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Earn points towards special rewards and more at David's Bridal dot com. And we return to our American stories. Up next, a story from renowned writer and biographer Walter Isaacson on the invention of the computer and the Internet. We'd like to thank the Library of Congress for this wonderful audio from a book talk back in 2015. Let's get into the story.
Take it away, Walter. We know that we distort history a little bit. We make it seem like there's some lone genius who ripples the surface of history.
Some guy or gal who goes to a garage or a garret and has a light bulb moment and innovation happens. That's not the way it works. We know that in our lives. Creativity is a team sport.
It's not done by loners. The reason we do not really know who invented the computer and who invented the Internet is they were invented by teams of people who had the wonderful quality of wanting to share credit more than take credit for themselves. Now, I must admit, I didn't know too much about Ada Lovelace. In fact, I had started maybe eight years ago and my daughter was applying to college.
And if, you know, people like us, we think we're supposed to be involved with the college application process, we're supposed to help a little bit. And my daughter was having none of that. She wouldn't even tell us who she was writing about. Finally, she said, I sent it in. I said, well, who was your essay on? And she said, Ada Lovelace.
And I said, remind me, what did she do? And Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron. And by being the daughter of Lord Byron, she had a poetic artistic sensibility. But she also loved math and science and engineering, and she would go around industrial Midlands of England and see the beauty of the connection of art to technology with the mechanical looms that were using punch cards to tell the looms how to weave beautiful patterns. Now, her father, Lord Byron, was a Luddite.
I mean that literally. His only speech in the House of Lords was defending the followers of Ned Ludd who was smashing these looms because they thought it would put people out of work. Back then, people were afraid that technology would put people out of work.
They were wrong then, just as they're wrong now. And Ada got that because she believed that the combination of human creativity and scientific technology would always create more productivity and more creativity. So she had a friend named Charles Babbitt. She was making a calculating machine doing numbers. And she realized that if you use punch cards in the analytical engine, which was the name of his machine, that the calculating machine could do more than just numbers. She actually wrote and published a scientific article, which was unusual for women in the 1830s in a journal, in which she said that with the punch cards, this calculating machine could do not only numbers, but it could do words, it could do pictures, it could do patterns, it could do art, it could do sounds, it could do anything that can be notated in symbols. She even wrote an algorithm explaining how it would work. In other words, she conceived of the computer, the general purpose computer.
That wasn't just a numerical calculator. Now, when it came to actually making this computer, you focus on a guy named John Vincent Adanasoff, who was a professor at Iowa State. And he wanted to build a logical sequence computer, and he decides to do it in the basement of the Iowa State physics building. But he doesn't collaborate. He's a loner. In fact, when he has a big problem to solve, he just gets into his Oldsmobile and drives all the way long distances to think it through, sometimes all the way to the Illinois border.
I think he went there not just to think, but you could actually buy alcohol by the drink in Illinois and you couldn't in Iowa. So he'd sit in a bar and do it. But he got it pretty much figured out, but he never got it working.
Why? Because he had no mechanics. The punch card burners didn't work.
The machinery kept getting clogged. He had the concept, but he didn't have the execution. And one thing about innovation is a simple lesson.
That vision without execution is hallucination. So he gets called into the Navy, and he leaves, and he leaves his half-built machine down there, and they don't know what it is after a few months, and they need the space, so they take it apart and throw it away. It would have been lost to history had it not been for somebody from this town named John Markley, who you've never heard of because he liked giving credit more than taking it. But he knew that building a computer wasn't just about building a computer.
It was about building a team that could collaborate. So he went all over the country as he tried to build a computer. He went up to the 1939 World's Fair. He went to Dartmouth where there was an electromechanical machine, to Harvard where there was another mechanical machine that Grace Hopper and Howard Aiken had built. He even heard about this guy in Iowa and drove with his nine-year-old boy all the way to Iowa to meet Attanasoff. And he stayed there, and he took notes, and he brought all the ideas back. If any of you know any intellectual property lawyers, you know the upshot of the story, which is there was a 17-year lawsuit about whether or not Markley, who created UNIVAC, had stolen the ideas from Attanasoff.
But I try to say that's not stealing. That's collaboration. That's how we get things done. He comes back to the University of Pennsylvania. He gets a really great engineer whose grandfather had helped create the Turkish taffy machine to do the mechanics.
He gets all sorts of people who know how to do wiring and pull it all together. And he even hires six great women mathematicians to do the programming. Back then, more women got PhDs in math in the 1930s than they did a generation later. It was before men had told women that they didn't know how to do math. And so from Ada Lovelace to the six women of ENIAC, you have women in the forefront of programming.
I also think it's because boys with their toys thought the hardware was the most important thing, but the women realized that the operating system software was the most important. So they collaborate to create COBOL and the operating system. Markley collaborates to create the first computer, ENIAC and UNIVAC. And it is a model of how collaborative creativity can work.
Because you bring people together from all different types of backgrounds and somehow by putting them together, magical things happen. It happened a few years after that at Bell Labs. This was back in the good old days when we actually did basic research in this country. So there'd be something called Bell Labs, which is partly funded by the Bell system, AT&T, partly funded by the government, which gave it a lot of contracts, and partly connected to a lot of great universities. It was a collaboration of governments, universities, and industry to create things like Bell Labs. And at Bell Labs, they knew they had a couple of challenges, like amplifying a phone signal.
What they did is they threw together all sorts of diverse people. There were people like William Shockley, who was a great physicist, and John Bardeen, who worked with him, who was a quantum theorist and knew how electrons would dance on the surface of a semiconducting material. There was also John Bardeen, who sat in the cubicle with him, who knew how to do experiments, like putting a paperclip in a piece of silicon or germanium to see if he could break the surface state. And there was Claude Shannon, who would ride a unicycle up and down the halls juggling balls because he was an information theorist. And he even invited Alan Turing to come over from Bletchley Park, England. And together, they invent the transistor. And you've been listening to Walter Isaacson giving a talk back in the Library of Congress in 2015, and the subject was how, well, how the internet and how computers were invented. And indeed, what he got at and got at straight was that not always are these things created by that one guy alone. In fact, almost nothing is created by one guy alone. There's collaborative creativity, and it's not just guys. It's women, too.
But the point he made about vision without execution being hallucination is as true back in the 19th century as it is today, when we come back. More of this remarkable story about how things get made, big things like computers, the internet, and so much more, here on Our American Story. The Philadelphia Eagles are Super Bowl champions. It's over! Fly, Eagles, fly! Celebrate the big win with the official licensed Super Bowl champions gear, available now at nflshop.com. The Eagles win at Super Bowl 59.
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Let's return to the story. At Bell Labs they knew they had a couple of challenges like amplifying a phone signal. And what they did is they threw together all sorts of diverse people. And together they invent the transistor. But a lesson for that is that William Shockley, who in some ways was the leader of the team inventing the transistor, had a definite two flaws. One of which is he becomes a racist. The other of which is he's paranoid and he wants all of the credit. And when they pull together the team and they win the Nobel Prize and everything else in the pictures, he insists by contract that he has to be in the center of the pictures. So when he starts a semiconducting company, nobody will come work with him. And he finally gets a couple of great people, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore.
And after about a year they can't stand working with him. And so Shockley Semiconductor blows apart and you have the creation of the greatest company in the digital age, which was Intel. Where Bob Noyce, a Congregationalist from Iowa who loved madrigal singing where nobody sang solo and everybody worked together, and Gordon Moore. And they put together what they ended up eventually calling Intel. And they did it in a room about this size.
It was an old apricot barn. And instead of having corner offices or organizational charts, they made it a collaborative enterprise with Noyce and Moore putting their battered desk right in the center and anybody could come up and talk to them. Somebody who was just hired said, well, can you show me who I report to, what the chart is? And Noyce said sure. He took a white piece of paper and he said, here's you right in the center.
Here's everybody else. Draw a line between you and everybody else and collaborate with whomever you want. And this is a new type of physical based systems where people come together and learn collaboration. You see that notion of physical spaces being so important.
Being there in the flesh makes a difference. This is something Ada Lovelace could have told you, but it's also something Steve Jobs understood. When he created Pixar Studios, he looked at all the Hollywood Studios. We had a lot of cottages and different buildings for different things. And he said, no, I want one big building with one huge atrium.
And to get to the bathroom or the screening room or the cafe, you got to go through this big atrium because when people bump into each other and see each other physically, they have serendipitous encounters. And that's how creativity happens. He did that with the new Apple headquarters that they're now building in Cupertino. Now, that type of collaboration also happened when they created the Internet. There were computers at various research universities.
And as I said, the government was funding some of these research centers. And so the government back then, very efficient, decided we need a network so people can share computer resources. And they figured out how to get all these great research universities to agree on what was originally called the ARPANET, after the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon, to make it all work where each one of these computers could have equal power and share ideas, be nodes on a web-like network. They came up with that idea, and then they just told the research universities, and you figure out the way to make it work, the network work. So being great research universities, the research professors did what they always do, is they delegated it to their graduate students. So you had 30 graduate students who decided to figure out how are we going to make the protocols work for the packets to go darting around this wonderful web and know how to reunite and know where they're supposed to go and know what to happen if one of the packets doesn't make it, all these rules of what became the Internet. And they wanted to do it in the most collaborative way, so they got together and they had no votes, they had no chair, whatever, they just went from city to city, San Diego, Salt Lake, they went down to New Orleans once, and they would meet every few months, and the youngest one of them, Steve Crocker, would take notes. He wanted to make sure that it didn't seem like they were handing down rules from on high, because he wanted it to feel like a collaborative network. So he tried to come up with the name of what these rules would be, and he said he was showering in his girlfriend's parents' house, late at night he'd just shower, it was the only place he could go and get away from his future in-laws and think. And he came up with the notion of calling these things requests for comment.
In other words, these weren't rules, these weren't regulations, these were not handed down manuals. They'd send them around and say requests for comment, so everybody felt they could be part of building the Internet. Now that's pretty cool that that's how they created the Internet, but what's particularly cool to me is that's still how the Internet's being created.
People are still doing the requests for comment process, I think they're up to number 7,900, as they figure out how do we incorporate Bitcoin, how do we have small payments. All of these things are done collaboratively. Now when I was at Time Magazine, we wrote a story that said they did it that way so that it would survive a Russian nuclear attack, because if you do it with a central hub and central rules, you know, a missile takes out one of those hubs, the network goes down. But the Internet is built so that each and every node of the Internet has equal power to store and forward packets of information.
So somebody takes out a packet, I mean a node, Internet just routes around it. And we said that was done to survive a nuclear attack. We got a letter from Steve Klocker, who I did not know at the time, who said no, that's not why we did it, we were graduate students. We were graduate students and we were avoiding the draft.
We weren't helping the Pentagon. And he wrote a letter to Time. Time was somewhat arrogant back then, so we didn't print the letter. So years later, I'm researching this, I was in this neighborhood having coffee with Steve Klocker and he reminded me of this. I said oh wow, I remember that vaguely.
And I called up the current editor of Time and I said go get me the files, I want to know who the better source was, because Time said they had a better source. Well the better source was a guy named Steve Lukasich and he had said yeah, yeah, the graduate, we didn't tell the graduate students we were doing it to survive a Russian attack, but that's the only way we could get money out of the colonels at the Pentagon. That's why we were doing it, we just didn't tell them. And so Lukasich said tell Steve Klocker that he was on the bottom and I was on the top, so he didn't know what was happening.
So I had my coffee with Klocker again, I told him that and he strokes his chin and he says tell Lukasich, he was on the top, I was on the bottom, so he didn't know what was happening. And that is the essence of the collaborative nature of the internet. And the fingerprints of the founders of the internet doing that way are there imprinted on the genetic code of the internet. So it can't be censored, it's totally decentralized and distributed and it allows collaboration from people who have never met each other, never seen each other. And you've been listening to Walter Isaacson, he was on the road in 2015, plugging his book The Innovators, a story about well how the internet and computers got created. In other words, how the modern age got created and it was not the way we normally think as Americans, which is that one man. Yes, there's that leader perhaps and we learn about some of those leaders at places like Intel, giants like Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore. But what did they immediately do? They sought team input, they sought a collaboration on a very high level.
And then the internet itself, how it was developed, my goodness, the story of The Innovators, the story of the modern age, the modern digital age here on Our American Stories. From jerseys to hats to must have collectibles, we've got everything you need to rep your team with pride. Don't wait, these styles won't last. Shop now at nflshop.com and gear up like a champion. Find the place to be with Roku TV, streaming players and smart lights.
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