1 00:00:28,960 --> 00:00:30,160 Mr Garrett (Archival Audio): Who saw you? 2 00:00:31,920 --> 00:00:32,320 Voder (Archival Aud: SHE saw me. 3 00:00:31,929 --> 00:00:33,200 Mr Garrett (Archival Audio: Whom did she see? 4 00:00:34,880 --> 00:00:35,200 Voder (Archival Aud: She saw ME. 5 00:00:34,890 --> 00:00:37,439 Mr Garrett (Archival Audio): Did she see you or hear you? 6 00:00:40,079 --> 00:00:40,240 Voder (Archival Aud: She SAW me. 7 00:00:40,090 --> 00:00:41,600 Mr Garrett (Archival Audio): Now you have only heard the Voder 8 00:00:41,600 --> 00:00:42,719 speak in one voice. 9 00:00:42,719 --> 00:00:45,920 But the Voder has other voices which you can use when 10 00:00:45,920 --> 00:00:48,799 Ms. Harper makes a simple adjustment in his mechanism. 11 00:00:48,799 --> 00:00:52,479 Helen will you have the Voder say, greetings everybody? 12 00:00:52,479 --> 00:00:55,280 Greetings everybody. 13 00:00:55,130 --> 00:00:56,799 Mr Garrett (Archival Audio): Now will you have him repeat that 14 00:00:56,799 --> 00:00:57,759 in a high voice? 15 00:01:00,079 --> 00:01:00,320 Voder (Arc: Greetings everybody. 16 00:01:00,090 --> 00:01:01,520 Mr Garrett (Archival Audio): And now in his best bass. 17 00:01:01,619 --> 00:01:01,619 Voder (Arc: Greetings everybody. 18 00:01:17,359 --> 00:01:20,000 It is the summer of 1939. Somewhere a merging band is playing. 19 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:22,319 Diesel buses idle. 20 00:01:22,319 --> 00:01:26,319 Thousands of people are talking at once. 21 00:01:26,319 --> 00:01:28,799 This is the World's Fair. 22 00:01:29,359 --> 00:01:32,159 The World of Tomorrow. 23 00:01:32,159 --> 00:01:36,640 Everywhere you look, someone is staring at something. 24 00:01:36,640 --> 00:01:40,480 A wooden cabinet that shows moving pictures. 25 00:01:40,480 --> 00:01:44,640 A seven foot-tall robot that smokes cigarettes. 26 00:01:44,640 --> 00:01:47,120 It is all very loud. 27 00:01:47,120 --> 00:01:53,200 Then you step out of the heat into the Bell Telephone 28 00:01:53,200 --> 00:01:56,480 pavilion, and the noise falls away. 29 00:01:56,480 --> 00:01:59,359 There is a stage. 30 00:01:59,359 --> 00:02:06,079 Behind the stage, a mural, three stories tall, shows a 31 00:02:06,079 --> 00:02:09,280 man's face in the Art Deco style. 32 00:02:09,280 --> 00:02:15,199 Its mouth wide open, sound waves rolling off his lips. 33 00:02:15,199 --> 00:02:21,039 And beneath that giant shouting man sits a woman. 34 00:02:21,039 --> 00:02:23,599 She is dressed impeccably. 35 00:02:23,599 --> 00:02:28,719 She sits with perfect posture at a wooden console that looks 36 00:02:28,719 --> 00:02:29,599 like a desk. 37 00:02:29,599 --> 00:02:33,759 Her hands rest on two small keyboards and her right foot 38 00:02:33,759 --> 00:02:35,360 rests on a pedal. 39 00:02:35,360 --> 00:02:40,240 A man in a suit steps up to the microphone. 40 00:02:40,240 --> 00:02:44,479 He tells you that the machine in front of you is going to 41 00:02:44,479 --> 00:02:45,120 speak. 42 00:02:45,120 --> 00:02:48,000 Not a recording. 43 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:52,000 Not by passing air through a tube. 44 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:54,960 There are no vibrating strings. 45 00:02:54,960 --> 00:03:00,400 This voice is made of nothing but electricity. 46 00:03:00,400 --> 00:03:03,759 He turns to the woman. 47 00:03:03,759 --> 00:03:07,520 And she makes the machine talk. 48 00:03:07,520 --> 00:03:14,080 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 49 00:03:14,960 --> 00:03:20,319 I want you to try something. 50 00:03:20,319 --> 00:03:24,719 Put two fingers against your throat and say, ahhh. 51 00:03:24,719 --> 00:03:29,120 You can feel it buzzing. 52 00:03:29,120 --> 00:03:33,120 Keep going, but this time change the sound. 53 00:03:33,120 --> 00:03:40,560 Ahhh-eee. The buzz in your throat didn't change, but 54 00:03:40,560 --> 00:03:42,319 everything else does. 55 00:03:42,319 --> 00:03:47,039 Your tongue moves, your jaw drops, your lips pull back. 56 00:03:47,039 --> 00:03:50,400 That buzz is your vocal folds. 57 00:03:50,400 --> 00:03:53,120 Two small flaps of tissue. 58 00:03:53,120 --> 00:03:57,039 That is the engine and everything above them. 59 00:03:57,039 --> 00:04:00,159 Your throat, your mouth, your nose. 60 00:04:00,159 --> 00:04:04,000 It's a room the buzz has to pass through. 61 00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:07,520 And the shape of the room decides which parts of the buzz 62 00:04:07,520 --> 00:04:11,280 get louder and which parts get dampened. 63 00:04:11,280 --> 00:04:15,120 You change the room, you change the sound. 64 00:04:15,120 --> 00:04:19,439 The man who figured out how to build that room out of 65 00:04:19,439 --> 00:04:23,680 electricity did not want to build a talking machine. 66 00:04:23,680 --> 00:04:25,199 Not at first. 67 00:04:25,199 --> 00:04:30,319 Homer Dudley was a preacher's son from Virginia. 68 00:04:30,319 --> 00:04:34,240 He trained to be a school teacher and he was bad at it. 69 00:04:34,240 --> 00:04:38,079 He could not keep a classroom quiet, so he quit. 70 00:04:38,079 --> 00:04:41,519 He went back to school for electrical engineering and got a 71 00:04:41,519 --> 00:04:44,240 job at Bell Telephone Laboratories. 72 00:04:44,240 --> 00:04:50,240 By the late 1920s, voices were traveling across the country on 73 00:04:50,240 --> 00:04:51,360 copper wire. 74 00:04:51,360 --> 00:04:54,240 And copper wire has limits. 75 00:04:54,240 --> 00:04:56,480 A human voice is big. 76 00:04:56,480 --> 00:05:01,120 It's a messy signal, and every conversation takes up room. 77 00:05:01,120 --> 00:05:06,480 Bell wanted to fit more conversations into their wires. 78 00:05:06,480 --> 00:05:11,759 So around 1928, Dudley stopped asking how to carry a voice more 79 00:05:11,759 --> 00:05:12,959 faithfully. 80 00:05:12,959 --> 00:05:17,279 And instead, he started asking what a voice is made of. 81 00:05:17,279 --> 00:05:21,680 In his notes, he describes a person talking almost as if they 82 00:05:21,680 --> 00:05:24,000 were a piece of telephone equipment. 83 00:05:24,000 --> 00:05:27,040 The brain writes the message. 84 00:05:27,040 --> 00:05:29,519 The mouth and tongue shape it. 85 00:05:29,519 --> 00:05:33,680 And the buzz in the throat is just the carrier, the thing that 86 00:05:33,680 --> 00:05:37,040 gets the message from one head to another. 87 00:05:37,040 --> 00:05:42,160 Once you see it that way, you can do something strange to a 88 00:05:42,160 --> 00:05:42,800 voice. 89 00:05:42,800 --> 00:05:45,439 You can start to take it apart. 90 00:05:45,439 --> 00:05:53,439 Dudley built a machine called the Vocoder, or the voice coder. 91 00:05:53,439 --> 00:05:59,439 You speak into one end, but instead of carrying your voice, 92 00:05:59,439 --> 00:06:01,279 the machine measures it. 93 00:06:01,279 --> 00:06:06,399 There's the pitch and how much energy is in the low 94 00:06:06,399 --> 00:06:09,920 frequencies, how much is in the high one. 95 00:06:09,920 --> 00:06:14,879 Just a handful of numbers changing slowly, like settings 96 00:06:14,879 --> 00:06:15,920 on a dial. 97 00:06:15,920 --> 00:06:19,279 Those numbers go down the wire. 98 00:06:19,279 --> 00:06:22,639 Not your voice, just the settings. 99 00:06:22,639 --> 00:06:27,360 On the other end, another machine makes its own buzz and 100 00:06:27,360 --> 00:06:31,759 applies your settings, and out comes something that sounds like 101 00:06:31,759 --> 00:06:32,079 you. 102 00:06:32,079 --> 00:06:44,240 And if the shape of the room is just a set of numbers, you can 103 00:06:44,240 --> 00:06:46,000 change the numbers. 104 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:48,079 Raise the pitch. 105 00:06:48,079 --> 00:06:54,079 Flatten it. You can build a voice that belongs to no one. 106 00:06:54,079 --> 00:07:02,319 When Bell started planning its pavilion for the fair, they 107 00:07:02,319 --> 00:07:04,959 wanted to show off the Vocoder. 108 00:07:04,959 --> 00:07:07,839 But there was nothing to see. 109 00:07:07,839 --> 00:07:13,279 A voice goes in one side and something like a voice comes out 110 00:07:13,279 --> 00:07:13,920 the other. 111 00:07:13,920 --> 00:07:19,040 Standing next to the smoking robot, it was not something that 112 00:07:19,040 --> 00:07:20,560 would draw a crowd. 113 00:07:20,560 --> 00:07:23,600 So someone had an idea. 114 00:07:23,600 --> 00:07:29,360 What if you threw away the half that listens and keep only the 115 00:07:29,360 --> 00:07:30,639 half that speaks? 116 00:07:30,639 --> 00:07:36,480 So instead of having a machine set the dials, you could put a 117 00:07:36,480 --> 00:07:38,879 person at the controls instead. 118 00:07:38,879 --> 00:07:43,839 A person could learn to press keys to make the room the right 119 00:07:43,839 --> 00:07:49,120 shape, and then play it like an organ or something. 120 00:07:49,120 --> 00:07:51,600 But there was a problem. 121 00:07:51,600 --> 00:07:57,759 The instrument didn't exist yet, and no one knew how to play 122 00:07:57,759 --> 00:07:58,079 it. 123 00:07:58,079 --> 00:08:04,240 In the summer of 1937, Bell brought ten women from its 124 00:08:04,240 --> 00:08:06,560 transcription department into the lab. 125 00:08:06,560 --> 00:08:10,079 Typists and stenographers. 126 00:08:10,079 --> 00:08:12,399 That seemed promising. 127 00:08:12,399 --> 00:08:14,879 The prototype did have keys. 128 00:08:14,879 --> 00:08:20,000 The engineers judged two of the ten to be, and this is their 129 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:22,480 word, unsuited. 130 00:08:22,480 --> 00:08:26,399 The other eight weren't considered especially promising 131 00:08:26,399 --> 00:08:29,839 either, though two or three might improve with time. 132 00:08:29,839 --> 00:08:33,039 But while the women were learning the machine, the 133 00:08:33,039 --> 00:08:34,559 machine was learning them. 134 00:08:34,559 --> 00:08:37,919 The keys were too far apart. 135 00:08:37,919 --> 00:08:40,320 Several of the women said so. 136 00:08:40,320 --> 00:08:43,600 The keys traveled too far when you pressed them. 137 00:08:43,600 --> 00:08:46,879 An engineer wrote in his notes that the operators might do 138 00:08:46,879 --> 00:08:49,200 better if they didn't have to press so much. 139 00:08:49,200 --> 00:08:51,279 And then there was the pedal. 140 00:08:51,279 --> 00:08:53,840 It controlled pitch. 141 00:08:53,840 --> 00:08:58,320 If you wanted a voice to go up, what does your foot do? 142 00:08:58,320 --> 00:09:00,639 Do you press it down? 143 00:09:00,639 --> 00:09:04,399 Or does it make more sense to lift it? 144 00:09:04,399 --> 00:09:08,879 The machine was still being invented around the bodies of 145 00:09:08,879 --> 00:09:11,120 the people who were learning to use it. 146 00:09:11,120 --> 00:09:15,759 When it was finished, Belle went looking for the women who 147 00:09:15,759 --> 00:09:16,960 could master it. 148 00:09:16,960 --> 00:09:22,000 Not typists this time, but telephone operators. 149 00:09:22,000 --> 00:09:26,000 Around 320 of them tried. 150 00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:30,320 These were women who spent their days at switchboards, 151 00:09:30,320 --> 00:09:34,559 pulling and plugging in thick cables, connecting one voice to 152 00:09:34,559 --> 00:09:35,440 another. 153 00:09:35,440 --> 00:09:40,639 They were trained to be clear, to be pleasant, and to 154 00:09:40,639 --> 00:09:41,759 disappear. 155 00:09:41,759 --> 00:09:45,039 Twenty-four women were selected. 156 00:09:45,039 --> 00:09:48,720 The press called them girls. 157 00:09:48,720 --> 00:09:51,440 The telephone girls. 158 00:09:51,440 --> 00:09:54,879 But eventually they did have a name. 159 00:09:54,879 --> 00:09:56,799 They were called the Voderettes. 160 00:09:56,799 --> 00:10:03,120 And the one at the front of the room, the one who would train 161 00:10:03,120 --> 00:10:06,000 the rest, was Helen Harper. 162 00:10:06,100 --> 00:10:06,100 Ms. Harper I've been wondering whether our listeners realize how many motions you have to make in the production of a single word. Can you give us some idea? 163 00:10:07,759 --> 00:10:08,240 Well for example in producing the word concentration on the Voder I have to form thirteen different sounds in succession, make five up and down movements of the wrist bar, and vary the position of the foot pedal from three to five times according to what expression I want the Voder to give the word. 164 00:10:11,279 --> 00:10:16,480 Daina Bouquin: There were ten white keys, one for each finger 165 00:10:16,480 --> 00:10:18,080 that shaped the vowel. 166 00:10:18,080 --> 00:10:22,480 Three black keys for the hard sounds. 167 00:10:22,480 --> 00:10:25,840 The P, the D, the K. 168 00:10:25,840 --> 00:10:29,360 A bar under her left wrist. 169 00:10:29,360 --> 00:10:32,559 Push it one way and the machine buzzes. 170 00:10:32,559 --> 00:10:35,759 Push it the other way and it hisses. 171 00:10:35,759 --> 00:10:40,559 Buzz is a voice and a hiss is a breath. 172 00:10:40,559 --> 00:10:46,879 Every S, every F, every whispered word is a hiss. 173 00:10:46,879 --> 00:10:52,000 And her right foot was on a pedal, raising and lowering the 174 00:10:52,000 --> 00:10:52,639 pitch. 175 00:10:52,639 --> 00:10:56,000 Without the pedal, every sentence is flat. 176 00:10:56,000 --> 00:10:59,759 The pedal is the difference between a statement and a 177 00:10:59,759 --> 00:11:00,399 question. 178 00:11:00,399 --> 00:11:03,279 Between calm and afraid. 179 00:11:03,279 --> 00:11:07,919 To say one word, she has to take it apart in her head. 180 00:11:07,919 --> 00:11:10,559 Separate the breath from the voice. 181 00:11:10,559 --> 00:11:15,519 Send the vowels to her fingers, the breath to her wrist, 182 00:11:15,519 --> 00:11:20,080 feeling to her foot, and do it all in the time that it takes to 183 00:11:20,080 --> 00:11:21,039 say a word. 184 00:11:21,039 --> 00:11:27,039 The Voderettes practiced for three hours a day. 185 00:11:27,039 --> 00:11:30,240 They had lessons several times a week. 186 00:11:30,240 --> 00:11:34,240 And they did this for more than a year. 187 00:11:34,240 --> 00:11:39,679 They had to first learn single sounds, and then they had to 188 00:11:39,679 --> 00:11:42,080 learn to put them next to each other. 189 00:11:42,080 --> 00:11:47,679 Because a T sounds different before an E than before an O. 190 00:11:47,679 --> 00:11:50,879 And the women had to learn to hear that. 191 00:11:50,879 --> 00:11:55,039 They had to hear the sounds that we swallow and the ones 192 00:11:55,039 --> 00:11:56,720 that we barely notice. 193 00:11:56,720 --> 00:12:00,559 They learned to make the voice whisper. 194 00:12:00,559 --> 00:12:03,679 They learned to make it sound old. 195 00:12:03,679 --> 00:12:08,879 By the time Helen Harper sat down under the shouting man, she 196 00:12:08,879 --> 00:12:11,919 could make it say a sentence in French. 197 00:12:11,919 --> 00:12:14,799 She could make it moo like a cow. 198 00:12:14,799 --> 00:12:17,440 And she could make it sing. 199 00:12:47,360 --> 00:12:47,679 Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot in the days of auld lang syne? 200 00:12:47,370 --> 00:12:49,600 The fair closed in October of 1940. The pavilion came down. 201 00:12:49,600 --> 00:12:55,279 The console was packed away. 202 00:12:55,279 --> 00:12:58,960 Homer Dudley went back to the lab. 203 00:12:58,960 --> 00:13:05,120 But the idea of the voice as a set of numbers, it went to war. 204 00:13:05,120 --> 00:13:09,679 Bell used it to scramble the telephone calls between 205 00:13:09,679 --> 00:13:11,440 Roosevelt and Churchill. 206 00:13:11,440 --> 00:13:16,240 Dudley worked on that too, alongside a young British 207 00:13:16,240 --> 00:13:19,120 mathematician named Alan Turing. 208 00:13:19,120 --> 00:13:42,799 The machine didn't quite make it into the archive. 209 00:13:42,799 --> 00:13:46,000 None of the consoles survived. 210 00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:51,840 Somewhere between 1940 and now, in one move or another, the 211 00:13:51,840 --> 00:13:54,399 desks with the keyboards got lost. 212 00:13:54,399 --> 00:13:59,440 But in December 2015, in a storage room in Warren, New 213 00:13:59,440 --> 00:14:04,480 Jersey, archivists uncovered two tall equipment racks. 214 00:14:04,480 --> 00:14:09,600 They were the practice units, the ones the women had learned 215 00:14:09,600 --> 00:14:09,919 on. 216 00:14:09,919 --> 00:14:13,759 The thing she performed on was gone, but the thing she 217 00:14:13,759 --> 00:14:15,519 practiced on was found. 218 00:14:15,519 --> 00:14:17,919 And then there's Helen. 219 00:14:17,919 --> 00:14:23,120 In September of 1941, a newspaper reported that she was 220 00:14:23,120 --> 00:14:25,360 retiring from operator work. 221 00:14:25,360 --> 00:14:29,360 She was already married, and now she told the reporter she 222 00:14:29,360 --> 00:14:31,679 was going to make marriage her career. 223 00:14:31,679 --> 00:14:34,799 She had made a scrapbook, though. 224 00:14:34,799 --> 00:14:39,440 More than a hundred pages of memories about playing the 225 00:14:39,440 --> 00:14:40,240 Voder. 226 00:14:40,240 --> 00:14:44,399 I don't know what happened to Helen's scrapbook, and I don't 227 00:14:44,399 --> 00:14:46,559 know what she put on those pages. 228 00:14:46,559 --> 00:14:50,399 But when she left, she had gathered something she wanted to 229 00:14:50,399 --> 00:14:51,039 keep. 230 00:15:01,360 --> 00:15:02,960 Every voice you hear from a machine today, the one that reads you directions, the one that can say your 231 00:15:02,960 --> 00:15:05,840 grandmother's name is lifeless. 232 00:15:09,440 --> 00:15:14,879 But the Voder sat there humming until a woman put her hands on 233 00:15:14,879 --> 00:15:15,200 it. 234 00:15:15,200 --> 00:15:20,399 Back in the pavilion, the crowd is laughing. 235 00:15:20,399 --> 00:15:24,240 The machine has just said good afternoon. 236 00:15:24,240 --> 00:15:29,039 Someone in the crowd asks it to say it again, but sadder this 237 00:15:29,039 --> 00:15:29,360 time. 238 00:15:29,360 --> 00:15:35,600 Helen changes the pressure on her foot, and it does. 239 00:15:35,600 --> 00:15:42,000 Above her, the painted man is shouting, and her mouth is 240 00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:42,879 closed. 241 00:15:42,879 --> 00:15:50,639 I'm Daina Bouquin, and this is Found in the Machine. 242 00:15:50,639 --> 00:15:59,279 Today's episode was brought to you exclusively by our founding 243 00:15:59,279 --> 00:16:00,720 Patreon members. 244 00:16:00,720 --> 00:16:06,399 You can go to found in the machine.com /support to find our 245 00:16:06,399 --> 00:16:09,440 Patreon and other ways you can support the show. 246 00:16:09,440 --> 00:16:15,360 And I can't tell you how much I would appreciate a rating or a 247 00:16:15,360 --> 00:16:18,639 review wherever you listen to this show. 248 00:16:18,639 --> 00:16:25,919 Thanks so much for listening.