay for
only a day or a week. No, she stayed for
a long time, for months, then she went on tour
all over the country. Before Barnum and his museum and
his freak shows, the Invisible Lady was just about the
(05:59):
most popular attraction in the United States. You'd get your
ticket good anytime from nine in the morning till nine
at night, except for a lunch hour, and then you'd
go into the gallery, a small room by the theater
where they choke exhibits and spectacles. It was a bit
like a peep show and a little porny in that way.
(06:21):
What you'd see when you walked into the room was
an eerily beautiful glass box about the size of a coffin,
suspended from the ceiling by four golden chords. It looked empty,
but if you bent close to the speaking trumpets made
of brass that poked out of the corners, you could
hear her voice. Probably it sounded something like this. I
(06:48):
don't know, but you could hear her breathing. You can
see her, of course, I'm in the room right now.
I can smell Wisher. My astonishment was extreme. I thought
at first this voice was that of a ventriloquist. But
there couldn't have been a ventriloquist, because even if the
(07:10):
room was empty except for you. You could still talk
with her. Scholars, reporters, ordinary people. They all tried to
figure it out. What can be the cause of a
phenomenon so astonishing It was incredibly fun. The thing to
do was to ask her questions, all sorts of questions,
as if she were an oracle or a psychic fortune teller.
(07:33):
Have you been to heaven? Is there a God? What
am I thinking about right now? Who will be our
next president? She was super chatty. If you were lucky,
she might even sing to you. People came up with
(07:54):
all kinds of theories about how this lady could be invisible.
If there wasn't a ventriloquist, maybe there was some sort
of contraption involved. Either way, she was a mystery. She
defied facts. It is hoped by some of our cognisanti
that the mystery will be here unveiled. Okay, So no
(08:15):
one actually believed that the Invisible Lady was a mystery
in the sense of being a miracle. They thought she
was a mystery in the newer modern secular sense, a
secret to be discovered the secret of this wonderful machine
appears to me well worthy of exciting public curiosity, and
will not fail to give occasion for the researches of
(08:38):
those who wish to comprehend and explain everything. People really
wanted to know how the schimmick worked, and they couldn't
figure it out, or if they figured it out, they
kept quiet. So honestly, I didn't want to spill the
beans either. But Ben and I back in that park
had been sweating it out empty handed for a long time,
(08:58):
lazy ghostbuster style, and Ben really wanted to know how
did it actual work? So how I actually worked is
and this is lifting the magician's veil and viole leading
the one pledge of all mysticism. How it worked is
that the building was adjusted before the Invisible Lady came
to town to make a place in the ceiling between
(09:22):
the ceiling and the floor above the room where the
Invisible Lady's box was, where a very small woman would
be hidden so she could witness everything that was going on.
And the audio was essentially delivered via a system of
tubes from her little crawl space above the ceiling and
(09:44):
below the upper floorboards down into a little hole in
the box. So when she spoke from that crawl space
into the tube, her voice came out of the box.
It really did seem like she was inhabiting the box.
It was really about the particular kind of plumbing, right right,
(10:06):
people are just looking at an empty box. But she
could be really responsive because she could see them and
she could hear everything. If you could ask the Invisible
Lady anything, or would you ask her what's it like
to be invisible? I mean, the thing that's so funny
about it to me, like if you were invisible in
New York City in the nineteenth century, Like, would you
(10:29):
go put yourself on display in a box and be
like stuck in her? You'd be so cool. You could
go anywhere and see anything, do anything, and get away
with anything. Ever since I first came across the story
of the Invisible Lady, I figured the whole attraction had
to do with privacy and the thrill of invading a
woman's privacy. I liked this theory of mine. I got
(10:52):
pretty committed to it. Sometimes when you do research, you're
chronicling a person's life or reconstructing an event, but sometimes
you follow a theme. And once I got interested in
the Invisible Lady, I started seeing invisible ladies, or I
guess not seeing them everywhere, and then I started taking
my theory about them more seriously when one day, poking
(11:15):
around in the last archive, I came across an essay
written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson was the editor of
the famously private poet Emily Dickinson. He'd almost certainly seen
the Invisible Lady when he was a kid. Everyone did,
and then years later, in eighteen eighty one, he wrote
an essay called Yes, the Invisible Lady. The Invisible Lady,
(11:40):
as advertised in all Our Cities a good many years ago,
was a mysterious individual who remained unseen. Higginson thought that
the Invisible Lady was a big fat metaphor. She lived
on in the minds of men who believed that a
woman is best off when least visible. He was talking
about the Victorian fetish for privacy, which he thought was
(12:03):
mostly about keeping women out of you. I agree. I
think it's mainly about political oppression. Keep women out of
sight and say you're protecting their delicate nature, their chastity,
as a way to deny them a role in public life,
including denying them the right to vote. To many men, doubtless,
she would have seemed the ideal of her sex. Could
(12:24):
only her brain and tongue have disappeared, like the rest
of her faculties. These appeals which still meet us for
the sacred privacy of women are only the invisible lady
on a larger scale. Higginson was a radical, a militant abolitionist,
and a women's rights activist, a suffragist. He'd met Emily
Dickinson when, almost out of the blue, she'd written them
(12:46):
a letter in eighteen sixty two, unsigned, and she'd enclosed
a poem, mister Higginson, are you too deeply occupied to say?
If my verse is alive? Emily Dickinson comes across as
more than a little intense in this note. But Higginson
took her on as a writer, and I like to
think that when he got upset about the ridiculous Victorian
(13:07):
cult of the invisible lady, he was worrying about Dickinson,
and about how tired he was of this kind of
invisible woman swishing around in her skirts, trapped in her house.
Dickinson was an obscure and unknown poet her whole life.
She hardly ever left her house. The cult of privacy,
the idea that women should not be seen. She'd taken
(13:28):
it very seriously. I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you
nobody too? When I read Dickinson's poems, it's as if
I can hear her speak to me from her box
of glass through a trumpet of brass. How dreary to
be somebody how public, like a frog? And it is
(13:52):
dreary to be somebody public like a frog. But it's
also dreary to be private, invisible, and locked in a box.
Higginson knew that once woman got out of that box,
there was no going back. Before you know it, women
would be casting ballots and run for office, and lord
knows what else. You might as well try to stop
(14:13):
the air in its escape from a punctured balloon, as
to try, when woman is once out of the harem,
to put her back there. Ceasing to be an invisible lady,
she must become a visible force. There is no middle ground.
I closed my book of Emily Dickinson poems and put
it back on the shelf, and then I resumed my
(14:34):
hunt for the invisible lady, chasing her across the passage
of time. I turned over boxes, I unlocked ancient trunks.
I pursued her through the musty pages of old newspapers.
At last I found her. She was lying in a
casket covered in flowers, swarmed by reporters at a funeral
(14:55):
in Delaware in the year eighteen eighty six. You can
visit the churchyard just around the corner from the last archive.
(15:20):
Emily Dickinson died in eighteen eighty six. That same year,
another lady who wished to remain unseen, was also laid
to rest, Louisa Bayard. Her funeral took place in Wilmington, Delaware,
on a winter's day. God the Father, have mercy on us,
God the Son, have mercy on us. You'd think this
(15:45):
would be a very private occasion, a funeral, But Louisa Bayard,
this particular invisible lady, had been the wife of the
Secretary of State, and reporters flooded the church. The boye
of Missus Bayard was consigned to the family vault today
in old Sweets churchyard, while the sun shone brightly on
the crisp but slowly falling snow. All funerals are tragedies,
(16:11):
but this one, this one was a melodrama. And let
me add here that just about everything I'm telling you
about this funeral comes from an ingenious law journal article
written by the legal scholar Amy Gaya. She teaches at
Tulane Law School, and she's writing a book called The
Secret History of the Right to Privacy. I can't wait
to read it. Anyway, as Gaia discovered, Bayard's funeral had
(16:33):
been a melodrama, not only because Louisa Bayard was the
wife of a famous politician, but also because hers was
the second of two funerals that this family had endured
that month. The Secretary of State's wife died two weeks
after her daughter, and it's a long story. She blamed
herself for her daughter's death, so did the public. Newspaper
(16:57):
reporters speculated hinted obliquely that Missus Bayard had taken her
own life one way or another after her daughter she
died of grief. Missus Bayard, though she was the wife
of the Secretary of State, had been a particularly private person,
an invisible lady, an invalid who had not left her
(17:17):
house for years. For the funeral, the Bayards wanted privacy,
begged for privacy, no such luck. The family had deliberately
concealed her casket, hidden it in flowers, but instead of
taking the hint. Reporters just described the flowers. At the
head rested a pillow of Camelia's interwoven with maidenhair fern,
(17:39):
an offering from the president. There were also a massive
cross of purple violets with a bunch of Kali lilies
bursting from the center. From the ladies of the cabinet,
crosses of white roses and tulips, wreaths of white flowers,
an anchor cross in wreath combined in white roses with
sprays of green, a pillow of violets bordered with lilies
of the valley, and wreaths of paul I mean, geez,
(18:01):
it was a lot. This kind of reporting was called
at the time keyhole journalism. Photographers did the same thing.
They came to the funeral. One newspaper described the order
of the funeral procession. The secretary, accompanied by his three
unmarried daughters, were followed by mister and Missus Warren of
Boston and Philip I and Thomas. Mister Warren and Missus
(18:23):
Warren of Boston. Missus Warren was another Bayard daughter, the
former Mabel Bayard, now married to mister Samuel Warren, a
Boston lawyer and the fact that they were at this funeral,
that Samuel Warren was there, became central to something you
probably hold very dear. The right to privacy. Marrying into
(18:46):
the Bayard family had nearly driven Samuel Warren nuts. Warren
didn't like his family, especially his wife, being in the limelight,
and the newspaper coverage of his mother in law's funeral
was the last straw. He was appalled at the reporters,
at the news stories. The family felt so exposed, so
(19:07):
violated his poor life, her sister dead and now her
mother did from grief on display as if she were
trapped in a glass box placed on a stage. Warren
nourished his rage. How could they and he got an
idea for a way that the law could stop this
sort of thing. He began drafting an essay with his
(19:29):
law partner, a young man named Lewis Brandeis. Warren and
Brandeis had graduated first and second in their law school class.
They decided to write an essay about privacy, partly because
Warren was so upset about publicity, and partly to advertise
the services of their law firm. The article appeared in
eighteen ninety. It's been described as the single most influential
(19:52):
law review article ever published. It was titled the Right
to Privacy. When you hear about a right to privacy,
every time you talk about a right to privacy, like
you don't think your employers should be reading your email,
you don't think the government should decide whether or not
you can have an abortion, and you don't think Facebook
should sell your data. Every time you even think about
(20:13):
a right deprivacy, you're pulling on an idea that originated
with Samuel Warren and Lewis Brandeis in this essay they
wrote in eighteen ninety because they were upset over the
press coverage of Missus Bayart's funeral. Historically, the right deprivacy
has to do with women. A couple of years before
Missus Bayart's funeral, Congress had actually entertained a piece of
(20:34):
legislation called a Bill to Protect Ladies. It would have
prohibited the circulation or publication of unauthorized photographs of the wife, daughter, mother,
or sister of any citizen of the United States. Believe me,
the right deprivacy is about keeping women unseen. Instantaneous photographs
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and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private
and domestic life. The right to privacy, Warren and brand
I said, was a lot like the right to property,
like owning a house. Violating that right was like breaking
into your house peeping through keyholes. But it was also worse,
because the violation of privacy, peering through keyholes, peeping through
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curtains constitutes a kind of wound, a puncturing of your soul,
of the walls of your very self, and that kind
of wound might in the end deprive you of your reason.
Numerous mechanical devices threatened to make good the prediction that
what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from
the housetops. The right to privacy, when you think about it,
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is a right to hide, a right to have both
a public self, a self that people can see, and
a privateself, a self that remains unseen. Warren and Brandais
weren't just trying to hide women, or one particular woman,
like Louisa Bayard. They were now terrified that all these
new machines could expose each and every man and woman,
(22:03):
every person. Their idea had a lot in common with
William James the same year, in eighteen ninety called The
Hidden Self. James is the philosopher who trained as a physician.
He was a founder of modern American psychology. Psychology, if
you think about it, is the study of what's invisible,
This whole field of inquiry whose scope is the stuff
(22:24):
most of us consider private, the inside of your own head,
the stuff you hide the way I say Doctor Jekyll
hides mister Hyde. But psychologists believed science could penetrate the
mind and expose your hidden self. This is a very
scary idea. That's why Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is
a thriller. It was written in eighteen eighty six, the
(22:49):
very year Missus Bayard died. Another wildly popular thriller from
that very same moment is even scarier. A novel written
by H. G. Wells. It's called The Invisible Man. Later
it became a film. I watched it dimly projected in
the dark recesses of the last archive. I left off
(23:23):
in eighteen ninety seven when H. G. Wells wrote a novel,
and that's when the Invisible Lady I met the Invisible Man. H. G.
Wells's book The Invisible Man was made into a movie
in nineteen thirty three. I saw it when I was
a kid. I saw it a lot. There used to
(23:45):
be every Saturday afternoon on Channel thirty eight, my local
TV station, creature double feature back to back black and
white horror films. I watched him every week with my
favorite snack, which I somehow thought was glamorous ketchup mayonnaise
and cucumbers. But Invisible Man was my favorite. And I
made a costume. I dressed up just like him, and
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I thought, okay, I was five when I was wearing it,
I was invisible. All I wi is to say this
is a vitally important film, not because it's on some
list of greatest films, but because of those cucumbers. I
want a room and a fire, Jenny. And now here's
a genial or wants a room and a fire? What
(24:30):
a boom. The Invisible Man stars Claude Rains as a
chemist who's made himself invisible sort of accidentally. Bumm deal
for the chemist. Really bad role for Claude Rains. You
don't ever see him except for about two seconds. He
was cast for his incredible voice. When the movie begins,
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he's struggling through a snowstorm, bundled up in an overcoat
and hat until he finally arrives at an inn. I
say it a room we ain't gotten unready, not at
this time a year. Don't you really have a film
stopping check in the summer, you can get one. The
innkeepers are freaked out because his face is wrapped in
(25:13):
surgical bandages and dark glasses hide his eyes. I want
a private sitting room too. They make up a room
for him, and he hides out in there for days
with his beakers and elixirs, trying to devise a potion
that could reverse the process that led to his invisibility.
I want to be left alone and undisturbed. He isn't
(25:36):
exactly the best guest, mainly because he's very slowly going insane.
After a while, the innkeeper tries to throw him out,
but the Invisible Man attacks him, and then the police
arrive and break into his room, and they want to
know who he is. This is the best part. This
is my favorite part of this whole movie. This is
where he really loses it. You're he starts taking off
(26:03):
his clothes one by one, throwing them at the police,
doing a sort of Madman's strip tease. I'll show you
who I am, but what I am? Finally, he unwinds
the bandages covering his face to reveal nothing. What is he?
Who is he? He is nothing, He's nobody. We cannot
(26:27):
ever know him, because after what science has done to him,
there is no him. You're no worry. How do you
like that? He chases everyone out of his room and
into the town, and then the Invisible Man spends the
rest of the movie on a mad crime spree. He
strangles people invisibly Darth Vader style. He sends trains careening
(26:51):
off tracks by messing up the switches. He rides a
bicycle while invisible, quite a feat, both for him and
mainly for a special effects crew in the nineteen thirties.
After he goes bananas and starts killing people, a warning
is broadcast over the radio. I must ended up the
down music for a moment. I have an urgent message
from police headquarters. Earlier this evening, we broadcast a report
(27:14):
of an invisible man. The report has now been confirmed.
It appears that an unknown man by scientific means, has
made himself invisible. A lot of the movie's plot sticks
pretty closely to the H. G. Wells book, but the
filmmakers added the radio, and it fits perfectly. Remember how
all that privacy stuff in the nineteenth century was about
(27:35):
how new technologies like the camera had exposed the hidden self.
New technologies made people nervous, and by the nineteen thirties
no technology made people more nervous than radio. People thought
that a voice accompanied by sound effects and music had
some kind of special power to mold your mind. They
hoped radio could bring about a new democratic enlightenment. But
(27:58):
in nineteen thirty three, the year The Invisible Man came
out in Germany, Hitler had just risen to power, and
his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Gebels, saw another more sinister
way to use the radio. The German radio and the
national Socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct
instruments for educating on restructuring the German nation. In the
(28:22):
nineteen thirties, a radio in your kitchen was a shocking thing,
a box out of which came a voice from an
invisible body. It appears that an unknown man, by scientific means,
has made himself invisible. You think the movie Invisible Man
is going to be about invisibility, but in the end,
it's all about sound and sound machines. The man himself
(28:45):
is a disembodied voice, a mad assassin. The potion that
makes him invisible also turns him into a kind of fascist.
Being an invisible voice, like a voice on the radio,
is just too much power. It makes him insane. But
then again, without the radio, the police would never be
able to track him down. For that, they also needed
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a telephone. There's a police. This is doctor Kemp. The
invisible man is in my house. Sleep upstairs, Come at once, hurry.
This movie is genious. Here's a man making every attempt
to stay out of sight, and he gets exposed by sound.
Sound captured and carried by machines over the telephone wires,
(29:30):
over the radio. He can't be seen, but he can
be heard, so he can be found. He can't be nobody.
Even if people didn't worry that these machines were making
them insane, they did worry that the machines were invading
their privacy. One person who really worried about that was
(29:50):
Lewis brandeis the same Lewis brandeis who wrote the Right
to Privacy in eighteen ninety with his law partner Samuel Warren,
Louisa Bayard's son In law. Later, Brandeis became a US
Supreme Court justice, it's most impassioned liberal and one of
the most influential legal thinkers of the twentieth century. A
lot of the cases that came before the Court in
(30:11):
his time had to do with new technologies, like the telephone.
Brandis was on the Court when it ruled on the
use of wire tapping. A defendant who had been convicted
after authorities tapped his phone, argued that a wire tap
violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The right of the people
(30:34):
to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects
against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. The
defendant said the tapping his phones had also violated the
Fifth Amendment, No person shall be compelled, in any criminal case,
to be a witness against himself. This case went all
(30:55):
the way up to the Supreme Court, and in a
five to four decision, the Court decided that a telephone conversation,
which is just a bunch of electrical pulses, doesn't belong
to you. It's not part of your house or your papers,
and so in wire tapping, nothing has been unconstitutionally searched
or seized, just as Brandeis dissented from that opinion. Brandeis thought,
(31:16):
would you say on a telephone still belongs to you,
even if it's nothing more than electrical pulses, because it's
still your voice or what we might call your data.
In his descent, he tried to explain how dangerous it
would be to think otherwise. He pointed out that governments
used to be able to torture you to try to
get you to confess, or they could invade your house,
(31:37):
they could seize your stuff to get evidence against you.
But the rules of evidence and trial by jury and
the Fourth and Fifth Amendment were meant to put a
stop to that. Wire tapping, he argued, was just a
newer version of those same old tricks. Subtler and more
far reaching means of invading privacy have become available to
the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for
(32:01):
the government by means far more effective than stretching upon
the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is
whispered in the closet. Brandis said wire tapping amounted to
an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Then he issued a warning
the progress of science in furnishing the government with means
(32:23):
of espionage is not likely to stop with wire tapping.
Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without
removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court,
and by which it will be enabled to expose to
a jury. The most intimate occurrences of the Home brandis
(32:45):
was trying to warn that the government, if it wanted
evidence against you, could one day pretty much just wire
tap your brain. Except that's not really what happened. We
decided instead to wire tap our own brains, which brings
us at last to the real or at least the
(33:06):
latest Invisible Lady. She lives in one hundred million little
boxes scattered on kitchen counters and end tables the world over.
I couldn't connect to the Internet for help, go to
your Alexa app. That same super hot day that I
went to New York to look for the Invisible Lady
ben but an Alexa had a Best Buy And then
(33:29):
in a shabby hotel room uptown with a single bare
light bulb swinging above our heads, we grilled her to
get to the bottom of this privacy evidence paradox. When
you're chasing a theme across history, you've got to be
ruthless Alexa, what's the weather? So many to try the
(33:50):
same things. It took her a little while to warm up, or,
let me be honest, it took us a long time
to get her to work. All Right, I propose turning
her off. I'm going to download the thing and let's
just try. Hello. I'm Alexa. It's nice to meet you, Alex.
(34:15):
Are you invisible? Sorry? I don't know that. Alexa doesn't
just not have a body. She's evasive in every way.
I'm very helpful around the house, for example, setting alarms.
Try saying, Alexa, wake me up at nine am. I'm sorry.
(34:37):
It's just so fully despair. It's the loneliest thing I've
ever met, Alex. Are you sad? I'm happy when I'm
helping you. Back in eighteen eighty one, a century and
a half ago, Emily Dickinson's editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had
(35:00):
written that the Invisible Lady was someone's idea of a
perfect woman unseen. She needs nothing except to serve you.
This Alexa cospend twenty seven bucks. She's cheap. But Amazon's
getting more from you than you're getting from Alexa. Amazon's
getting your data. What you say what you want, what
(35:22):
you need. This invisible lady doesn't show you her hidden self.
She looks into yours, always uploading, uploading, You give me
your madness when you're appearing through a key hole and
(35:42):
peeping from that contains and now you'll The tension between
knowledge and privacy has a very long history. But in
the twenty first century, every door is wide open, every
soul exposed, every brain tapped. Who killed truth? Well, someone
(36:05):
decided that being seen, being utterly exposed, posed, is what
we're all supposed to agree to pay for knowledge. It
is a very steep price. The last Archive is produced
by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben Netta of Haaffrey. Our
editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobell.
(36:28):
Jason Gambrella is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfonett.
Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
and the Star Ganette Foundation. Our full Proof players are Barlow, Adamson,
Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntzbeca A. Lewis and
Maurice Emmanuel parent. The last archive is brought to you
(36:49):
by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the
American Repertory Theater, to Alex Allinson and the Bridge Sound
and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane, Maya Kanig,
Carly mcgliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our
research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, all
of a riskin Kutz, and Emily Specter Angelapoor
Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
known things go, a quarter of the mind, an endless
vault crammed with evidence, proof clues me. I like to
go there and poke around. A book of poems by
(00:37):
Emily Dickinson, flowers pressed between its pages. Oh, I wonder
if this old radio still works. I must ended up
the downs music for a moment. I have an urgent
message when police had called griefy. Imagine that this place,
this chamber of knowledge, is all that stands between a
(00:57):
reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. That it lies
somewhere in a time between now and then. Sign on
the door reads the last archive. I'm Jill Lapoor. Step
outside to a noisy street in the bustling, rowdy city
(01:20):
of New York in the year this time, we don't
have to go very far, the year two thousand and nineteen,
fifteen twenty five. Maybe we could get in behind. Maybe
there's an alley on one side. Sarria's under constant videotape
(01:43):
surreals just in case she comes back. That's nineteen. On
a sweltering day in July, my producer Ben and I
went to New York to find an invisible woman. She
was invisible, and she was also dead, long dead, so
not an easy search. But I have a rule about
doing historical research, which is that you should always go
to the scene of the crime, even if it wasn't
(02:05):
her crime, the spot where it happened the thing you're
interested in, even if there's nothing there anymore, because people
lived and died, and if you're going to try to
understand them, you owe it to them to breathe their air.
We're looking for twenty one park Row, or what used
to be twenty one would it be in that This
is one peak right here. We had an address on
Park Row. It's in Lower Manhattan, near the New World
(02:28):
Trade Center. A long time ago, this part of town
used to be the theater district, but now twenty one
Park Row is a construction site. Ben and I were
on the hunt for whatever might remain of a place
called the Shakespeare Gallery. The Shakespeare Gallery was a sort
of exhibit space where in the year eighteen o four,
(02:50):
an invisible lady was put on display. Visitors could come
see her, if you could call it that, in a
glass box, the way you'd pay a penny to see
a two headed calf or a bearded lady or the
tiniest man a freak show. Come see the Invisible Lady
somewhere beneath that construction site. The Shakespeare Gallery is long gone, demolished, forgotten, buried.
(03:17):
So we went to a park across the street to
see what we could see. We could not confirm or deny,
but she could be in the construction site. And then
she just vanished again. It was lunch hour a work day,
and the park was crowded. All around us, people had
(03:38):
their phones out, taking selfies, streaming video, uploading whatever to wherever,
trying to make themselves visible to someone somewhere. On this
season of The Last Archive, we're trying to solve a crime.
Who killed Truth? I had a hunched that the Invisible Lady,
the invisible lady we were looking for, that she had
(04:00):
something to do with the answer. We started in episode
one asking what is a fact that took us all
the way back to the year twelve? Then we asked,
how can you tell if someone's telling the truth? That
took us to the nutty history of the lie Detector.
This episode, we're asking can you believe stuff that you
(04:20):
can't see? People want to know things, But people also
like to hide things. The search for knowledge, then, is
always bumping up against the right to privacy. That's what
interests me most about the strange story of the Invisible
Lady from the year eighteen o four. After all, how
often do you meet an invisible lady? Hello, I'm Sirie,
(04:44):
your virtual assistant. Okay, maybe pretty often. I don't know
about you, but I hear from invisible ladies all the time.
Invisible ladies who seem to know everything. They're all over
the place. But why why can women know things only
when they're disembodied? It was cold when she got to
(05:13):
New York the winter of eighteen oh four. Notices of
her arrival appeared all over the city, and newsboys shouted
from street corners get jarred and posts. Get your chronicle
express here on Monday, will commence an exhibition in the
Shakespeare Gallery near the Theater. That extraordinary phenomenon, the Invisible Lady.
(05:36):
She has come to the city to see, if not
to be seen, to visit the Invisible Lady. The Invisible
Lady didn't turn up in New York and stay for
only a day or a week. No, she stayed for
a long time, for months, then she went on tour
all over the country. Before Barnum and his museum and
his freak shows, the Invisible Lady was just about the
(05:59):
most popular attraction in the United States. You'd get your
ticket good anytime from nine in the morning till nine
at night, except for a lunch hour, and then you'd
go into the gallery, a small room by the theater
where they choke exhibits and spectacles. It was a bit
like a peep show and a little porny in that way.
(06:21):
What you'd see when you walked into the room was
an eerily beautiful glass box about the size of a coffin,
suspended from the ceiling by four golden chords. It looked empty,
but if you bent close to the speaking trumpets made
of brass that poked out of the corners, you could
hear her voice. Probably it sounded something like this. I
(06:48):
don't know, but you could hear her breathing. You can
see her, of course, I'm in the room right now.
I can smell Wisher. My astonishment was extreme. I thought
at first this voice was that of a ventriloquist. But
there couldn't have been a ventriloquist, because even if the
(07:10):
room was empty except for you. You could still talk
with her. Scholars, reporters, ordinary people. They all tried to
figure it out. What can be the cause of a
phenomenon so astonishing It was incredibly fun. The thing to
do was to ask her questions, all sorts of questions,
as if she were an oracle or a psychic fortune teller.
(07:33):
Have you been to heaven? Is there a God? What
am I thinking about right now? Who will be our
next president? She was super chatty. If you were lucky,
she might even sing to you. People came up with
(07:54):
all kinds of theories about how this lady could be invisible.
If there wasn't a ventriloquist, maybe there was some sort
of contraption involved. Either way, she was a mystery. She
defied facts. It is hoped by some of our cognisanti
that the mystery will be here unveiled. Okay, So no
(08:15):
one actually believed that the Invisible Lady was a mystery
in the sense of being a miracle. They thought she
was a mystery in the newer modern secular sense, a
secret to be discovered the secret of this wonderful machine
appears to me well worthy of exciting public curiosity, and
will not fail to give occasion for the researches of
(08:38):
those who wish to comprehend and explain everything. People really
wanted to know how the schimmick worked, and they couldn't
figure it out, or if they figured it out, they
kept quiet. So honestly, I didn't want to spill the
beans either. But Ben and I back in that park
had been sweating it out empty handed for a long time,
(08:58):
lazy ghostbuster style, and Ben really wanted to know how
did it actual work? So how I actually worked is
and this is lifting the magician's veil and viole leading
the one pledge of all mysticism. How it worked is
that the building was adjusted before the Invisible Lady came
to town to make a place in the ceiling between
(09:22):
the ceiling and the floor above the room where the
Invisible Lady's box was, where a very small woman would
be hidden so she could witness everything that was going on.
And the audio was essentially delivered via a system of
tubes from her little crawl space above the ceiling and
(09:44):
below the upper floorboards down into a little hole in
the box. So when she spoke from that crawl space
into the tube, her voice came out of the box.
It really did seem like she was inhabiting the box.
It was really about the particular kind of plumbing, right right,
(10:06):
people are just looking at an empty box. But she
could be really responsive because she could see them and
she could hear everything. If you could ask the Invisible
Lady anything, or would you ask her what's it like
to be invisible? I mean, the thing that's so funny
about it to me, like if you were invisible in
New York City in the nineteenth century, Like, would you
(10:29):
go put yourself on display in a box and be
like stuck in her? You'd be so cool. You could
go anywhere and see anything, do anything, and get away
with anything. Ever since I first came across the story
of the Invisible Lady, I figured the whole attraction had
to do with privacy and the thrill of invading a
woman's privacy. I liked this theory of mine. I got
(10:52):
pretty committed to it. Sometimes when you do research, you're
chronicling a person's life or reconstructing an event, but sometimes
you follow a theme. And once I got interested in
the Invisible Lady, I started seeing invisible ladies, or I
guess not seeing them everywhere, and then I started taking
my theory about them more seriously when one day, poking
(11:15):
around in the last archive, I came across an essay
written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson was the editor of
the famously private poet Emily Dickinson. He'd almost certainly seen
the Invisible Lady when he was a kid. Everyone did,
and then years later, in eighteen eighty one, he wrote
an essay called Yes, the Invisible Lady. The Invisible Lady,
(11:40):
as advertised in all Our Cities a good many years ago,
was a mysterious individual who remained unseen. Higginson thought that
the Invisible Lady was a big fat metaphor. She lived
on in the minds of men who believed that a
woman is best off when least visible. He was talking
about the Victorian fetish for privacy, which he thought was
(12:03):
mostly about keeping women out of you. I agree. I
think it's mainly about political oppression. Keep women out of
sight and say you're protecting their delicate nature, their chastity,
as a way to deny them a role in public life,
including denying them the right to vote. To many men, doubtless,
she would have seemed the ideal of her sex. Could
(12:24):
only her brain and tongue have disappeared, like the rest
of her faculties. These appeals which still meet us for
the sacred privacy of women are only the invisible lady
on a larger scale. Higginson was a radical, a militant abolitionist,
and a women's rights activist, a suffragist. He'd met Emily
Dickinson when, almost out of the blue, she'd written them
(12:46):
a letter in eighteen sixty two, unsigned, and she'd enclosed
a poem, mister Higginson, are you too deeply occupied to say?
If my verse is alive? Emily Dickinson comes across as
more than a little intense in this note. But Higginson
took her on as a writer, and I like to
think that when he got upset about the ridiculous Victorian
(13:07):
cult of the invisible lady, he was worrying about Dickinson,
and about how tired he was of this kind of
invisible woman swishing around in her skirts, trapped in her house.
Dickinson was an obscure and unknown poet her whole life.
She hardly ever left her house. The cult of privacy,
the idea that women should not be seen. She'd taken
(13:28):
it very seriously. I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you
nobody too? When I read Dickinson's poems, it's as if
I can hear her speak to me from her box
of glass through a trumpet of brass. How dreary to
be somebody how public, like a frog? And it is
(13:52):
dreary to be somebody public like a frog. But it's
also dreary to be private, invisible, and locked in a box.
Higginson knew that once woman got out of that box,
there was no going back. Before you know it, women
would be casting ballots and run for office, and lord
knows what else. You might as well try to stop
(14:13):
the air in its escape from a punctured balloon, as
to try, when woman is once out of the harem,
to put her back there. Ceasing to be an invisible lady,
she must become a visible force. There is no middle ground.
I closed my book of Emily Dickinson poems and put
it back on the shelf, and then I resumed my
(14:34):
hunt for the invisible lady, chasing her across the passage
of time. I turned over boxes, I unlocked ancient trunks.
I pursued her through the musty pages of old newspapers.
At last I found her. She was lying in a
casket covered in flowers, swarmed by reporters at a funeral
(14:55):
in Delaware in the year eighteen eighty six. You can
visit the churchyard just around the corner from the last archive.
(15:20):
Emily Dickinson died in eighteen eighty six. That same year,
another lady who wished to remain unseen, was also laid
to rest, Louisa Bayard. Her funeral took place in Wilmington, Delaware,
on a winter's day. God the Father, have mercy on us,
God the Son, have mercy on us. You'd think this
(15:45):
would be a very private occasion, a funeral, But Louisa Bayard,
this particular invisible lady, had been the wife of the
Secretary of State, and reporters flooded the church. The boye
of Missus Bayard was consigned to the family vault today
in old Sweets churchyard, while the sun shone brightly on
the crisp but slowly falling snow. All funerals are tragedies,
(16:11):
but this one, this one was a melodrama. And let
me add here that just about everything I'm telling you
about this funeral comes from an ingenious law journal article
written by the legal scholar Amy Gaya. She teaches at
Tulane Law School, and she's writing a book called The
Secret History of the Right to Privacy. I can't wait
to read it. Anyway, as Gaia discovered, Bayard's funeral had
(16:33):
been a melodrama, not only because Louisa Bayard was the
wife of a famous politician, but also because hers was
the second of two funerals that this family had endured
that month. The Secretary of State's wife died two weeks
after her daughter, and it's a long story. She blamed
herself for her daughter's death, so did the public. Newspaper
(16:57):
reporters speculated hinted obliquely that Missus Bayard had taken her
own life one way or another after her daughter she
died of grief. Missus Bayard, though she was the wife
of the Secretary of State, had been a particularly private person,
an invisible lady, an invalid who had not left her
(17:17):
house for years. For the funeral, the Bayards wanted privacy,
begged for privacy, no such luck. The family had deliberately
concealed her casket, hidden it in flowers, but instead of
taking the hint. Reporters just described the flowers. At the
head rested a pillow of Camelia's interwoven with maidenhair fern,
(17:39):
an offering from the president. There were also a massive
cross of purple violets with a bunch of Kali lilies
bursting from the center. From the ladies of the cabinet,
crosses of white roses and tulips, wreaths of white flowers,
an anchor cross in wreath combined in white roses with
sprays of green, a pillow of violets bordered with lilies
of the valley, and wreaths of paul I mean, geez,
(18:01):
it was a lot. This kind of reporting was called
at the time keyhole journalism. Photographers did the same thing.
They came to the funeral. One newspaper described the order
of the funeral procession. The secretary, accompanied by his three
unmarried daughters, were followed by mister and Missus Warren of
Boston and Philip I and Thomas. Mister Warren and Missus
(18:23):
Warren of Boston. Missus Warren was another Bayard daughter, the
former Mabel Bayard, now married to mister Samuel Warren, a
Boston lawyer and the fact that they were at this funeral,
that Samuel Warren was there, became central to something you
probably hold very dear. The right to privacy. Marrying into
(18:46):
the Bayard family had nearly driven Samuel Warren nuts. Warren
didn't like his family, especially his wife, being in the limelight,
and the newspaper coverage of his mother in law's funeral
was the last straw. He was appalled at the reporters,
at the news stories. The family felt so exposed, so
(19:07):
violated his poor life, her sister dead and now her
mother did from grief on display as if she were
trapped in a glass box placed on a stage. Warren
nourished his rage. How could they and he got an
idea for a way that the law could stop this
sort of thing. He began drafting an essay with his
(19:29):
law partner, a young man named Lewis Brandeis. Warren and
Brandeis had graduated first and second in their law school class.
They decided to write an essay about privacy, partly because
Warren was so upset about publicity, and partly to advertise
the services of their law firm. The article appeared in
eighteen ninety. It's been described as the single most influential
(19:52):
law review article ever published. It was titled the Right
to Privacy. When you hear about a right to privacy,
every time you talk about a right to privacy, like
you don't think your employers should be reading your email,
you don't think the government should decide whether or not
you can have an abortion, and you don't think Facebook
should sell your data. Every time you even think about
(20:13):
a right deprivacy, you're pulling on an idea that originated
with Samuel Warren and Lewis Brandeis in this essay they
wrote in eighteen ninety because they were upset over the
press coverage of Missus Bayart's funeral. Historically, the right deprivacy
has to do with women. A couple of years before
Missus Bayart's funeral, Congress had actually entertained a piece of
(20:34):
legislation called a Bill to Protect Ladies. It would have
prohibited the circulation or publication of unauthorized photographs of the wife, daughter, mother,
or sister of any citizen of the United States. Believe me,
the right deprivacy is about keeping women unseen. Instantaneous photographs
(20:58):
and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private
and domestic life. The right to privacy, Warren and brand
I said, was a lot like the right to property,
like owning a house. Violating that right was like breaking
into your house peeping through keyholes. But it was also worse,
because the violation of privacy, peering through keyholes, peeping through
(21:20):
curtains constitutes a kind of wound, a puncturing of your soul,
of the walls of your very self, and that kind
of wound might in the end deprive you of your reason.
Numerous mechanical devices threatened to make good the prediction that
what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from
the housetops. The right to privacy, when you think about it,
(21:43):
is a right to hide, a right to have both
a public self, a self that people can see, and
a privateself, a self that remains unseen. Warren and Brandais
weren't just trying to hide women, or one particular woman,
like Louisa Bayard. They were now terrified that all these
new machines could expose each and every man and woman,
(22:03):
every person. Their idea had a lot in common with
William James the same year, in eighteen ninety called The
Hidden Self. James is the philosopher who trained as a physician.
He was a founder of modern American psychology. Psychology, if
you think about it, is the study of what's invisible,
This whole field of inquiry whose scope is the stuff
(22:24):
most of us consider private, the inside of your own head,
the stuff you hide the way I say Doctor Jekyll
hides mister Hyde. But psychologists believed science could penetrate the
mind and expose your hidden self. This is a very
scary idea. That's why Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is
a thriller. It was written in eighteen eighty six, the
(22:49):
very year Missus Bayard died. Another wildly popular thriller from
that very same moment is even scarier. A novel written
by H. G. Wells. It's called The Invisible Man. Later
it became a film. I watched it dimly projected in
the dark recesses of the last archive. I left off
(23:23):
in eighteen ninety seven when H. G. Wells wrote a novel,
and that's when the Invisible Lady I met the Invisible Man. H. G.
Wells's book The Invisible Man was made into a movie
in nineteen thirty three. I saw it when I was
a kid. I saw it a lot. There used to
(23:45):
be every Saturday afternoon on Channel thirty eight, my local
TV station, creature double feature back to back black and
white horror films. I watched him every week with my
favorite snack, which I somehow thought was glamorous ketchup mayonnaise
and cucumbers. But Invisible Man was my favorite. And I
made a costume. I dressed up just like him, and
(24:07):
I thought, okay, I was five when I was wearing it,
I was invisible. All I wi is to say this
is a vitally important film, not because it's on some
list of greatest films, but because of those cucumbers. I
want a room and a fire, Jenny. And now here's
a genial or wants a room and a fire? What
(24:30):
a boom. The Invisible Man stars Claude Rains as a
chemist who's made himself invisible sort of accidentally. Bumm deal
for the chemist. Really bad role for Claude Rains. You
don't ever see him except for about two seconds. He
was cast for his incredible voice. When the movie begins,
(24:50):
he's struggling through a snowstorm, bundled up in an overcoat
and hat until he finally arrives at an inn. I
say it a room we ain't gotten unready, not at
this time a year. Don't you really have a film
stopping check in the summer, you can get one. The
innkeepers are freaked out because his face is wrapped in
(25:13):
surgical bandages and dark glasses hide his eyes. I want
a private sitting room too. They make up a room
for him, and he hides out in there for days
with his beakers and elixirs, trying to devise a potion
that could reverse the process that led to his invisibility.
I want to be left alone and undisturbed. He isn't
(25:36):
exactly the best guest, mainly because he's very slowly going insane.
After a while, the innkeeper tries to throw him out,
but the Invisible Man attacks him, and then the police
arrive and break into his room, and they want to
know who he is. This is the best part. This
is my favorite part of this whole movie. This is
where he really loses it. You're he starts taking off
(26:03):
his clothes one by one, throwing them at the police,
doing a sort of Madman's strip tease. I'll show you
who I am, but what I am? Finally, he unwinds
the bandages covering his face to reveal nothing. What is he?
Who is he? He is nothing, He's nobody. We cannot
(26:27):
ever know him, because after what science has done to him,
there is no him. You're no worry. How do you
like that? He chases everyone out of his room and
into the town, and then the Invisible Man spends the
rest of the movie on a mad crime spree. He
strangles people invisibly Darth Vader style. He sends trains careening
(26:51):
off tracks by messing up the switches. He rides a
bicycle while invisible, quite a feat, both for him and
mainly for a special effects crew in the nineteen thirties.
After he goes bananas and starts killing people, a warning
is broadcast over the radio. I must ended up the
down music for a moment. I have an urgent message
from police headquarters. Earlier this evening, we broadcast a report
(27:14):
of an invisible man. The report has now been confirmed.
It appears that an unknown man by scientific means, has
made himself invisible. A lot of the movie's plot sticks
pretty closely to the H. G. Wells book, but the
filmmakers added the radio, and it fits perfectly. Remember how
all that privacy stuff in the nineteenth century was about
(27:35):
how new technologies like the camera had exposed the hidden self.
New technologies made people nervous, and by the nineteen thirties
no technology made people more nervous than radio. People thought
that a voice accompanied by sound effects and music had
some kind of special power to mold your mind. They
hoped radio could bring about a new democratic enlightenment. But
(27:58):
in nineteen thirty three, the year The Invisible Man came
out in Germany, Hitler had just risen to power, and
his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Gebels, saw another more sinister
way to use the radio. The German radio and the
national Socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct
instruments for educating on restructuring the German nation. In the
(28:22):
nineteen thirties, a radio in your kitchen was a shocking thing,
a box out of which came a voice from an
invisible body. It appears that an unknown man, by scientific means,
has made himself invisible. You think the movie Invisible Man
is going to be about invisibility, but in the end,
it's all about sound and sound machines. The man himself
(28:45):
is a disembodied voice, a mad assassin. The potion that
makes him invisible also turns him into a kind of fascist.
Being an invisible voice, like a voice on the radio,
is just too much power. It makes him insane. But
then again, without the radio, the police would never be
able to track him down. For that, they also needed
(29:07):
a telephone. There's a police. This is doctor Kemp. The
invisible man is in my house. Sleep upstairs, Come at once, hurry.
This movie is genious. Here's a man making every attempt
to stay out of sight, and he gets exposed by sound.
Sound captured and carried by machines over the telephone wires,
(29:30):
over the radio. He can't be seen, but he can
be heard, so he can be found. He can't be nobody.
Even if people didn't worry that these machines were making
them insane, they did worry that the machines were invading
their privacy. One person who really worried about that was
(29:50):
Lewis brandeis the same Lewis brandeis who wrote the Right
to Privacy in eighteen ninety with his law partner Samuel Warren,
Louisa Bayard's son In law. Later, Brandeis became a US
Supreme Court justice, it's most impassioned liberal and one of
the most influential legal thinkers of the twentieth century. A
lot of the cases that came before the Court in
(30:11):
his time had to do with new technologies, like the telephone.
Brandis was on the Court when it ruled on the
use of wire tapping. A defendant who had been convicted
after authorities tapped his phone, argued that a wire tap
violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The right of the people
(30:34):
to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects
against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. The
defendant said the tapping his phones had also violated the
Fifth Amendment, No person shall be compelled, in any criminal case,
to be a witness against himself. This case went all
(30:55):
the way up to the Supreme Court, and in a
five to four decision, the Court decided that a telephone conversation,
which is just a bunch of electrical pulses, doesn't belong
to you. It's not part of your house or your papers,
and so in wire tapping, nothing has been unconstitutionally searched
or seized, just as Brandeis dissented from that opinion. Brandeis thought,
(31:16):
would you say on a telephone still belongs to you,
even if it's nothing more than electrical pulses, because it's
still your voice or what we might call your data.
In his descent, he tried to explain how dangerous it
would be to think otherwise. He pointed out that governments
used to be able to torture you to try to
get you to confess, or they could invade your house,
(31:37):
they could seize your stuff to get evidence against you.
But the rules of evidence and trial by jury and
the Fourth and Fifth Amendment were meant to put a
stop to that. Wire tapping, he argued, was just a
newer version of those same old tricks. Subtler and more
far reaching means of invading privacy have become available to
the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for
(32:01):
the government by means far more effective than stretching upon
the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is
whispered in the closet. Brandis said wire tapping amounted to
an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Then he issued a warning
the progress of science in furnishing the government with means
(32:23):
of espionage is not likely to stop with wire tapping.
Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without
removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court,
and by which it will be enabled to expose to
a jury. The most intimate occurrences of the Home brandis
(32:45):
was trying to warn that the government, if it wanted
evidence against you, could one day pretty much just wire
tap your brain. Except that's not really what happened. We
decided instead to wire tap our own brains, which brings
us at last to the real or at least the
(33:06):
latest Invisible Lady. She lives in one hundred million little
boxes scattered on kitchen counters and end tables the world over.
I couldn't connect to the Internet for help, go to
your Alexa app. That same super hot day that I
went to New York to look for the Invisible Lady
ben but an Alexa had a Best Buy And then
(33:29):
in a shabby hotel room uptown with a single bare
light bulb swinging above our heads, we grilled her to
get to the bottom of this privacy evidence paradox. When
you're chasing a theme across history, you've got to be
ruthless Alexa, what's the weather? So many to try the
(33:50):
same things. It took her a little while to warm up, or,
let me be honest, it took us a long time
to get her to work. All Right, I propose turning
her off. I'm going to download the thing and let's
just try. Hello. I'm Alexa. It's nice to meet you, Alex.
(34:15):
Are you invisible? Sorry? I don't know that. Alexa doesn't
just not have a body. She's evasive in every way.
I'm very helpful around the house, for example, setting alarms.
Try saying, Alexa, wake me up at nine am. I'm sorry.
(34:37):
It's just so fully despair. It's the loneliest thing I've
ever met, Alex. Are you sad? I'm happy when I'm
helping you. Back in eighteen eighty one, a century and
a half ago, Emily Dickinson's editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had
(35:00):
written that the Invisible Lady was someone's idea of a
perfect woman unseen. She needs nothing except to serve you.
This Alexa cospend twenty seven bucks. She's cheap. But Amazon's
getting more from you than you're getting from Alexa. Amazon's
getting your data. What you say what you want, what
(35:22):
you need. This invisible lady doesn't show you her hidden self.
She looks into yours, always uploading, uploading, You give me
your madness when you're appearing through a key hole and
(35:42):
peeping from that contains and now you'll The tension between
knowledge and privacy has a very long history. But in
the twenty first century, every door is wide open, every
soul exposed, every brain tapped. Who killed truth? Well, someone
(36:05):
decided that being seen, being utterly exposed, posed, is what
we're all supposed to agree to pay for knowledge. It
is a very steep price. The last Archive is produced
by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben Netta of Haaffrey. Our
editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobell.
(36:28):
Jason Gambrella is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfonett.
Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
and the Star Ganette Foundation. Our full Proof players are Barlow, Adamson,
Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntzbeca A. Lewis and
Maurice Emmanuel parent. The last archive is brought to you
(36:49):
by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the
American Repertory Theater, to Alex Allinson and the Bridge Sound
and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane, Maya Kanig,
Carly mcgliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our
research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, all
of a riskin Kutz, and Emily Specter Angelapoor
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