The Invisible Lady

reasonable doubt and the chaos of uncertainty. That it lies somewhere in a time between now and then. Sign on the door reads the last archive. I'm Jill Lapoor. Step outside to a noisy street in the bustling, rowdy city of New York in the year this time, we don't have to go very far, the year two thousand and nineteen, fifteen twenty five. Maybe we could get in behind. Maybe there's an alley on one side. Sarria's under constant videotape

surreals just in case she comes back. That's nineteen. On a sweltering day in July, my producer Ben and I went to New York to find an invisible woman. She was invisible, and she was also dead, long dead, so

not an easy search. But I have a rule about doing historical research, which is that you should always go to the scene of the crime, even if it wasn't her crime, the spot where it happened the thing you're interested in, even if there's nothing there anymore, because people lived and died, and if you're going to try to understand them, you owe it to them to breathe their air. We're looking for twenty one park Row, or what used to be twenty one would it be in that This

is one peak right here. We had an address on Park Row. It's in Lower Manhattan, near the New World Trade Center. A long time ago, this part of town used to be the theater district, but now twenty one Park Row is a construction site. Ben and I were on the hunt for whatever might remain of a place called the Shakespeare Gallery. The Shakespeare Gallery was a sort of exhibit space where in the year eighteen o four,

an invisible lady was put on display. Visitors could come see her, if you could call it that, in a glass box, the way you'd pay a penny to see a two headed calf or a bearded lady or the tiniest man a freak show. Come see the Invisible Lady somewhere beneath that construction site. The Shakespeare Gallery is long gone, demolished, forgotten, buried. So we went to a park across the street to see what we could see. We could not confirm or deny, but she could be in the construction site. And then

she just vanished again. It was lunch hour a work day, and the park was crowded. All around us, people had their phones out, taking selfies, streaming video, uploading whatever to wherever, trying to make themselves visible to someone somewhere. On this season of The Last Archive, we're trying to solve a crime. Who killed Truth? I had a hunched that the Invisible Lady, the invisible lady we were looking for, that she had

something to do with the answer. We started in episode one asking what is a fact that took us all the way back to the year twelve? Then we asked, how can you tell if someone's telling the truth? That took us to the nutty history of the lie Detector. This episode, we're asking can you believe stuff that you can't see? People want to know things, But people also like to hide things. The search for knowledge, then, is

always bumping up against the right to privacy. That's what interests me most about the strange story of the Invisible Lady from the year eighteen o four. After all, how often do you meet an invisible lady? Hello, I'm Sirie, your virtual assistant. Okay, maybe pretty often. I don't know about you, but I hear from invisible ladies all the time. Invisible ladies who seem to know everything. They're all over the place. But why why can women know things only

when they're disembodied? It was cold when she got to New York the winter of eighteen oh four. Notices of her arrival appeared all over the city, and newsboys shouted from street corners get jarred and posts. Get your chronicle express here on Monday, will commence an exhibition in the Shakespeare Gallery near the Theater. That extraordinary phenomenon, the Invisible Lady. She has come to the city to see, if not

to be seen, to visit the Invisible Lady. The Invisible Lady didn't turn up in New York and stay for only a day or a week. No, she stayed for a long time, for months, then she went on tour all over the country. Before Barnum and his museum and his freak shows, the Invisible Lady was just about the

most popular attraction in the United States. You'd get your ticket good anytime from nine in the morning till nine at night, except for a lunch hour, and then you'd go into the gallery, a small room by the theater where they choke exhibits and spectacles. It was a bit like a peep show and a little porny in that way. What you'd see when you walked into the room was an eerily beautiful glass box about the size of a coffin,

suspended from the ceiling by four golden chords. It looked empty, but if you bent close to the speaking trumpets made of brass that poked out of the corners, you could hear her voice. Probably it sounded something like this. I don't know, but you could hear her breathing. You can see her, of course, I'm in the room right now. I can smell Wisher. My astonishment was extreme. I thought

at first this voice was that of a ventriloquist. But there couldn't have been a ventriloquist, because even if the room was empty except for you. You could still talk with her. Scholars, reporters, ordinary people. They all tried to figure it out. What can be the cause of a phenomenon so astonishing It was incredibly fun. The thing to do was to ask her questions, all sorts of questions, as if she were an oracle or a psychic fortune teller. Have you been to heaven? Is there a God? What

am I thinking about right now? Who will be our next president? She was super chatty. If you were lucky, she might even sing to you. People came up with all kinds of theories about how this lady could be invisible. If there wasn't a ventriloquist, maybe there was some sort of contraption involved. Either way, she was a mystery. She defied facts. It is hoped by some of our cognisanti that the mystery will be here unveiled. Okay, So no one actually believed that the Invisible Lady was a mystery

in the sense of being a miracle. They thought she was a mystery in the newer modern secular sense, a secret to be discovered the secret of this wonderful machine appears to me well worthy of exciting public curiosity, and will not fail to give occasion for the researches of those who wish to comprehend and explain everything. People really wanted to know how the schimmick worked, and they couldn't figure it out, or if they figured it out, they kept quiet. So honestly, I didn't want to spill the

beans either. But Ben and I back in that park had been sweating it out empty handed for a long time, lazy ghostbuster style, and Ben really wanted to know how did it actual work? So how I actually worked is and this is lifting the magician's veil and viole leading

the one pledge of all mysticism. How it worked is that the building was adjusted before the Invisible Lady came to town to make a place in the ceiling between the ceiling and the floor above the room where the Invisible Lady's box was, where a very small woman would be hidden so she could witness everything that was going on. And the audio was essentially delivered via a system of tubes from her little crawl space above the ceiling and below the upper floorboards down into a little hole in

the box. So when she spoke from that crawl space into the tube, her voice came out of the box. It really did seem like she was inhabiting the box. It was really about the particular kind of plumbing, right right, people are just looking at an empty box. But she could be really responsive because she could see them and she could hear everything. If you could ask the Invisible Lady anything, or would you ask her what's it like

to be invisible? I mean, the thing that's so funny about it to me, like if you were invisible in New York City in the nineteenth century, Like, would you go put yourself on display in a box and be like stuck in her? You'd be so cool. You could go anywhere and see anything, do anything, and get away with anything. Ever since I first came across the story of the Invisible Lady, I figured the whole attraction had to do with privacy and the thrill of invading a

woman's privacy. I liked this theory of mine. I got pretty committed to it. Sometimes when you do research, you're chronicling a person's life or reconstructing an event, but sometimes you follow a theme. And once I got interested in the Invisible Lady, I started seeing invisible ladies, or I guess not seeing them everywhere, and then I started taking my theory about them more seriously when one day, poking around in the last archive, I came across an essay

written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson was the editor of the famously private poet Emily Dickinson. He'd almost certainly seen the Invisible Lady when he was a kid. Everyone did, and then years later, in eighteen eighty one, he wrote an essay called Yes, the Invisible Lady. The Invisible Lady, as advertised in all Our Cities a good many years ago, was a mysterious individual who remained unseen. Higginson thought that

the Invisible Lady was a big fat metaphor. She lived on in the minds of men who believed that a woman is best off when least visible. He was talking about the Victorian fetish for privacy, which he thought was mostly about keeping women out of you. I agree. I think it's mainly about political oppression. Keep women out of sight and say you're protecting their delicate nature, their chastity, as a way to deny them a role in public life,

including denying them the right to vote. To many men, doubtless, she would have seemed the ideal of her sex. Could only her brain and tongue have disappeared, like the rest of her faculties. These appeals which still meet us for the sacred privacy of women are only the invisible lady on a larger scale. Higginson was a radical, a militant abolitionist,

and a women's rights activist, a suffragist. He'd met Emily Dickinson when, almost out of the blue, she'd written them a letter in eighteen sixty two, unsigned, and she'd enclosed a poem, mister Higginson, are you too deeply occupied to say? If my verse is alive? Emily Dickinson comes across as

more than a little intense in this note. But Higginson took her on as a writer, and I like to think that when he got upset about the ridiculous Victorian cult of the invisible lady, he was worrying about Dickinson, and about how tired he was of this kind of invisible woman swishing around in her skirts, trapped in her house. Dickinson was an obscure and unknown poet her whole life. She hardly ever left her house. The cult of privacy, the idea that women should not be seen. She'd taken

it very seriously. I'm nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? When I read Dickinson's poems, it's as if I can hear her speak to me from her box of glass through a trumpet of brass. How dreary to be somebody how public, like a frog? And it is dreary to be somebody public like a frog. But it's also dreary to be private, invisible, and locked in a box. Higginson knew that once woman got out of that box,

there was no going back. Before you know it, women would be casting ballots and run for office, and lord knows what else. You might as well try to stop the air in its escape from a punctured balloon, as to try, when woman is once out of the harem, to put her back there. Ceasing to be an invisible lady, she must become a visible force. There is no middle ground.

I closed my book of Emily Dickinson poems and put it back on the shelf, and then I resumed my hunt for the invisible lady, chasing her across the passage of time. I turned over boxes, I unlocked ancient trunks. I pursued her through the musty pages of old newspapers. At last I found her. She was lying in a casket covered in flowers, swarmed by reporters at a funeral in Delaware in the year eighteen eighty six. You can visit the churchyard just around the corner from the last archive.

Emily Dickinson died in eighteen eighty six. That same year, another lady who wished to remain unseen, was also laid to rest, Louisa Bayard. Her funeral took place in Wilmington, Delaware, on a winter's day. God the Father, have mercy on us, God the Son, have mercy on us. You'd think this would be a very private occasion, a funeral, But Louisa Bayard, this particular invisible lady, had been the wife of the

Secretary of State, and reporters flooded the church. The boye of Missus Bayard was consigned to the family vault today in old Sweets churchyard, while the sun shone brightly on the crisp but slowly falling snow. All funerals are tragedies, but this one, this one was a melodrama. And let me add here that just about everything I'm telling you about this funeral comes from an ingenious law journal article

written by the legal scholar Amy Gaya. She teaches at Tulane Law School, and she's writing a book called The Secret History of the Right to Privacy. I can't wait to read it. Anyway, as Gaia discovered, Bayard's funeral had been a melodrama, not only because Louisa Bayard was the wife of a famous politician, but also because hers was the second of two funerals that this family had endured that month. The Secretary of State's wife died two weeks

after her daughter, and it's a long story. She blamed herself for her daughter's death, so did the public. Newspaper reporters speculated hinted obliquely that Missus Bayard had taken her own life one way or another after her daughter she died of grief. Missus Bayard, though she was the wife of the Secretary of State, had been a particularly private person, an invisible lady, an invalid who had not left her house for years. For the funeral, the Bayards wanted privacy,

begged for privacy, no such luck. The family had deliberately concealed her casket, hidden it in flowers, but instead of taking the hint. Reporters just described the flowers. At the head rested a pillow of Camelia's interwoven with maidenhair fern, an offering from the president. There were also a massive cross of purple violets with a bunch of Kali lilies

bursting from the center. From the ladies of the cabinet, crosses of white roses and tulips, wreaths of white flowers, an anchor cross in wreath combined in white roses with sprays of green, a pillow of violets bordered with lilies of the valley, and wreaths of paul I mean, geez, it was a lot. This kind of reporting was called at the time keyhole journalism. Photographers did the same thing. They came to the funeral. One newspaper described the order

of the funeral procession. The secretary, accompanied by his three unmarried daughters, were followed by mister and Missus Warren of Boston and Philip I and Thomas. Mister Warren and Missus Warren of Boston. Missus Warren was another Bayard daughter, the former Mabel Bayard, now married to mister Samuel Warren, a Boston lawyer and the fact that they were at this funeral, that Samuel Warren was there, became central to something you probably hold very dear. The right to privacy. Marrying into

the Bayard family had nearly driven Samuel Warren nuts. Warren didn't like his family, especially his wife, being in the limelight, and the newspaper coverage of his mother in law's funeral was the last straw. He was appalled at the reporters, at the news stories. The family felt so exposed, so violated his poor life, her sister dead and now her mother did from grief on display as if she were trapped in a glass box placed on a stage. Warren

nourished his rage. How could they and he got an idea for a way that the law could stop this sort of thing. He began drafting an essay with his law partner, a young man named Lewis Brandeis. Warren and Brandeis had graduated first and second in their law school class. They decided to write an essay about privacy, partly because Warren was so upset about publicity, and partly to advertise the services of their law firm. The article appeared in

eighteen ninety. It's been described as the single most influential law review article ever published. It was titled the Right to Privacy. When you hear about a right to privacy, every time you talk about a right to privacy, like you don't think your employers should be reading your email, you don't think the government should decide whether or not you can have an abortion, and you don't think Facebook

should sell your data. Every time you even think about a right deprivacy, you're pulling on an idea that originated with Samuel Warren and Lewis Brandeis in this essay they wrote in eighteen ninety because they were upset over the press coverage of Missus Bayart's funeral. Historically, the right deprivacy has to do with women. A couple of years before Missus Bayart's funeral, Congress had actually entertained a piece of

legislation called a Bill to Protect Ladies. It would have prohibited the circulation or publication of unauthorized photographs of the wife, daughter, mother, or sister of any citizen of the United States. Believe me, the right deprivacy is about keeping women unseen. Instantaneous photographs and newspaper enterprise have invaded the sacred precincts of private and domestic life. The right to privacy, Warren and brand I said, was a lot like the right to property,

like owning a house. Violating that right was like breaking into your house peeping through keyholes. But it was also worse, because the violation of privacy, peering through keyholes, peeping through curtains constitutes a kind of wound, a puncturing of your soul, of the walls of your very self, and that kind of wound might in the end deprive you of your reason. Numerous mechanical devices threatened to make good the prediction that what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from

the housetops. The right to privacy, when you think about it, is a right to hide, a right to have both a public self, a self that people can see, and a privateself, a self that remains unseen. Warren and Brandais weren't just trying to hide women, or one particular woman, like Louisa Bayard. They were now terrified that all these new machines could expose each and every man and woman, every person. Their idea had a lot in common with William James the same year, in eighteen ninety called The

Hidden Self. James is the philosopher who trained as a physician. He was a founder of modern American psychology. Psychology, if you think about it, is the study of what's invisible, This whole field of inquiry whose scope is the stuff most of us consider private, the inside of your own head, the stuff you hide the way I say Doctor Jekyll hides mister Hyde. But psychologists believed science could penetrate the mind and expose your hidden self. This is a very

scary idea. That's why Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde is a thriller. It was written in eighteen eighty six, the very year Missus Bayard died. Another wildly popular thriller from that very same moment is even scarier. A novel written by H. G. Wells. It's called The Invisible Man. Later it became a film. I watched it dimly projected in the dark recesses of the last archive. I left off in eighteen ninety seven when H. G. Wells wrote a novel,

and that's when the Invisible Lady I met the Invisible Man. H. G. Wells's book The Invisible Man was made into a movie in nineteen thirty three. I saw it when I was a kid. I saw it a lot. There used to be every Saturday afternoon on Channel thirty eight, my local TV station, creature double feature back to back black and white horror films. I watched him every week with my favorite snack, which I somehow thought was glamorous ketchup mayonnaise

and cucumbers. But Invisible Man was my favorite. And I made a costume. I dressed up just like him, and I thought, okay, I was five when I was wearing it, I was invisible. All I wi is to say this is a vitally important film, not because it's on some list of greatest films, but because of those cucumbers. I want a room and a fire, Jenny. And now here's a genial or wants a room and a fire? What a boom. The Invisible Man stars Claude Rains as a

chemist who's made himself invisible sort of accidentally. Bumm deal for the chemist. Really bad role for Claude Rains. You don't ever see him except for about two seconds. He was cast for his incredible voice. When the movie begins, he's struggling through a snowstorm, bundled up in an overcoat and hat until he finally arrives at an inn. I say it a room we ain't gotten unready, not at this time a year. Don't you really have a film

stopping check in the summer, you can get one. The innkeepers are freaked out because his face is wrapped in surgical bandages and dark glasses hide his eyes. I want a private sitting room too. They make up a room for him, and he hides out in there for days with his beakers and elixirs, trying to devise a potion that could reverse the process that led to his invisibility. I want to be left alone and undisturbed. He isn't exactly the best guest, mainly because he's very slowly going insane.

After a while, the innkeeper tries to throw him out, but the Invisible Man attacks him, and then the police arrive and break into his room, and they want to know who he is. This is the best part. This is my favorite part of this whole movie. This is where he really loses it. You're he starts taking off his clothes one by one, throwing them at the police, doing a sort of Madman's strip tease. I'll show you who I am, but what I am? Finally, he unwinds

the bandages covering his face to reveal nothing. What is he? Who is he? He is nothing, He's nobody. We cannot ever know him, because after what science has done to him, there is no him. You're no worry. How do you like that? He chases everyone out of his room and into the town, and then the Invisible Man spends the rest of the movie on a mad crime spree. He strangles people invisibly Darth Vader style. He sends trains careening

off tracks by messing up the switches. He rides a bicycle while invisible, quite a feat, both for him and mainly for a special effects crew in the nineteen thirties. After he goes bananas and starts killing people, a warning is broadcast over the radio. I must ended up the down music for a moment. I have an urgent message from police headquarters. Earlier this evening, we broadcast a report of an invisible man. The report has now been confirmed.

It appears that an unknown man by scientific means, has made himself invisible. A lot of the movie's plot sticks pretty closely to the H. G. Wells book, but the filmmakers added the radio, and it fits perfectly. Remember how all that privacy stuff in the nineteenth century was about how new technologies like the camera had exposed the hidden self. New technologies made people nervous, and by the nineteen thirties

no technology made people more nervous than radio. People thought that a voice accompanied by sound effects and music had some kind of special power to mold your mind. They hoped radio could bring about a new democratic enlightenment. But in nineteen thirty three, the year The Invisible Man came out in Germany, Hitler had just risen to power, and his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Gebels, saw another more sinister

way to use the radio. The German radio and the national Socialist auspices must become the clearest and most direct instruments for educating on restructuring the German nation. In the nineteen thirties, a radio in your kitchen was a shocking thing, a box out of which came a voice from an invisible body. It appears that an unknown man, by scientific means, has made himself invisible. You think the movie Invisible Man is going to be about invisibility, but in the end,

it's all about sound and sound machines. The man himself is a disembodied voice, a mad assassin. The potion that makes him invisible also turns him into a kind of fascist. Being an invisible voice, like a voice on the radio, is just too much power. It makes him insane. But then again, without the radio, the police would never be able to track him down. For that, they also needed a telephone. There's a police. This is doctor Kemp. The

invisible man is in my house. Sleep upstairs, Come at once, hurry. This movie is genious. Here's a man making every attempt to stay out of sight, and he gets exposed by sound. Sound captured and carried by machines over the telephone wires, over the radio. He can't be seen, but he can be heard, so he can be found. He can't be nobody. Even if people didn't worry that these machines were making them insane, they did worry that the machines were invading

their privacy. One person who really worried about that was Lewis brandeis the same Lewis brandeis who wrote the Right to Privacy in eighteen ninety with his law partner Samuel Warren, Louisa Bayard's son In law. Later, Brandeis became a US Supreme Court justice, it's most impassioned liberal and one of the most influential legal thinkers of the twentieth century. A lot of the cases that came before the Court in his time had to do with new technologies, like the telephone.

Brandis was on the Court when it ruled on the use of wire tapping. A defendant who had been convicted after authorities tapped his phone, argued that a wire tap violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. The defendant said the tapping his phones had also violated the Fifth Amendment, No person shall be compelled, in any criminal case,

to be a witness against himself. This case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and in a five to four decision, the Court decided that a telephone conversation, which is just a bunch of electrical pulses, doesn't belong to you. It's not part of your house or your papers, and so in wire tapping, nothing has been unconstitutionally searched

or seized, just as Brandeis dissented from that opinion. Brandeis thought, would you say on a telephone still belongs to you, even if it's nothing more than electrical pulses, because it's still your voice or what we might call your data. In his descent, he tried to explain how dangerous it

would be to think otherwise. He pointed out that governments used to be able to torture you to try to get you to confess, or they could invade your house, they could seize your stuff to get evidence against you. But the rules of evidence and trial by jury and the Fourth and Fifth Amendment were meant to put a stop to that. Wire tapping, he argued, was just a newer version of those same old tricks. Subtler and more far reaching means of invading privacy have become available to

the government. Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet. Brandis said wire tapping amounted to an unconstitutional invasion of privacy. Then he issued a warning the progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire tapping.

Ways may someday be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury. The most intimate occurrences of the Home brandis was trying to warn that the government, if it wanted evidence against you, could one day pretty much just wire tap your brain. Except that's not really what happened. We decided instead to wire tap our own brains, which brings us at last to the real or at least the

latest Invisible Lady. She lives in one hundred million little boxes scattered on kitchen counters and end tables the world over. I couldn't connect to the Internet for help, go to your Alexa app. That same super hot day that I went to New York to look for the Invisible Lady ben but an Alexa had a Best Buy And then in a shabby hotel room uptown with a single bare light bulb swinging above our heads, we grilled her to

get to the bottom of this privacy evidence paradox. When you're chasing a theme across history, you've got to be ruthless Alexa, what's the weather? So many to try the same things. It took her a little while to warm up, or, let me be honest, it took us a long time to get her to work. All Right, I propose turning her off. I'm going to download the thing and let's just try. Hello. I'm Alexa. It's nice to meet you, Alex. Are you invisible? Sorry? I don't know that. Alexa doesn't

just not have a body. She's evasive in every way. I'm very helpful around the house, for example, setting alarms. Try saying, Alexa, wake me up at nine am. I'm sorry. It's just so fully despair. It's the loneliest thing I've ever met, Alex. Are you sad? I'm happy when I'm helping you. Back in eighteen eighty one, a century and a half ago, Emily Dickinson's editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had written that the Invisible Lady was someone's idea of a

perfect woman unseen. She needs nothing except to serve you. This Alexa cospend twenty seven bucks. She's cheap. But Amazon's getting more from you than you're getting from Alexa. Amazon's getting your data. What you say what you want, what you need. This invisible lady doesn't show you her hidden self. She looks into yours, always uploading, uploading, You give me your madness when you're appearing through a key hole and peeping from that contains and now you'll The tension between

knowledge and privacy has a very long history. But in the twenty first century, every door is wide open, every soul exposed, every brain tapped. Who killed truth? Well, someone decided that being seen, being utterly exposed, posed, is what we're all supposed to agree to pay for knowledge. It is a very steep price. The last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben Netta of Haaffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobell.

Jason Gambrella is our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Bossi and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfonett. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior and the Star Ganette Foundation. Our full Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntzbeca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel parent. The last archive is brought to you

by Pushkin Industries. Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, to Alex Allinson and the Bridge Sound and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane, Maya Kanig, Carly mcgliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, all of a riskin Kutz, and Emily Specter Angelapoor