Advertising Artifacts

stories we tell. I love digging deeper into historical events and finding tales that go beyond the headlines. That's the kind of story I want to share with you today. It starts on a chilly afternoon in Massachusetts in the mid night nineteen sixties. A thirty something woman named Margaret knew she was going to have to stay late at work. Her husband was busy taking law classes at Harvard, so Margaret had no choice but to bring their young daughter, Lauren,

up to the office with her. While Margaret worked, Lauren played astronaut. She toddled around Margaret's office pretending to be wearing a spacesuit. Lauren took huge bounding steps, like she was walking in zero gravity. Then she ran over to Margaret's computer and did what kids do. She started pressing random buttons. Suddenly, Margaret's computer short circuited the simulation she'd been running crashed, But she wasn't upset with her daughter.

She was actually grateful because Lauren had just helped her identify a flaw in her system. You see, Margaret was a computer software engineer, one of the very first in the world. She actually coined the term software engineer decades before Silicon Valley was a wash with tech startups. Margaret was doing pioneering work at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, overseeing tea team of engineers working on writing and debugging computer software.

Her young daughter, Lauren had just helped her realize something important. No matter how perfect a computer seemed to be, there was always room for error. Someone could press the wrong button accidentally or on purpose, and throw everything into chaos, which made Margaret think computers should be well smarter. Now, this was way before the idea of smartphones or artificial intelligence. The computers at MIT were huge and clunky. They took up entire rooms, and a lot of them didn't even

have screens. Margaret and her team couldn't just type their software code onto a keyboard. They had to put software information onto paper punch cards, which they then ran physically into the giant room sized computing machines they worked on. It was some serious, rudimentary stuff by today's standards, but back in the nineteen sixties it was cutting edge technology. So after her daughter crashed the system, Margaret focused on creating a software program that would be able to self

identify and self correct errors. If someone clicked the wrong button, the computer could fix itself without human intervention. If something went disastrously wrong, the computer could shut down some parts of itself while keeping the most vital parts up and running. Basically, it could prioritize certain tasks and make sure one small

mistake didn't blow the whole thing up. It took years, not to mention, thousands of pages of handwritten and hand punched software code, but Margaret's program worked, and it came in handy in a big way. You see. The lab that Margaret worked at in MIT had a contract with NASA. Their software was used on board spacecrafts. During one NASA mission, Margaret and her team were standing in the monitoring room at MIT when they got an emergency error message. The

computer on board the spacecraft was overloaded. If it couldn't be fixed, the craft would crash. But Margaret and her team didn't need to panic. The software she pioneered worked perfectly. The spacecraft's computer was able to shut down the parts of the system that were malfunctioning while keeping the rest up and running. And that's spacecraft well. On July twentieth

of nineteen sixty nine, it landed on the Moon. Neil Armstrong stepped out of the ship, put a foot on the lunar surface and said the quote we probably all know by heart. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. Too bad he didn't mention women. Margaret was in charge of the software for the Apollo eleven mission. Her full name was Margaret Hamilton, and you might have seen a picture of her in her sixty style dress standing next to a stack of paperwork that

is taller than she is. That's the software code that she wrote, the same code that sent astronauts to the moon. Margaret is a living legend, but the contributions that she made to software engineering are often overlooked. Maybe that's because even though her code was fundamental to the creation of computer technology, it's considered pretty basic these days. And those room sized computers that sent astronauts to the moon there are millions of times less powerful than the phones that

we all carry in our pockets today. If you've ever studied world history, you know that civilizations tend to pop up along waterways like oceans, lakes, and rivers. Water is central to life, and that's never more apparent when we can't get enough of it. Take the summer of twenty eighteen, for example, Central Europe experienced the most severe drought in decades and have the highest temperatures ever recorded in the region. The water levels of various lakes and rivers decreased, and

the lack of humidity caused extremely dry air conditions. This had measurable negative impacts on wildlife populations, trade routes, and the ability to grow food and access water. So droughts are not fun to say the least, but the effects of that twenty eighteen droughts actually revealed some fascinating historical artifacts. You see, there's this waterway in Central Europe called the Elbe River. It runs from the mountains of Czech down

through Germany and into the North Sea. Historically, the river has been an important resource for people along its shores. During that dry summer, though, water levels in the Elbe River lowered drastically. Locals in the Czech town of Dutchin were exploring sections of the dried up riverbed when they

stumbled upon a rock, or more accurately, a boulder. It was large, kind of brownish gray, and its edges had been worn smooth by centuries of erosion, and carved into the surface was a message that said, if you see me, weep and to make things even creepier. This rock was just one of many. Another said and I quote we cried, we cry, and you will cry now. Many of these rocks had dates carved into them. Some were from as recent as eighteen ninety three, and some went back as

far as the fifteenth century. The oldest year referenced came from a rock carved with this message, if you will again see the stone, so you will weep. So shallow was the water in the U fourteen seventeen. These rocks are what historians call hunger stones. They're actually somewhat common throughout Central Europe. And specifically in the Elbe River. They offer important insight into the history of droughts in the region because they mark where the shoreline was at certain

times throughout history. The further the shoreline went out, the worst the drought was. So these stones are a very tangible historical record of European water levels, which is really cool in a way, but it's also kind of unsettling because ideally we wouldn't be seeing hunger stones at all. They're harbingers of drought and suffering warnings from people who lived four, five, six hundred years ago that when the

water levels get this low, bad things happen. There's only so much that we can do to counteract droughts, though anthropogenic climate change is a factor, but it's not the only one. If these hunger stones teach us anything, it's that people have suffered through extreme conditions for centuries and that people today are fascinated by the messages our ancestors left behind. You see some hunger stones in the Elb River are permanently visible due to dams in the area.

A few are actually macab tourist attractions. You can walk right out and touch the carvings that were made hundreds of years ago. They attract thousands of visitors every year. But not all of these stones are quite what they seem. The one, which was carved in the nineteen thirties says, don't cry, girl, don't whine, spray when the field is dry, which sounds like a nice encouraging message for when your

crops are getting thirsty, right. Well, it would be except for the fact that this was actually the slogan for Sigma Lutine, a check brand that sold water pumps to farmers. Apparently whoever headed up advertising for the business thought that it would be a good idea to make a hunger stone billboard. That hey, maybe it was, because here we are today talking about it, almost one hundred years later. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com and Until next time, stay curious,