Speaker: Imagine the year is nineteen sixty-five.
Speaker: You are building a machine to fly human beings to the moon.
Speaker: It has to survive the violence of a rocket launch.
Speaker: It has to survive the freezing, radiation-soaked void of space.
Speaker: And it has to fit inside a small spacecraft in an era when computers need to live inside large rooms.
Speaker: How do you guarantee the code will survive?
Speaker: You don't type it.
Speaker: You weave it.
Speaker: I'm Daina Bouquin.
Speaker: This is Found in the Machine.
Speaker: MIT.
Speaker: 1953.
Speaker: A laboratory bench.
Speaker: Bright overhead light.
Speaker: The smell of solder and warm metal.
Speaker: A black lab technician named Hilda G.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: The rings are smaller than shirt buttons.
Speaker: Smaller really than most things you'd touch in a day.
Speaker: Each one is a ferrite core, a tiny donut shape that can hold a charge or not hold a charge.
Speaker: That can mean one or mean zero.
Speaker: She picks up a wire.
Speaker: She threads it through the center of a ring.
Speaker: That is a one.
Speaker: She routes the wire around the outside of a ring, bypassing it entirely.
Speaker: That is a zero.
Speaker: One, zero, one, zero.
Speaker: She does this again and again for hours, for days, weeks.
Speaker: When she is done, software exists inside hardware.
Speaker: Information is not stored on a spinning disk or punched into a card.
Speaker: It is woven into a physical object.
Speaker: A plane of magnetic-core memory.
Speaker: The first one ever assembled.
Speaker: It becomes the standard form of computer memory for the next 20 years.
Speaker: Every computer that runs on magnetic core memory for two decades runs on a foundation that was physically laid by Hilda Carpenter's hands.
Speaker: There is a photograph of her in a technical journal from 1956.
Speaker: Her hands, the rings, the wire.
Speaker: The men who worked alongside her remember her efficiency, her precision, the particular stillness she brought to work that required absolute stillness.
Speaker: Decades later, many of them could no longer remember her last name.
Speaker: Now back to 1965.
Speaker: Back to the rooms in Massachusetts where the Apollo software is being made.
Speaker: The moon-bound computer's memory is made of ferrite cores.
Speaker: The same tiny donut-shaped rings held the carpenter once threaded by hand.
Speaker: If a wire passes directly through the center of a core, the computer reads it as one.
Speaker: If the wire goes around the outside, the computer reads it as a zero.
Speaker: One cubic foot holds 72 kilobytes of data, 18 times more dense than standard magnetic core memory.
Speaker: And it is permanent by design.
Speaker: The code cannot be erased.
Speaker: Not by a power failure, not by a hard landing in the silent dust of the moon.
Speaker: Not by anything short of physical destruction.
Speaker: The engineers call it core rope memory.
Speaker: The code is literally hardwired in.
Speaker: And someone has to do the weaving.
Speaker: The ferrite cores are microscopic.
Speaker: Workers have to peer through magnifying glasses just to see what they are doing.
Speaker: The contractor Raytheon realizes they do not need engineers.
Speaker: They need people with steady hands and extreme precision, and the patience to thread a needle through a space that is barely there.
Speaker: They hire women.
Speaker: Skilled women from the New England textile industry.
Speaker: Former employees of the Waltham Watch Company.
Speaker: Women who have spent years fitting tiny springs and gears into spaces smaller than a thumbnail.
Speaker: Picture them at long desks in white smocks under bright task lamps.
Speaker: Their backs curved over the work.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: One, zero, one, zero.
Speaker: The weaving of a single module takes about eight weeks.
Speaker: It costs fifteen thousand dollars.
Speaker: If the code needs to change even by a single bit, the work has to stop and begin again.
Speaker: The program has to be frozen months in advance, committed to wire and ring in the particular steadiness of human hand.
Speaker: Each core has 192 wires passing through it.
Speaker: A single mistake in the entire module is flawed, useless.
Speaker: NASA inspectors hover.
Speaker: Federal agents hover.
Speaker: There are supervisors they call the rope mothers.
Speaker: The men and women who oversee all of it, who are responsible in the end for what gets woven, for what goes up.
Speaker: Most of them were actually men.
Speaker: The engineers have a name for the whole operation.
Speaker: They call it the LOL method.
Speaker: The work that will take human beings to the moon.
Speaker: A thousand miles away in Shiprock, New Mexico, something similar is happening.
Speaker: Unemployment on the Navajo Reservation is hovering around 40%.
Speaker: For years, tribal leadership has been trying to attract outside investment.
Speaker: In 1964, tribal chairman Raymond Nakai opens the reservation to outside businesses.
Speaker: Tax breaks, subsidized construction.
Speaker: A workforce with almost no other options.
Speaker: Fairchild Semiconductor hears about it.
Speaker: They come to Shiprock.
Speaker: They build a plant.
Speaker: And they train Navajo women in the assembly of integrated circuits.
Speaker: Components also smaller than a fingernail.
Speaker: Made of silicon and metal, requiring electrical connections placed with microscopic precision.
Speaker: The women bend over their stations for hours, peering through microscopes.
Speaker: They place components onto chips with tweezers.
Speaker: They solder connections you could not see with the naked eye if you tried.
Speaker: Their backs hurt. Their necks hurt.
Speaker: They do not stop.
Speaker: At its peak, the plant employs more than a thousand workers.
Speaker: Most of them are Navajo women.
Speaker: To celebrate the dedication of the plant, Fairchild produces a brochure.
Speaker: First page, a large photograph of a Navajo rug.
Speaker: Geometric.
Speaker: Brown and black and white.
Speaker: Beautiful.
Speaker: Next page, a photograph of an integrated circuit.
Speaker: Also geometric.
Speaker: Also intricate.
Speaker: Then photographs of women at looms.
Speaker: Women at microscopes.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: "Innate".
Speaker: As in born with.
Speaker: Natural.
Speaker: Not learned, not earned, not transmitted across generations through years of patient instruction.
Speaker: Just present.
Speaker: Like eye color.
Speaker: Here is what innate erases.
Speaker: Navajo weaving is one of the most sophisticated textile traditions in human history.
Speaker: A master weaver has spent years learning from her mother and her grandmother.
Speaker: The patterns encode specific knowledge, cosmology, clan histories, ceremonial meaning, geometric systems developed and refined across centuries.
Speaker: A Navajo rug is not decoration.
Speaker: It is a record.
Speaker: It is argument and memory and identity woven into wool.
Speaker: Contemporary Navajo weaver D.
Speaker: Y.
Speaker: Begay gave an interview in 2017.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: This is knowledge that is taught, passed from person to person across generations.
Speaker: Building bleeding edge microchips is also something you have to learn.
Speaker: In 1975, NASA published a report summarizing the Apollo missions.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: The report did not mention the women at Raytheon.
Speaker: It did not mention the women at Fairchild Semiconductor.
Speaker: Not one name, not one line.
Speaker: Researchers trying to piece this history together now face a simple fact.
Speaker: Nearly every woman who could tell these stories firsthand is likely gone.
Speaker: The accounts of the engineers were carefully preserved.
Speaker: No one collected the oral histories of the weavers.
Speaker: We don't know where these women were as men landed on the moon.
Speaker: Whether they sat in front of a television and recognized, in the thing happening on the screen, the work of their own hands.
Speaker: No one thought the question was worth asking.
Speaker: But their code is still up there sitting in the dust. I'm Daina Bouquin. This is Found in the Machine.