The Tech Pioneers

It could be an entirely new idea, or it could be refining a concept to a point where everyone treats it as if it were a brand new idea. So today we're going to talk about some of the technologies that gave us abilities and opportunities that before we hadn't even imagined were possible. And I thought it would start with one that's near and dear to my heart, the Victor Talking Machine. Not that I own a Victor Talking machine,

and I do not have one of these antiques. As old as I am, this is way before my time, but it's an important invention, I would argue, not just because it would lead to the modern turntable and the modern album, but it would completely shape society and culture. So our story really starts back around eighteen seventy seven with Thomas Edison. Now, if you wanted to be really picky, you would have to go even further back and start

going to stuff like the telegraph. But if we keep doing that, we're going to eventually end up in the Stone Age, and we don't have that kind of time, So we're gonna actually begin with old Tommy Boy Edison. So he and many of the people working for his lab had been working on a device that could potentially record the sound playing through a telephone so that it would be possible to play that back later. This experimentation

led to the cylindrical phonogra. Now, this gadget had a diaphragm that would flex as it encountered sounds, so you would talk into like a trumpet essentially, and it would cause this diaphragm to move, and that would move a pointed stylus against a turning metal cylinder covered in tinfoil, doing these sort of vertical grooves in this tinfoil coated cylinder. So Edison's version actually had a secondary stylus and a secondary diaphragm for playback, so you had one set to

record and another set to play it back. So you would set this playback stylus on the grooves carved by the recording stylus. You would again have the cylinder rotate and you would get to hear the recorded sound. It was faint, and the cylinders weren't terribly resilient, nor were they easy to manufacture. They would switch to other materials besides tenfoil and use things like wax, but still not great. You could, however, now record sound for posterity, which was huge.

The ephemeral came less, so I wouldn't say permanent, because these cylinders were also delicate and they could only be played back a certain number of times before the quality of the recording would degrade to a point where you couldn't understand what it was. You know what the original audio was. So while Edison's invention had made it possible records sound for later playback, it wasn't practical. The cylinders

were really delicate. They weren't suitable for mass manufactures, so it was very slow to produce them, and other inventors would come along to make some refinements that would usher in a new way to experience audio, and those inventors were Emil Berliner and Eldridge Johnson. But let's start with Berlinner. So he was born in eighteen fifty one in Hanover, Germany, So I guess I should say Berlina, since there's no

hard r in German. He immigrated to the United States in eighteen seventy and he became interested in engineering, and so he and Edison would actually end up in a patent battle over microphone technology before Berlinner turned his attention to creating a disc based record player, so like a

flat disc as opposed to a vertical cylinder. So like Edison's cylinder based phonograph, his record player would use a stylist traveling through a groove, this time with horizontal grooves rather than vertical grooves, and it would play back sound, but this groove would be on a flat disc instead of on a cylinder, and the disc had a distinct

advantage because Berlinner could mass produce recordings. He could make a master recording and then use that to press copies, so you could suddenly make lots of copies in a fraction of the time it would take you if you were trying to produce this using Thomas Edison's cylinder based phonograph. So Berlinner's invention had one little drawback, well more than one,

but one distinct one. To power it, the listener would have to turn a crank, and you'd have to keep turning the crank in order to provide the rotational power to keep the record turning. So Berlinner wanted to find a way to motorize the turntable, both to free up the listener and to maybe create a slightly more uniform rotational speed, because if you're changing your speed at how you're cranking the crank, then the record's going to turn

at different speeds and it may sound funny. So Berliner met Eldritch, Johnson, and Johnson suggested a wind up spring motor system, so you would still have to wind up the device, which at this point was called the gramophone, but then the motor would take care of the rotation for you until you needed to wind it up again. That is now. The Gramophone would go on to be a huge success, and the model would stand for future turntables.

They would all become disc based turntables. But more importantly for our story, it meant that customers could purchase a record and have a copy of music to play at home whenever they liked. It's pretty hard for us to imagine it now. Right, we have our ability to access pretty much any media on demand from devices ranging from smartphones to televisions to refrigerators for goodness sakes, But this invention, the VIC talking machine or gramophone had a massive impact,

a huge change. No longer did you have to go to a performance venue and listen to musicians play something one time and then you may never hear that again. You certainly won't hear the same performance. It would be different, even if they played it back to back. Now you could enjoy a specific performance over and over and over

again from the comfort of your home. And these days, with vinyl albums enjoying a resurgence and popularity, we can thank Berliner's ingenuity for forging a path that we still follow today. That is a very powerful invention. And again, this invention would have a massive impact on culture and the way music would develop and the way music companies would come to be. The very format of vinyl albums

would have a big impact. Right, you would have your forty fives versus your full length long play vinyl albums. It was really a huge moment in tech, this development of the Victor talking machine and having access to recorded music again, such a huge change in culture. It's hard for us to take into account these days because we can take for granted the fact that we can access

music whenever we like, but that wasn't always the case. Now, on a related note, let's talk about an invention that wasn't a physical gadget, but more of an innovation in how to encode data and how that in turn created an entirely new market. So I'm talking about the Motion Picture or Moving Picture Expert Group Audio Layer three, better known as the MP three. Now, this story dates back

to the late nineteen eighties. There was a need to encode audio data in such a way that you could have a relatively high level of quality, but you didn't want to have all the information that would come along with a raw audio file because the files were huge. And the reason for this was that data transmission throughout

the nineteen eighties was limited. You didn't have gigafiber connections back then or anything like that, so transmitting a digital audio file would take a very long time unless you found some way to compress it to reduce it in size. The MP three standard would create a compression method, and the way it did this was really innovative. The MP three compression rates come to us courtesy of psychoacoustic masking,

which sounds scary but it's not. It's actually means that the inventors of the MP three wanted to reduce digital audio file sizes largely by eliminating sounds that humans aren't likely to hear in the first place. So, for example, if you're listening to something and there is a very loud noise and it's followed immediately by a quiet sound, you're not going to hear the quiet sound. You'll only

perceive the loud noise. So that means that if you were encoding an audio file into an MP three and it detected a quiet noise following a very loud no well, it would essentially eliminate the quiet noise data because you wouldn't be able to hear it anyway. Why keep it

in there if you can't perceive it. As another example, we generally described the range of human hearing for frequencies in you know, if we're talking about like pitches From around twenty hurts to twenty killer hurts or twenty thousand herts in other words, so that's the lowest of the low to the highest of the high that humans typically

can perceive. Obviously, there's always exceptions, so for pitches lower than twenty hurts or pitches that are higher than twenty killer hurts, we usually can't perceive them, at least not through hearing, though we might feel them, like if you have a fifteen hertz sound playing at a very high volume. You may not hear it, but you might feel it. And as we get older, we also typically lose some

of this range of hearing, usually in the upper range. Well, that means that if there are any sounds in a recording that are outside the range of human hearing, you can theoretically just lose that data too, because humans wouldn't be able to hear those sounds. Right now, this does

get a little whibbly wobbly. There are arguments about how imperceptible sounds might actually affect the stuff we can here, but when you're trying to save space by compressing a digital file, you got to make some hard choices anyway. The MP three method is actually something of a sliding scale, So when you're encoding an MP three, you can actually

choose how you want to optimize the file. Maybe you want to really conserve space, so you get really brutal with the settings, which is going to affect the audio quality of the file. You know, it might sound like something that's been recorded off a fairly weak radio signal, or maybe you want to optimize it for quality. Well, then you can choose to have the MP three be a pretty close to the original quality of the recorded audio. You're just not going to conserve as much file space

that way. So usually we aim for a sweet spot in the middle where the hit to quality isn't typically that perceptible. I mean, some people argue they can pick it out nine times out of one hundred, and I guess it depends on the quality of the encoding. But the key is that we do get the benefit of a smaller file size this way, which makes it easier

to transmit these files. And the MP three format would enable the creation of MP three players, then turn leads to the creation of the Apple iPod and a spoiler alert, that won't be the only Apple product that we'll talk about in this list, but not only would the iPod introduce digital music players to the mainstream at large. It would also help secure my career. I mean, this is a podcast, right, tech Stuff's a podcast? Well, where do we get the word podcast? We get it from the

Apple iPod. Even though the iPod was not the first digital media player on the market, right, they weren't the innovators in that sense. They just made a product that really took off. Apple's amazing product design, coupled with the very savvy development of iTunes and the iTunes store, would secure its place in history. It actually take a couple of generations of the iPod for that particular invention to really take off. Now, the development of the MP three

had a massive impact on culture. In the late nineties, we saw the rise of peer to peer file sharing networks that were largely trafficking in MP three files, and yes, a lot of those files, perhaps most of those files were shared without permission from the copyright holder, which meant we were then in the era of digital piracy. The MP three also created new challenges. For example, it created challenges and how artists can expect to be paid for

their work. This was really complicated by the shift to streaming media. But the digital file formats raised questions as to how much an artist should receive per sale, right because you weren't talking about sales of albums necessarily, you

might be talking about specific tracks. And while there were you know, there's a history of singles that dates back to the earliest days of records, but it wasn't like you could buy an album track by track in the past, or just by you know, two or three tracks off an album. That was not possible before this digital file format really unless you just lucked out with the singles. So it would end up shining a light on the music industry's economics, and that gets pretty hairy hit times.

But that's a matter for a different kind of episode. So the MP three certainly deserves to be on this list of inventions that would break the mold or perhaps create an all new mold. And that's just scratching the surface of how MP three's have really made a change in how we experience audio. But let's go even further

back for our next invention. Now, like a lot of innovations, it can actually be tricky to say definitively this is the first of its kind, but broadly speaking, historians agree that George Bauschamp deserves credit for the next entry on our list, and that is for the electrically amplified pickup. Now I'm not talking about pickup trucks. I'm talking about what makes an electric guitar and electric guitar. It's the pickup.

So the pickup's job is to convert the energy from a vibrating guitar string into an electric signal that, once it's amplified, can then be sent to a speaker and then play back the tone of that vibrating string. And Beauchamp gets the credit for making the first one. He built it into a guitar, and eventually this guitar became an actual model of guitar that was sold. It was called the Rickenbacher Electro A twenty two. This first hit the market way back in nineteen thirty four. So how

do these things work? What's going on? Well, it has to do with magnetic fields and electrical charges. So we know there's a special relationship between electrical fields and magnetic fields, right, That's why we talk about electro magnetism. So, for example, if you run a conductive wire through a magnetic field, the magnetic field will induce an electrical current to flow

through the conductive wire. Similarly, if you wrap a conductive wire around something like an iron nail and then you run an electric current through the wire, then you will generate a magnetic field and you will have an electro

magnet on your hands. Well, a guitar pickup typically consists of one or more magnets, though not always with conductive wire wrapped around them, and the permanent magnet or magnets generates a magnetic field, and the guitar strings made of material like steel and nickel or brass or bronze, will disrupt that magnetic field when you strum them, and it induces an electrical current to flow through the wire, and that current will correspond to the frequency of the vibrating

string or strings. So if you're playing the E string, then it's going to produce an E because the frequency is going to create an electrical current that corresponds with that E. Note. Again, you have to pass the current through an amplifier, amplifying the signal, and then it gets sent to a speaker and then you get the replication.

But it's brilliant and it was actually necessary at the time because in the nineteen thirties when Beauchamp made this innovation, Big jazz were becoming popular and guitars were seen as useful instruments, but they could really only provide a little flavor and fullness to the sound because they were far too quiet against the rest of the band's instruments in order to stand out and be really versatile, So amplification was necessary to get guitars to have enough oomph to

really stand out and give more opportunities to explore an experiment with music. The invention of the pickup opened up new doors for musicians to make new sounds with guitars, and it led to huge innovations in jazz and rock and roll, tons of other genres, my favorites being like glam rock, punk rock, new wave and garage rock. And then we would get a lot of experimentations with the pickups themselves. This meant we would end up with guitars

that had very distinct sounds to them. Right, Brian May's guitars don't sound like anyone else's guitars because he wound his pickups himself, at least in his early guitars he did. So you might be talking about like big brands like Fender and Gibson, or he might be talking about competitors that have their own distinct elements that set them apart. And it's all due to the invention of these pickups

along with the construction of the guitars themselves. So to me, like the electric pickup really ushered in an entire new way of making music and expressing yourself, something that just was not possible before. So I had to put it on the list. Plus, like, I started playing guitar during the pandemic, and now I have two Fender guitars. I've got a stratocaster and a telecaster, and I also have a bass guitar. So I got pulled in y'all. And

let me tell you. When you get a guitar and you start learning those chords and you get your first like amplifier and pedal, like maybe adding a little effects to that sound as you're processing the signal that's being sent to the amplifier. Wow, it's just such an incredible feeling. I wouldn't say I achieved rock god status, but it sure is fun to play with. Okay, that's a good start for a list of incredible pioneering technologies. We've got several more to talk about before we get to that.

We're going to take a quick break to thank Nissan. All right, So we're back. And recently I did an episode about the history of the digital camera. Now I don't want to go through that entire episode again, but I do think it's important to acknowledge the development of two different types of sensors, the charge coupled device aka the CCD and the complementary metal oxide semiconductor or sea moss.

Both of these trace their history to the nineteen sixties and both are important in technology that we use today. The first out of the gate was actually sea moss. Researchers at Fairchild's Research and Development Laboratory created the C MOSS sensor. They build a semiconductor, which I'll remind you semiconductor is something that under certain conditions operates as an electrical conductor and in other conditions it operates as an

electrical insulator. This type of semiconductor was incredibly useful for low power applications because it would draw next to no power if it was just in standby mode. But we're more concerned with a subset of sea moss sensors, namely image sensors. So these sensors take light in the form of photons and they transform the energy of light into a different kind of energy, electrical current. The sensors consists of photodiodes and these correspond to the pixels in a

digital image. The intensity of light hitting each photodiode determines the amplitude of electrical charge that each photodiode generates. This in turn goes through an analog to digital converter to be processed into a digital image. There's a lot more to it than that, but you get the general idea.

With sea MAS sensors, each photodiode has its own amplifier, so the photodiode captures the light, converts it to electrical current, It goes through an amplifier for that specific photodiode and then continues on through the path to the analog to digital converter. That's important because the charge couple device or CCD works in a slightly different way. Now. It followed in nineteen sixty nine, so it was the second of the two sensors to be developed, and it came out

of the work of scientists who are at Bell Labs. So, like a sea MAS sensor, the CCD also consists of a grid or mosaic of photodiodes, but the CCD can have as few as just one amplifier, So instead of each photodiode wired to its own amplifier, the overall CCD stores a collection of charges. Then it shifts those charges off that are then amplified and processed, and they're shifted row by row if you think of it as a grid, right, So you shift everything over one step up and then

you process that and go it through the amplifier. Then you do it again and again until you've transferred the entire grid of charges. The reason why this is important is because using just the one amplifier the one pathway, reduces the amount of noise generated through electrical leakage, which leads to better images. You don't have problems like striation in your digital photos, at least not to the level

that you would with old seamos digital cameras. Now, in more recent years, improvements in seams technology has really changed the scene. So now seamos has come to dominate technologies like VR and AR headsets, and that's due in part to the fact that seamos is far more power efficient than CCD. It's also far less expensive, so it helps

bring costs down. But these innovations led to the development of digital cameras and digital headsets, and that also means they had a huge impact on an establish industry, namely the film industry. And you want to talk about disruptive. Digital cameras were incredibly disruptive to the film industry and still are today. So I'm talking about film as in motion pictures as well as film as in the physical medium that we used to depend upon if we were

taking photos or filming something. Digital photography would have a massive impact on that industry, particularly once it became standard for our phones to have digital image sensors in them. That was truly a game changer. Now we're entering into an era of mixed reality headsets that use these types of image sensors to help interpret and recontextualize the visual world around us, like we're able to augment our experience, and in large part it's due to the fact that

we have these types of sensors. It's hard to put into words how powerful this is now. At the moment, we're still in an era where the tech is pretty expensive for things like VR and mixed reality, and therefore it is very much limited to a niche audience, right, not everybody has a mixed reality headset, But the potential of this technology to really augment our experiences is really mind blowing. We may not ever reach the levels of something like Ready Player one, but we're already seeing the

tech implemented into everything from smart glasses to car displays. Now, if we're talking about tech that forged a new path, I think we have to give a nod to Doug Ingelbart and his team at what was at the time called the Stanford Research Institute. These days we call it SRI International. So back in nineteen sixty four, Inglebart presented a technology that would have a gargantuan impact on computers and specifically computer interfaces, and it was when he introduced

the humble computer mouse. Now, the original computer mouse was inside a little wooden chassis and had wheels to allow you to move it across the table top. It wasn't like based on a little track ball, but rather these

little wheels. It also had a single button to use to select things and using a mouse single Bart showed how it was easy to convert movements across an x y axis in one plane like the horizontal plane as in your desktop, and to have that connect to the movements of a cursor on a different plane, you know, a vertical display. And if you think about that ver

a second, I think it's really remarkable. We take it for granted today, right, We take it for granted that if you have your hand on a mouse, you're moving it around the table, you're moving a cursor across your screen. But you got to remember that that's a flip of a plane of ninety degrees. Today, it's second nature to use a computer mouse. We don't even consider for a moment that we're making movements along one set of axes in order to control elements on a totally different set

of axis. It's just natural. But there was a time before the computer mouse where that wasn't a foregone conclusion. Now, the computer mouse, along with the graphical user interface or gy or guy, would define computer interfaces in the future, though it would admittedly take a few decades. The first personal computers focused on text and keyboard inputs. Right. They didn't have a mouse, they didn't have graphic user interfaces.

But the Apple Macintosh and the birth of Microsoft Windows would usher in a new era of computer interfaces and control systems, and it's stuck around ever since. Even in the era of touch based interfaces, the history of the mouse is still there. We still have guy phones and such, so even in devices that don't have a computer mouse, the impact of the mouse is still felt because the design of the interface dates back to when we were using a computer mouse. But you know, talking about guy

phones is fun. Now. I'm fascinated with the longevity of the computer mouse, while the invention dates back to the nineteen sixties. For personal computers, we can really point to nineteen eighty four as being the real beginning with the debut of the Macintosh computer. But considering all the other methods that we have to interface with computers, from gestures to voice, it is telling to me that the keyboard and who else combo is still the dominant method, at

least for desktop computers, which is really saying something. Now, I think there's no better way to conclude this episode than with a discussion about the iPhone. Now, let's be clear, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. It wasn't the first device to even have a multi touch display. There were prototypes that were out there that already were working in that field. However, it was the first smartphone to bring the smartphone form factor to the mainstream public. Before

the iPhone, smartphones were more utilitarian. They were relegated to folks like executives and early adopters who had deep pockets. They typically had physical keyboards, and they stressed function over form.

The iPhone would change all of that. So when Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone back in early two thousand and seven, he emphasized how it was the combination of a widescreen iPod would touch controls, a quote revolutionary mobile phone end quote, and a break through Internet communications device. And perhaps at the time you might be forgiven for thinking some of this was marketing hyperbole, right, it was

all razzle dazzle. But I would say that calling it a breakthrough Internet communications device turned out to be a massive understatement. The iPhone would transform the Web as we know it, and I actually saw this unfold in real time because in early two thousand and seven, I started my job at HowStuffWorks dot com, which is a website dedicated to explaining the mysteries of the universe one topic at a time. I started just a month after Steve

Jobs had unveiled the iPhone. He did so in January ninth of two thousand and seven, and my first day was February fifteenth, two thousand and seven, but the phone wouldn't actually launch until that summer. It launched on June twenty ninth, so it still had six months to go before it would come out, So we had no clue at the time that it was going to change everything.

But that launch started a trend, and that trend was that lots of people would end up buying a smartphone, and if it wasn't an iPhone, then it might be an Android device, because those came out the following year in two thousand and eight, or you know, maybe they were one of those poor folks who ended up with a Windows phone. I say poor folks because Windows phones just didn't stick around very much. They weren't very well supported,

they had a very small user base. But the point I'm making is that the consumer smartphone era had arrived and it meant that people were shifting their behavior. So instead of using desktop or laptop computers to access the web, more folks were using their mobile devices. But that presented a major challenge to website developers. The design and layout of web pages often didn't mesh well with the mobile experience.

Either everything would appear to be far too small, or navigating the page was just way too clunky and required too much swiping and dragging your finger on the screen. The change in behaviors necessitated a change in design practices for the entire web. It was clear that if you wanted to remain real event on the web, you needed to make sure your website was optimized for different methods

of accessing that site, including mobile phones. So companies spent millions of dollars in order to catch up, and there were entire careers that came into being as a result of this, with new generations of web developers specializing and optimization. Beyond this change, which I assure you was enough to justify putting the iPhone on this list, Apple's smartphone would

lead to other massive transformations. So having a digital camera incorporated into the design of the iPhone would mean that you could leave your normal camera at home and just rely on your smartphone to snap a pick or even video. The evolution of streaming media would mean you wouldn't even have to carry a standalone digital media player. You could

just listen to your music on your smartphone. While the iPhone and other smartphones might not be superior to these individual gadgets, the convenience of having just a single device that did it all really made up for it. The rival of the App Store was another massive shift, again thanks to Apple's iPhone. We used to talk about programs back in the day. We don't really say the word

programmed that much anymore. Now. We talk about applications innovation in the app space, where developers figured out new ways to leverage smartphone features like geolocation, data or connectivity. They really opened up opportunities like never before. I mean, billion dollar companies emerged out of these opportunities, and while not all of them would stick around, some would change our lives. So I'm excited to see what other devices in my lifetime will make this kind of huge impact, some of

which we may not notice until after the fact. So is it possible that Apple will pull it off again? Is it possible that the vision pro will one day join a list like this one? Or is it going to take some other huge leap for that kind of technology to grow beyond early adopters who have big old wallets and what other innovations are going to stand out as game changers. Can't wait to find out. To me, that's one of the really exciting things about covering technology.

I like talking about improvements that happen over time and the gradual evolution of technologies as well, but it's really exciting to zero in on a specific technology that would ultimately have a massive impact on us, either directly or indirectly. And I really do believe that the ones I've mentioned today fall into that category. Well that's it for this episode.

Thanks again to Nissan for sponsoring us to explore this world of pioneering technology, and I'm sure I'll do more episodes in the future talking about other examples, because this is just a small collection. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit thee heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.