by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The TV show I’ve been
wanting to comment on since it aired last Wednesday was the final episode in
the Breakthrough series on PBS: “The
Smartphone,” which was actually an exploration of long-distance communication
in general. It began with various visual systems for communication used by the
ancient Romans, who in order to win their imperialist battles had to be able to
give and receive orders over long distances, and in particular a mathematician
named Polybius who managed to enclose the entire Roman alphabet (the one we use
today and in which I’m writing this) in a box of 25 squares, five across and
five down. (He got the 26-letter alphabet into 25 squares by using the same box
for “I” and “J.”) With this system — really an ancestor of semaphores — he was able
to communicate a message by having the sender hold up his hands with fingers
raised, and by counting the number of figures on each hand the receiver could
look up what letter that represented in Polybius’ square. Obviously the
drawback was the length of time it takes to spell out a message one letter at a
time! From there the show jumped all the way to the 1830’s and the familiar
tale of Samuel F. B. Morse, who was in Washington, D.C. making the family a lot
of money painting a particularly prestigious portrait while his wife was back
home in New York having their third child. Alas, Mrs. Lucretia Morse died in
childbirth and Samuel was broken-hearted not only by the loss of his wife but
the fact that it took him a full week to receive the news. From this Morse
determined to figure out a way to send messages virtually instantaneously via
electricity, and within 20 years or so the telegraph was a national fixture and
the whole nation was “wired” to send and receive telegraph messages (though
they still had to be sent letter-by-letter in the code Morse invented for that
purpose).
The story then shifts to the invention of the telephone, for which
this show takes a print-the-legend approach, telling the familiar story of
Alexander Graham Bell and the patent battle between him and Elisha Gray (who
was actually working for Western Union, whose bosses realized that the
telephone had the possibility of putting the telegraph out of business) that
was resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote in 1888. The program
acknowledged Gray but didn’t mention the other claimants for the title
“inventor of the telephone,” including Antonio Meucci (an Italian immigrant who
had worked as a lab assistant for both Bell and Gray) and Nikola Tesla (whose patent drawings on his incarnation of the telephone, allegedly submitted
to the U.S. Patent Office a month before Bell’s or Gray’s, were reprinted on the cover of a CD by the
heavy-metal rock band Tesla). After depicting Marconi and his invention of
radio telegraphy, the story of the smartphone then takes some interesting
twists and turns, including an amateur inventor named Homer Dudley who
conceived of the idea of dividing a human conversation into binary bits and
reassembling them — he got the idea from the way a player piano records music
as a series of on-or-off patterns representing each note of a piano — and the
“Voder” or “Vocoder” he built by which one could play a set of keys resembling
a musical keyboard and come up with a synthesized version of human speech. The
Voder was a big hit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and led in turn to an
unbreakable (at least at the time) code system called SIGSALLY, by which the
Allies in World War II could secure their own telephone conversations — and one
of the developers of SIGSALLY was Alan Turing, who in addition to helping break
the German Enigma code and inventing the computer in order to do it also helped
the war effort by working on SIGSALLY for the U.S./British side (for which he
was rewarded by being criminally convicted, chemically castrated and driven to
suicide for being Gay).
The show then takes a detour to Hollywood and the
researches of Hedy Lamarr, who in addition to being a beautiful and glamorous
movie star for MGM was also an early anti-fascist before anti-fascism was cool
(she’d been married to German arms company CEO Fritz Mandl during the
mid-1930’s and had overheard him and his friends, including officials in the
Nazi government, discuss their plans for rearming Germany and launching a
second world war they hoped would end with the Nazis ruling the world) and an
accomplished inventor and technological researcher. In 1942 she set out to
solve the problem of how to keep the German navy from intercepting the radio
messages between Allied ships in convoys, identifying their locations and
sending U-boats to sink them, and also how to keep the U-boats from jamming the
radio signals guiding the Allied torpedoes to their underwater targets. She
came up with a principle called “frequency hopping,” in which the radio signals
wouldn’t go out on just one frequency; they would “hop” around different parts
of the radio spectrum, so if the enemy tuned to one frequency they would hear
an occasional blip of audible message but mostly static. The problem with this
is the one that has dogged all secret communications since Polybius: you have
to ensure that the intended recipient of your message has the exact same
frequency sequence you do, and also that the enemy can’t hack the system and
discover the frequency sequence that would enable them to decode the message.
The U.S. military didn’t take Lamarr’s invention seriously — both sexism and
snobbery seemed to have been at work here (“What the hell does a Hollywood
movie star — and a woman, at that? — know about radio signals?”), but 20 years
later it was used by the U.S. for secret communications during the Cuban
missile crisis.
The next inventor profiled was Frank Kilby, a researcher at
Texas Instruments (best known for developing the transistor radio and pocket
calculator) who didn’t have enough seniority to take a holiday vacation the way
the rest of their staff did, so he hung around the company’s headquarters and
invented the integrated circuit (IC), which enabled complex electronics to be
mass-produced without the intricate wiring needed to construct old-style
circuit boards and to be made considerably
smaller. The show claims that the first modern-style cell phone was developed
and marketed by Motorola in 1973 (I’m old enough to remember when Motorola’s
main reputation was as a maker of old-style black-and-white cathode-ray tube TV
sets! In fact, my family had a Motorola TV and they were already using the same spread-out stylized
“M” logo they use today), though I happen to know that’s not true. As early as
1949 cell phones were in use by police departments so people in police cars
could communicate over longer ranges than their standard portable radios could
manage and maintain long-distance pursuits. I know this because the 1949 film White
Heat, directed by Raoul Walsh
for Warner Bros. and starring James Cagney as outlaw Cody Jarrett, contains a
sequence in which the police use gigantic cell phones the size of shoeboxes to
try to track down Jarrett — who escapes them by finding a dead spot where their
system has no coverage. (When I wrote about White Heat in my journal I acidly commented that some aspects
of cell-phone technology have not improved — modern cell-phone users are still bedeviled by dead spots.)
My notes on the show contain a reference to Philippe Kuhn who in 1997 did something
important regarding digitizing communications that was the final step towards
the modern cell phone, but I can’t decipher my own hastily scribbled note and I
can’t find him on the Internet — my Web searches took me to too many other
people named Philippe or Philip Kuhn.
The program ends with a prediction that
future smartphones will connect directly to our brains — it showed a woman
connected to a smartphone that allows her to focus mental energy and thereby
move a ball around a table — which is a prospect I find utterly horrifying: if
they set up smartphones that can connect directly to our brains, future
authorities will be able to monitor the thought patterns of every human being who has one of these devices. Already,
many years ago, Jeff Ellison, the founding CEO of Oracle, said of the Internet,
“Privacy is over. Get used to it.” With devices that can see into the
electronic impulses that travel around our brain and can therefore literally read our thoughts, future authoritarian regimes
will have a direct power over us of which the “Inner Party” that was the ruling
class of George Orwell’s 1984 could only dream — and, even more frighteningly, they could control our
thoughts and go beyond monitoring us 24/7 and literally feed us our thoughts, meaning that democracy,
individuality and free will would join privacy on the junk heap of digital
technology. A lot of these scientific shows
end with glowing predictions of a brave new world that I find utterly
horrifying — especially since Brave New World is also the title of Aldous Huxley’s famous novel
in which the ruling class literally controlled people’s lives and ensured they
would stay content with their lot by genetically engineering them and massively
conditioning them to accept the social status the genetic engineers had decreed
for them. This sort of super-smartphone technology would make both Orwell’s and
Huxley’s dystopias far easier to achieve — and I’m not sure which apocalypse I
fear more: a future in which a handful of ruling-class technocrats literally run our brains by remote control and stamp out all
dissent before it can even have a chance to form as thoughts, or a future in
which the current ruling class’s obstinate refusal to accept the reality of
human-caused climate change leads to a collapse in the environment and the
extinction of all or most of the human race.
