WEBVTT 00:00:27.120 --> 00:00:30.239 Imagine the year is nineteen sixty-five. 00:00:30.239 --> 00:00:35.359 You are building a machine to fly human beings to the moon. 00:00:35.359 --> 00:00:41.600 It has to survive the violence of a rocket launch. 00:00:41.600 --> 00:00:47.119 It has to survive the freezing, radiation-soaked void of space. 00:00:47.119 --> 00:00:56.560 And it has to fit inside a small spacecraft in an era when computers need to live inside large rooms. 00:00:56.560 --> 00:01:02.479 How do you guarantee the code will survive? 00:01:02.479 --> 00:01:05.680 You don't type it. 00:01:05.680 --> 00:01:07.519 You weave it. 00:01:07.519 --> 00:01:10.959 I'm Daina Bouquin. 00:01:10.959 --> 00:01:13.920 This is Found in the Machine. 00:01:13.920 --> 00:01:20.560 MIT. 00:01:20.560 --> 00:01:23.599 1953. 00:01:23.599 --> 00:01:26.319 A laboratory bench. 00:01:26.319 --> 00:01:29.280 Bright overhead light. 00:01:29.280 --> 00:01:33.359 The smell of solder and warm metal. 00:01:33.359 --> 00:01:37.439 A black lab technician named Hilda G. 00:01:37.439 --> 00:01:49.519 Carpenter sits down with a spool of fine wire and a tray of tiny magnetic rings and begins to build something that has never existed before. 00:01:49.519 --> 00:01:52.879 The rings are smaller than shirt buttons. 00:01:52.879 --> 00:01:56.879 Smaller really than most things you'd touch in a day. 00:01:56.879 --> 00:02:05.920 Each one is a ferrite core, a tiny donut shape that can hold a charge or not hold a charge. 00:02:05.920 --> 00:02:09.599 That can mean one or mean zero. 00:02:09.599 --> 00:02:13.199 She picks up a wire. 00:02:13.199 --> 00:02:16.960 She threads it through the center of a ring. 00:02:16.960 --> 00:02:18.479 That is a one. 00:02:18.479 --> 00:02:25.280 She routes the wire around the outside of a ring, bypassing it entirely. 00:02:25.280 --> 00:02:27.360 That is a zero. 00:02:27.360 --> 00:02:32.719 One, zero, one, zero. 00:02:32.719 --> 00:02:42.080 She does this again and again for hours, for days, weeks. 00:02:42.080 --> 00:02:49.280 When she is done, software exists inside hardware. 00:02:49.280 --> 00:02:56.000 Information is not stored on a spinning disk or punched into a card. 00:02:56.000 --> 00:02:59.840 It is woven into a physical object. 00:02:59.840 --> 00:03:03.280 A plane of magnetic-core memory. 00:03:03.280 --> 00:03:05.680 The first one ever assembled. 00:03:05.680 --> 00:03:13.759 It becomes the standard form of computer memory for the next 20 years. 00:03:13.759 --> 00:03:24.479 Every computer that runs on magnetic core memory for two decades runs on a foundation that was physically laid by Hilda Carpenter's hands. 00:03:24.479 --> 00:03:32.560 There is a photograph of her in a technical journal from 1956. 00:03:32.560 --> 00:03:37.039 Her hands, the rings, the wire. 00:03:37.039 --> 00:03:51.120 The men who worked alongside her remember her efficiency, her precision, the particular stillness she brought to work that required absolute stillness. 00:03:51.120 --> 00:03:56.080 Decades later, many of them could no longer remember her last name. 00:03:56.080 --> 00:04:04.080 Now back to 1965. 00:04:04.080 --> 00:04:09.759 Back to the rooms in Massachusetts where the Apollo software is being made. 00:04:09.759 --> 00:04:14.879 The moon-bound computer's memory is made of ferrite cores. 00:04:14.879 --> 00:04:19.920 The same tiny donut-shaped rings held the carpenter once threaded by hand. 00:04:19.920 --> 00:04:28.319 If a wire passes directly through the center of a core, the computer reads it as one. 00:04:28.319 --> 00:04:32.800 If the wire goes around the outside, the computer reads it as a zero. 00:04:32.800 --> 00:04:43.680 One cubic foot holds 72 kilobytes of data, 18 times more dense than standard magnetic core memory. 00:04:43.680 --> 00:04:48.000 And it is permanent by design. 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:51.279 The code cannot be erased. 00:04:51.279 --> 00:04:58.399 Not by a power failure, not by a hard landing in the silent dust of the moon. 00:04:58.399 --> 00:05:02.160 Not by anything short of physical destruction. 00:05:02.160 --> 00:05:07.199 The engineers call it core rope memory. 00:05:07.199 --> 00:05:10.639 The code is literally hardwired in. 00:05:10.639 --> 00:05:15.439 And someone has to do the weaving. 00:05:15.439 --> 00:05:18.639 The ferrite cores are microscopic. 00:05:18.639 --> 00:05:23.519 Workers have to peer through magnifying glasses just to see what they are doing. 00:05:23.519 --> 00:05:29.920 The contractor Raytheon realizes they do not need engineers. 00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:38.560 They need people with steady hands and extreme precision, and the patience to thread a needle through a space that is barely there. 00:05:38.560 --> 00:05:41.519 They hire women. 00:05:41.519 --> 00:05:45.839 Skilled women from the New England textile industry. 00:05:45.839 --> 00:05:51.920 Former employees of the Waltham Watch Company. 00:05:51.920 --> 00:06:00.480 Women who have spent years fitting tiny springs and gears into spaces smaller than a thumbnail. 00:06:00.480 --> 00:06:07.439 Picture them at long desks in white smocks under bright task lamps. 00:06:07.439 --> 00:06:10.480 Their backs curved over the work. 00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:29.920 Hour after hour, season after season, a hollow wire-filled needle passing back and forth through a matrix of tiny eyelets, through the core around the core. 00:06:29.920 --> 00:06:34.240 One, zero, one, zero. 00:06:34.240 --> 00:06:39.600 The weaving of a single module takes about eight weeks. 00:06:39.600 --> 00:06:43.920 It costs fifteen thousand dollars. 00:06:43.920 --> 00:06:51.920 If the code needs to change even by a single bit, the work has to stop and begin again. 00:06:51.920 --> 00:07:00.000 The program has to be frozen months in advance, committed to wire and ring in the particular steadiness of human hand. 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:07.920 Each core has 192 wires passing through it. 00:07:07.920 --> 00:07:13.279 A single mistake in the entire module is flawed, useless. 00:07:13.279 --> 00:07:16.160 NASA inspectors hover. 00:07:16.160 --> 00:07:18.480 Federal agents hover. 00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:23.519 There are supervisors they call the rope mothers. 00:07:23.519 --> 00:07:32.000 The men and women who oversee all of it, who are responsible in the end for what gets woven, for what goes up. 00:07:32.000 --> 00:07:35.120 Most of them were actually men. 00:07:35.120 --> 00:07:41.920 The engineers have a name for the whole operation. 00:07:41.920 --> 00:07:45.360 They call it the LOL method. 00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:54.560 The work that will take human beings to the moon. 00:07:54.560 --> 00:08:04.720 A thousand miles away in Shiprock, New Mexico, something similar is happening. 00:08:04.720 --> 00:08:10.079 Unemployment on the Navajo Reservation is hovering around 40%. 00:08:10.079 --> 00:08:16.560 For years, tribal leadership has been trying to attract outside investment. 00:08:16.560 --> 00:08:24.800 In 1964, tribal chairman Raymond Nakai opens the reservation to outside businesses. 00:08:24.800 --> 00:08:28.480 Tax breaks, subsidized construction. 00:08:28.480 --> 00:08:32.080 A workforce with almost no other options. 00:08:32.080 --> 00:08:37.919 Fairchild Semiconductor hears about it. 00:08:37.919 --> 00:08:40.320 They come to Shiprock. 00:08:40.320 --> 00:08:42.879 They build a plant. 00:08:42.879 --> 00:08:48.240 And they train Navajo women in the assembly of integrated circuits. 00:08:48.240 --> 00:08:52.320 Components also smaller than a fingernail. 00:08:52.320 --> 00:08:58.960 Made of silicon and metal, requiring electrical connections placed with microscopic precision. 00:08:58.960 --> 00:09:04.879 The women bend over their stations for hours, peering through microscopes. 00:09:04.879 --> 00:09:08.879 They place components onto chips with tweezers. 00:09:08.879 --> 00:09:14.159 They solder connections you could not see with the naked eye if you tried. 00:09:14.159 --> 00:09:19.840 Their backs hurt. Their necks hurt. 00:09:19.840 --> 00:09:21.840 They do not stop. 00:09:21.840 --> 00:09:27.279 At its peak, the plant employs more than a thousand workers. 00:09:27.279 --> 00:09:30.080 Most of them are Navajo women. 00:09:30.080 --> 00:09:37.360 To celebrate the dedication of the plant, Fairchild produces a brochure. 00:09:37.360 --> 00:09:43.279 First page, a large photograph of a Navajo rug. 00:09:43.279 --> 00:09:44.960 Geometric. 00:09:44.960 --> 00:09:47.600 Brown and black and white. 00:09:47.600 --> 00:09:49.120 Beautiful. 00:09:49.120 --> 00:09:54.159 Next page, a photograph of an integrated circuit. 00:09:54.159 --> 00:09:56.000 Also geometric. 00:09:56.000 --> 00:09:57.679 Also intricate. 00:09:57.679 --> 00:10:01.519 Then photographs of women at looms. 00:10:01.519 --> 00:10:04.559 Women at microscopes. 00:10:04.559 --> 00:10:18.399 The brochure says, quote, the blending of innate Navajo skill and semiconductor's precision assembly techniques has made the shiprock plant one of Fairchild's best facilities. 00:10:18.399 --> 00:10:22.480 "Innate". 00:10:22.480 --> 00:10:25.039 As in born with. 00:10:25.039 --> 00:10:26.879 Natural. 00:10:26.879 --> 00:10:36.240 Not learned, not earned, not transmitted across generations through years of patient instruction. 00:10:36.240 --> 00:10:38.159 Just present. 00:10:38.159 --> 00:10:41.360 Like eye color. 00:10:41.360 --> 00:10:45.279 Here is what innate erases. 00:10:45.279 --> 00:10:52.159 Navajo weaving is one of the most sophisticated textile traditions in human history. 00:10:52.159 --> 00:10:58.480 A master weaver has spent years learning from her mother and her grandmother. 00:10:58.480 --> 00:11:13.440 The patterns encode specific knowledge, cosmology, clan histories, ceremonial meaning, geometric systems developed and refined across centuries. 00:11:13.440 --> 00:11:17.440 A Navajo rug is not decoration. 00:11:17.440 --> 00:11:20.080 It is a record. 00:11:20.080 --> 00:11:25.759 It is argument and memory and identity woven into wool. 00:11:25.759 --> 00:11:30.320 Contemporary Navajo weaver D. 00:11:30.320 --> 00:11:30.720 Y. 00:11:30.720 --> 00:11:34.559 Begay gave an interview in 2017. 00:11:34.559 --> 00:11:48.639 She said, "I paint with my yarn to tell my story about where I come from." She shared that she teaches her nieces not to swear in front of their looms. 00:11:48.639 --> 00:11:56.559 This is knowledge that is taught, passed from person to person across generations. 00:11:56.559 --> 00:12:02.960 Building bleeding edge microchips is also something you have to learn. 00:12:02.960 --> 00:12:13.919 In 1975, NASA published a report summarizing the Apollo missions. 00:12:13.919 --> 00:12:33.360 It spoke at length about the flawless performance of the computer software, the adaptability, the precision, the extraordinary reliability of a system that had to work perfectly the first time, with human lives depending on it. 00:12:33.360 --> 00:12:37.360 The report did not mention the women at Raytheon. 00:12:37.360 --> 00:12:42.080 It did not mention the women at Fairchild Semiconductor. 00:12:42.080 --> 00:12:46.399 Not one name, not one line. 00:12:46.399 --> 00:12:53.919 Researchers trying to piece this history together now face a simple fact. 00:12:53.919 --> 00:13:00.240 Nearly every woman who could tell these stories firsthand is likely gone. 00:13:00.240 --> 00:13:05.120 The accounts of the engineers were carefully preserved. 00:13:05.120 --> 00:13:10.000 No one collected the oral histories of the weavers. 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:16.480 We don't know where these women were as men landed on the moon. 00:13:16.480 --> 00:13:26.559 Whether they sat in front of a television and recognized, in the thing happening on the screen, the work of their own hands. 00:13:26.559 --> 00:13:31.440 No one thought the question was worth asking. 00:13:31.440 --> 00:13:41.039 But their code is still up there sitting in the dust. I'm Daina Bouquin. This is Found in the Machine.