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¿QUIÉN INVENTÓ LA IMPRENTA? Grandes inventos que cambiaron la historia| Vídeos Educativos para Niños

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¿CÓMO SE INVENTÓ LA BICICLETA? Grandes inventos que cambiaron la historia | Vídeos Educativos par

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Do you have imagination ? Do you like to solve problems? Can you think outside the box?

If so, you could be the next great inventor. "But I'm just a kid," you might say! Don't worry about a little thing like age. Some of the greatest inventors in the world got their start as kids.

For example, Benjamin Franklin got his start when he was only twelve. At that young age, he created paddles for his hands to help him swim faster. Eventually, his creation led to what we now call flippers!

You don't have to be an adult, a , or a to be an inventor. One thing you do need, though, is something that kids have plenty of: and imagination . Kids are known for looking at things in new and ways. The they have can lead to great inventions!

Sometimes inventors come up with completely new products or devices that solve a particular problem. Other times, they improve existing items to work better or serve a different .

So, what should you do if you have what you think is a great idea for an ? Talk to a friend or family member about it. Get input from others about your idea. Then, ask them to help you create a working model - called a - of your idea.

Once you have a , you can test it. Sometimes your idea turns out to be not quite as great as you thought. At other times, though, you realize it is a good idea and your can help you figure out how to make it even better.

If your idea really is a good one, an adult can help you contact companies that might be interested in it. You will also want an adult's help to get a patent for your idea, so that it is protected and can't be stolen by someone else.

If you need some inspiration, consider these kids and their inventions:

Jeanie Low invented the Kiddie Stool when she was just 11. It's a folding stool that fits under the kitchen sink. Kids can unfold it and use it to reach the sink all by themselves.

At the age of 15, Louis Braille invented the system named after him that allows the blind to read.

Chelsea Lannon received a patent when she was just 8 for the "pocket diaper," a new type of diaper that includes a pocket for holding baby wipes and powder.

Do you dream of creating the world's next great ? Why not start trying today? There's no need to wait to grow up to become an inventor. Put your and creativity to use now!

CCRA.L.3, CCRA.L.6, CCRA.R.1, CCRA.R.2, CCRA.R.4, CCRA.R.10, CCRA.SL.1, CCRA.SL.2, CCRA.W.2, CCRA.L.1, CCRA.L.2

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Today's Wonder of the Day could be about you...if you're inventive enough!

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Inventions come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and varieties. Doesn't it just make that inventors, too, would come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and varieties? And they do! Even kids can be inventors ...well before they ever decide what they want to be when they grow up!

Think about all the inventions around you that you use and enjoy on a daily basis. Electricity, the hot water heater, the microwave oven, the toothbrush, toothpaste, water faucets, shower heads...and those are just a few of the things you probably encounter when you first get up in the morning.

To be sure, many scientists have made important discoveries and turned those discoveries into fantastic inventions. The scientific process lends itself to seeking information and using it in new ways. Thinking scientifically in some way is probably a part of every that has ever been created.

That doesn't mean you have to be a to be an , though. It's often been said thatis the mother of invention. What does this curious phrase mean? It means that people often identify a need they have and then to meet that need. Sometimes the only way to meet that need is to invent a new product!

Think about all of the musical instruments that exist in the world. Now think of all the products that go along with those instruments. Many of those products were probably invented by musicians - not scientists - who discovered a need and then invented a to satisfy it.

They may have thought scientifically about the product. They may have even gotten a or two involved along the way to help them with things they didn't understand. But many people have shown that inventors can come from any background you could imagine.

Let's take a look at a few qualities that it takes to be an , regardless of what path you choose in life:

Curiosity - An open, WONDERing mind is a common quality shared by most inventors. Inventors consistently to improve how we do things. They are open to change and don't easily get stuck in a of always doing something the same way every time.

- Inventors spend a lot of time gathering information. They study hard and out new knowledge on a regular basis. They to understand fully how something is currently done. They evaluate the processes involved and look for ways to improve.

and - Inventors keep trying. Over and over again, they will test new ideas to try to find the best solution to the problem they've identified. They through multiple defeats until repeated testing finally gives them a breakthrough.

Improvement - There's an old saying that says that someone is always trying to build a better mouse trap. That's true. Even if you have a quality mouse trap and it works just fine, you can bet that someone, somewhere is thinking about how it could work even better. That's the heart of an . Inventors are never satisfied with the status quo. They constantly look for ways to make products safer, faster, smaller, more efficient, or better in some way.

Non-scientific approaches can be incredibly helpful in developing new, breakthrough inventions. Although thinking scientifically is often a necessity, it can also be very helpful to think " outside the box."

Sometimes certain ways of thinking lock us into certain paths of exploration. Because things are always done a certain way and we assume that certain things just won't work, we cut off avenues of thought that could lead to incredible new discoveries.

This is why some inventors can come from a wide variety of non-scientific backgrounds. For example, a poet might view the night sky in a completely different way than an astronomer. This difference in point of view could mean that the poet might think of all sorts of different approaches to a problem than an astronomer might never consider.

Of course, the opposite is true, too. Sometimes the best inventions end up being a project involving the skills of many different people from a wide variety of backgrounds!

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Today's Wonder of the Day is a brand-new invention. Come check it out!

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Improve your knowledge on amazing inventions with fun facts for kids. Find out more about inventions that changed the world and learn more from DK Find Out

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[MUSIC PLAYING] JOY DOLO: Lord Featheringstone of Stratford upon Sussex upon Avon upon France reporting from 1762. I'm here to warn you about a danger that is going to sweep the world in the next century, something called a camera. As we all know, having a portrait is a privilege reserved for fancy schmancy rich people. We pay tons of money for the privilege of immortalizing our powdered wigs and frilly shirts as we should. These looks will stay hot for all time.

But our sources say this camera will allow any old riffraff to take a picture and have their own portrait. It's a travesty. Our correspondent took to the streets to see how the public reacts.

ELENA: Yes, my Lord. I'm here at the town market to consult with the common folk, many of whom aren't wearing buckled shoes or fine ruffled silk garments. Here's what these fashion "oh no no nos" are saying.

SPEAKER 1: Ooh, I'd love to see my face without looking into a spoon.

SPEAKER 2: I've been corresponding for quite some time with a lovely lady up in the North country. She thinks I'm quite tall, and muscular, and handsome, so I'll stick with pen and paper, thank you.

SPEAKER 3: Wait, it can make portraits of anything? Forget me. I want pictures of my dog and my lunch. People would love to see that, right?

ELENA: So there you have it. This camera you speak of will be welcomed with open arms.

JOY DOLO: Oh, dear, dear. If we let the masses have this technology, we'll be drowning in pictures of everyone we've ever met, and the portrait artist will die starving.

SPEAKER 4: Think of me fondly, the poor portrait artist.

JOY DOLO: I'm Joy Dolo and this is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning. And today, we want to know, where do cameras come from? And by we, I mean me and Elena.

ELENA: Hey!

JOY DOLO: Hi, Elena. How's it going?

ELENA: I'm well.

JOY DOLO: Oh, good, good. So cameras, what do you think about cameras? Do you have one?

ELENA: Yeah, I have it on my phone.

JOY DOLO: On your phone, do you use it a lot?

ELENA: Well, it's kind of hard because, if I'm doing something with friends, I record it or take pictures. So it depends.

JOY DOLO: So when you're using the camera, you usually use it with your friends.

ELENA: Yeah, basically, but sometimes I take pictures just to take pictures.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, have you ever like taken a picture of your food or anything like that?

ELENA: No, I don't do that. I'm not that person.

JOY DOLO: You think that's weird?

ELENA: Yeah, I think it's kind of weird. It's like, it's food. Just eat it.

JOY DOLO: Just eat it. Yeah, nothing going on there.

ELENA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: What about with your family?

ELENA: Oh, yeah, I take pictures with my family.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, like when you guys go on vacation?

ELENA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: So you use a lot with your family, with your friends. You don't take pictures of food because that's weird.

ELENA: That's just weird.

JOY DOLO: So let's imagine that the world didn't have any cameras. Or I know, it's terrifying, right?

ELENA: Yeah, it's terrifying.

JOY DOLO: How do you think that would change how you record things or how you look at things?

ELENA: It would be kind of weird because what if your friend moved out to California and then you couldn't take pictures? And you couldn't send them pictures or anything? That would just be sad. You wouldn't be able to see them.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, you wouldn't see them. Yeah, exactly it.

ELENA: You could maybe not even be able to recognize their face.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, if you didn't see them for a long time, you might even forget what they look like. I think I take it for granted that I have a phone with me at all times and that I can see my pictures instantaneously. But it wasn't that long ago that you had to buy a camera separate from your phone and you had to use film. Have you ever used a camera that needed film?

ELENA: My grandma had one of them, and once I was just messing around with it. So yeah, once.

JOY DOLO: It's cool because you could take the picture right there, but you can't see it right away, right?

ELENA: No, you can't see it.

JOY DOLO: Yeah. Film seems so low tech now, but at one point, it was exciting and new.

ELENA: And someone had to invent it.

PAULINA VELASCO: Or several someones.

JOY DOLO: Whoa.

ELENA: Woah.

JOY DOLO: Hey, Paulina.

ELENA: Hi.

PAULINA VELASCO: Hello.

JOY DOLO:

PAULINA: Paulina Velasco is a reporter, and we asked her here to investigate the camera and where it comes from.

ELENA: OK, so who invented the camera, Paulina?

PAULINA VELASCO: Well, before we get to the who's, we should talk about what. What exactly is a camera? How would you describe it, Elena?

ELENA: A camera is a device that records visual images such as photos, film, and videos.

JOY DOLO: You're like a walking Wikipedia page.

[LAUGHTER]

PAULINA VELASCO: Yeah, that's totally correct. We usually think of a camera as an instrument that records images of the world around us.

ELENA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: Yeah.

PAULINA VELASCO: But it actually all got started with something that just reflected an image and didn't actually record anything yet. I'm talking about the camera obscura. Can you guess what language that's in, camera obscura?

ELENA: Spanish?

JOY DOLO: I'm. Going to guess French.

PAULINA VELASCO: Close, but it's Latin.

ELENA: Oh.

PAULINA VELASCO: And it means dark room. And that's what it is. It's a dark box or a very dark room with a hole in the wall that lets the tiniest pinprick of light through, and directly opposite the hole, you'll see the image of whatever you're pointing this box or camera obscura at. It's just upside down. How old do you think the camera obscura is? What's your best guess?

ELENA: 200 years old.

JOY DOLO: I'm going to say 16,000--

ELENA: What the?

JOY DOLO: --years old. It sounds-- it's a pinprick of a light going through this big box. That sounds like-- not like cavemen-ish, but it sounds like it was a long time ago.

ELENA: That is like cavemen.

JOY DOLO: Yeah.

ELENA: It's like dinosaurs.

PAULINA VELASCO: Well, no one knows exactly how old the camera obscura is, k we do know that it's over 2000 years old because that's when Chinese philosopher Mao Tse wrote the earliest known description of it. And not long after that, the Greek philosopher Aristotle used it to look at a solar eclipse.

ARISTOTLE: No more sunburnt eyes. I love this thing.

PAULINA VELASCO: Eventually, painters use it to trace things and create more realistic paintings.

SPEAKER 4: Nonsense. I painted this, uh, completely free hand.

PAULINA VELASCO: And astronomers used it to reflect the night sky onto a piece of paper.

ASTRONOMER: Little Dipper, you won't escape my meticulous measurements ever again.

PAULINA VELASCO: The camera obscura was probably the first tool we had to see the world as it is through a sort of lens and not just our regular old eyes. We could point the lens in a specific direction like that star, this flower, that fancy lady sitting for her portrait. And so we start isolating pockets of the world to better study them. Do you think the camera obscura should be considered the first camera? It has camera in the name.

ELENA: Well, I think I think it should be because where did we get the name camera from?

JOY DOLO: Right, and I mean the idea is it's a box that you can see images through.

ELENA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: You just can't take it with you, so it seems like a camera in a way.

PAULINA VELASCO: Well, let's skip ahead to the 1800s. The Industrial Revolution is in full swing in Europe. Lots of people are moving from the countryside where they grew their own food and handmade their own clothes to cities where they work in factories and buy things from stores. And in a land called La France, there was a man named, wait for it, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre.

ELENA: Ooh.

JOY DOLO: Ooh la la.

ELENA: Yeah, ooh la la.

JOY DOLO: Yes, ma'am.

PAULINA VELASCO: And Daguerre and his partner Joseph Nicephore Niepce--

JOY DOLO: Very nice.

PAULINA VELASCO: --figured out how to record the images projected by a camera obscura. So first, they coated a polished metal plate with chemicals that reacted to light. Then they put the plate inside a camera obscura so that the upside-down image projected right onto it. And the parts of the plate touched by light undergo a chemical reaction, and then with the help of a few more chemicals, you get an image, voila.

JOY DOLO: Oh.

ELENA: Cool.

PAULINA VELASCO: Daguerre kept working after Niepce died. He made more improvements and eventually named the invention after himself. He called it the daguerreotype. Can you imagine how people might have used this new technology?

JOY DOLO: Yeah, it's like-- so if you had this image of a flower--

ELENA: Yeah, a flower.

JOY DOLO: --or the things we were talking about before, you would have it on this plate. You can--

ELENA: A metal plate, that's kind of weird but good at the same time.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, but you can bring it with you, so it's like you have it.

ELENA: Oh, you can bring it with you like put it in your back pocket.

PAULINA VELASCO: Oh, let me just show you my metal plate here. This is my mother.

JOY DOLO: This metal plate is also my dog.

PAULINA VELASCO: Yeah, people loved the idea of taking pictures.

MAN: The avenue to my photography studio.

PAULINA VELASCO: They took pictures of themselves--

WOMAN: For my beau to take on his travels.

PAULINA VELASCO: --and family and friends--

SPEAKER 2: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

SPEAKER 3: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

SPEAKER 4: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

PAULINA VELASCO: --but even their pets.

[DOG BARKING]

SPEAKER 2: Hold still you puffy little scoundrel.

PAULINA VELASCO: Early daguerreotypes show people wearing top hats and ruffles in their shirts. Some of the women wear corsets. Suddenly, like we said, people could carry pictures of their loved ones with them. You could feel closer to family when you were far away. Can you guys imagine other ways people might have used daguerreotypes?

JOY DOLO: I imagine that they used it to take pictures of food.

ELENA: I mean, I think it's honestly a weird thing to take pictures of food, but go ahead. Be wild. Be free.

JOY DOLO: Maybe even for advertising.

ELENA: Oh yeah, advertising.

JOY DOLO: Like you used to-- there's this shirt that's over in this store, and it's over here, and this is what it looks.

PAULINA VELASCO: Show people those ruffles.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, show off those ruffles.

PAULINA VELASCO: And also, when you think about it, it's sort of the first time that journalists could capture images. They did that in the Mexican-American war and their photos allowed people to see how horrible war was, even if they were far from the front lines.

Now daguerreotypes were expensive and hard to use, but that would change in 1877, when the next big camera innovator came along.

Oh, sorry, actually he just texted. He's running a little late.

JOY DOLO: Oh, goodness. Well, I guess while we wait, how about a game of First Things First, Elena?

ELENA: Let's do it.

JOY DOLO: Let's do it. So we have a list of three things, and we'll try to guess the order they first appeared in history.

ELENA: Like which came first-- bicycles or tricycles?

JOY DOLO: Exactly, Elena. Do you want to read today's three things?

ELENA: Sure, here they are-- selfies, insta-cameras like a Polaroid, and photo bombs.

JOY DOLO: Do you know what a photo bomb is?

ELENA: Yeah, it's when someone's trying to take a picture, and then you come out of nowhere and barge in their picture.

JOY DOLO: And you barge into their picture, exactly.

ELENA: Yeah, you just-- yeah.

JOY DOLO: So if you're thinking about the order of history that all of this stuff came in, what do you think came first? What do you think is the oldest one?

ELENA: The insta-camera is like a Polaroid.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, the instant cameras. Do you know the Polaroid? Do you know what that is?

ELENA: Not really.

JOY DOLO: They were really popular when I was young. Have you ever seen those big blocks of--

ELENA: Oh, like the block ones?

JOY DOLO: Yep, and then it spits it out like a tongue, and then you shake it. So you think your first guess would be instant cameras, and then selfies or photo bombs? What do you think?

ELENA: I feel like they came around like the same time. Maybe photo bombs first.

JOY DOLO: Photo bombs? Yeah, because you have the picture, you can photo bomb it, and then, finally, they got to selfies. That makes sense. I think I would go down that road too-- a Polaroid instant camera first-- with the picture, you can do a photo bomb. And then following that is a selfie.

ELENA: And you can maybe even do the photo bomb before the instant cameras.

JOY DOLO: That's true, with a daguerreotype-- a daguerreotype bomb.

ELENA: A daguerreotype bomb.

JOY DOLO: All right, well, don't go anywhere. We'll reveal the answers after the break.

ELENA: Forever Ago will be right back.

SPEAKER 5: Did you know that people have been using cameras to spy for almost 100 years?

SPEAKER 6: I'm sick and tired of tracing these copies of top secret documents by hand. They don't pay me enough for this.

SPEAKER 5: The Minox camera was invented in 1936.

SPEAKER 7: Ooh.

SPEAKER 6: Wow.

SPEAKER 7: I'll take 12.

SPEAKER 6: That is a gadget.

SPEAKER 5: It could fit in the palm of your hand and could easily be hidden inside things, like a hollowed out hairbrush.

SPEAKER 7: Just going to lean over these classified maps while I casually brush my hair. Nothing weird going on here at all.

SPEAKER 5: As camera technology improved, engineers were able to create smaller cameras, and you better believe it, the spy cameras got even craftier.

SPEAKER 6: Nothing to see here fellas. Just checking my completely normal wristwatch like a normal person who's not also a handsome, daring super spy.

SPEAKER 7: What camera? This is just a regular old Teddy bear. I take this little guy with me everywhere.

SPEAKER 5: Throughout history, cameras have been disguised to look like briefcases, lighters, buttons, you name it. The CIA even developed a camera for pigeons to wear so they could conduct aerial reconnaissance. Luckily for our feathered friends, this pigeon espionage program has since been abandoned-- as far as we know.

JOY DOLO: I'm Joy Dolo, and this is Forever Ago, the show where we go way, way, way, way, way back.

ELENA: Before we hear about the next big camera invention, it's time to finish First Things First, the game where we put things in order. Here's the envelope with the answers, Joy.

JOY DOLO: Oh, this is such a big moment. Here we go. We could see what actually happened. Oh my goodness. So the oldest thing was the selfie.

ELENA: What?

JOY DOLO: Yeah, in 1839 was the first selfie.

ELENA: Oh my god. Wow.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, a guy named Robert Cornelius took a daguerreotype of himself.

ELENA: Really?

JOY DOLO: And that was an 1839 selfie.

ELENA: Oh, hey.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, exactly. So he had his own selfie on that little metal plate. But we were right about the middle, photo bomb. The photo bomb was the second one. It was a picture taken by Welsh photographer Mary Dillwyn, and we actually have a picture here. Do you want to check it out?

ELENA: Oh, I see the face. That's hilarious.

JOY DOLO: What do you see there?

ELENA: So it's two women sitting down, getting their picture taken. And then this guy-- his head is coming from like out of nowhere.

JOY DOLO: Jumping in the photo.

ELENA: He's like [VOCALIZES]

JOY DOLO: [VOCALIZES] Stealth. Yeah, so that was the second one, that 1853 photo bomb. And then last but not least, the instant camera. Awesome. Well, thanks very much for playing that was fun, huh?

ELENA: Yeah, it was.

JOY DOLO: All right. Before the break, Paulina, you mentioned some kind of a big shot camera adventure that was running a little late?

PAULINA VELASCO: Oh yeah-- Joy, Elena, meet George Eastman.

GEORGE EASTMAN: How do you do?

JOY DOLO: Hello, George.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Apologies for the tardiness-- confounded parallel parking.

PAULINA VELASCO: Back in George's day, in the late 1800s, things were pretty low tech. No one had cars yet.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Oh no, none of these newfangled horseless carriages. We had to use a carriage and a horse, and let me tell you, it was not always romantic. Horses poop a lot.

PAULINA VELASCO: So when George was 23 years old, he was planning a business trip to the Dominican Republic, where he wanted to buy real estate. I'll let Kathy Connor from the George Eastman Museum explain what happened next.

KATHY CONNOR: And that meant either buying a camera, which he did not own and most people did not own, or bringing an artist with you who could draw the property and sign his name to it so it would prove that it really existed.

PAULINA VELASCO: So George decided to buy a camera for $100, which would be almost $2,000 now.

ELENA: Oh, wow.

JOY DOLO: That's a lot of money, huh?

ELENA: Yeah, for a camera.

KATHY CONNOR: And the camera was about the size of a microwave today, and he had to buy a tripod, a big huge stand to put it on so it wouldn't move, and he had to buy a tent and all the chemistry he would need to be able to process his own pictures.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Yes, it was so complicated.

PAULINA VELASCO: George actually had to take lessons before he could use it. So for the camera, it wasn't like, point the camera, snap a pic, save it, done. You had to set up a tent, and then inside the tent, you had this big piece of glass. You also had to have something to rest this giant camera on and a bunch of chemicals.

ELENA: Oh my god.

JOY DOLO: It's a lot more work than it is now.

ELENA: Yeah, it looked huge.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Don't even get me started with those stinky chemicals. I had to mix them and spread them out on the glass, all in the dark. Confound it.

PAULINA VELASCO: We'll let him clean up a little. You had to do all this complicated stuff in the dark because direct sunlight would make the whole plate turn dark and ruin your picture. So you'd have to take this big piece of glass, covered up, to the camera, which is outside, take a picture, run back into the dark tent with it.

KATHY CONNOR: It was a very complicated, messy, wet process. And Eastman complained many times how he hated it. He poured chemicals when he was traveling on trips on his underwear, on his clothes. He ruined a lot of things because you have to throw everything out if it got the chemicals on it.

PAULINA VELASCO: So George decided there must be a better way.

GEORGE EASTMAN: I sure did. Cancel my tickets, scrap the trip-- someone needs to show the camera who's boss.

PAULINA VELASCO: He shut himself in his mother's kitchen to figure out how to make the whole camera process a lot easier. Elena, would you cancel a trip to a tropical island to work on an invention?

ELENA: Of course not. You got to go to the tropical island when you can.

PAULINA VELASCO: I totally agree. I don't know if I would cancel my trip either. But George spent three years in that kitchen experimenting, and then he read something really exciting. All the way across the Atlantic, a British photographer named Richard Maddox had been working on the exact same problem, and Maddox had a brilliant solution.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Way simpler than the runny chemicals on a glass plate method.

PAULINA VELASCO: Maddox invented a dry plate where the chemicals were already imbued in the plate, like kind of how you can eat cereal in a Bowl with milk sloshing around, or, if you're in a hurry, you can grab a cereal bar to eat that's dry. Makes sense?

ELENA: Yeah, makes sense because I love cereal bars.

TOGETHER: Cereal bar, cereal bar, you can eat it in your car.

PAULINA VELASCO: Exactly. So the cereal has the dried milk in it. You got your cereal, only in dry form.

GEORGE EASTMAN: What the heck is a cereal bar?

PAULINA VELASCO: Don't worry about it, George. The point is, dry plates are way better than wet messy ones. So George experimented with this method, and eventually, he started making loads of dry plates in a factory-- his factory, because he starts a business.

GEORGE EASTMAN: The Eastman Dry Plate Company, established 1881.

PAULINA VELASCO: But for our old boy George, that wasn't enough. I mean, do we use dry plates today?

JOY DOLO: No, we do not.

ELENA: Nope.

JOY DOLO: I couldn't even imagine.

ELENA: No thank you.

PAULINA VELASCO: Exactly. George wanted to make photography even easier.

KATHY CONNOR: And so he came up with a roll of film.

PAULINA VELASCO: George goes from huge piece of glass to dry plates to tiny, thin paper film. And the film worked the same as the dry plates, just way smaller-- so much more portable and easy to use and that film allowed him to invent--

SPEAKER 8: Make a note right now to pick up a roll or two of dependable Kodak film, the film in the familiar yellow box.

PAULINA VELASCO: --the Kodak camera. George made up the word itself.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Yes, K is my favorite letter. It seemed strong and incisive.

ELENA: I've never heard of anyone having a favorite letter.

JOY DOLO: I like J, personally.

PAULINA VELASCO: Anyways, the Kodak camera cost $25 back in the day, which is more than most people earned in one whole week.

JOY DOLO: Goodness.

ELENA: Oh, god.

PAULINA VELASCO: Yeah, so not a lot of people could buy it. I mean, it was like, do I buy my family food for the week, or do I buy a camera?

ELENA: Food.

JOY DOLO: That's a good choice. That's a smart choice.

ELENA: Personally, I like food.

GEORGE EASTMAN: I want people to get three square meals a day, but also buy cameras, especially if they're my cameras. So in 1900, he came out with a camera called the Brownie that cost just $1. And he did even more. In 1930, George Eastman decided--

KATHY CONNOR: He would give away a free camera. It was a Brownie camera to every child that turned 12 that year.

PAULINA VELASCO: And this was a huge deal because it was during the Great Depression. A quarter of people across the US end up losing their jobs. Lots of schools are closed, especially in the countryside. Many people didn't have enough money for food or for rent. And we have pictures of that because now we could document not only the beautiful things, but also the sad ones.

JOY DOLO: That's really interesting, because there's so much going on. So even just having this camera is creating jobs. And then the kids, even if they're going through whatever they're going through in the Depression, they're able to take a camera and take a picture.

ELENA: Yeah, they can take a picture of fun.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, or things that they enjoy and they can look at it later.

PAULINA VELASCO: And over the next 100 years, pictures change the world, really. Like in the '50s and '60s, photos show people how unfairly African-Americans are being treated, and photos let people empathize with strangers and say, hey, that's not right. And they stand up for things by protesting, and we have pictures of the protests too. And we started documenting our own lives from childhood to the golden years.

KATHY CONNOR: Today, every time you press a button to take a picture with your cell phone you're doing exactly what Mr. Eastman had wanted with that first camera-- making photography simple and easy not only to take, but also to share with the world.

PAULINA VELASCO: Believe it or not, we have George Eastman to thank for our smartphone cameras too, because there was an inventor at Kodak that brought us the first digital camera in 1975. And from there, cameras get smaller and smaller. Eventually, they end up on our phones, making it easy to take selfies we can share on Snapchat. Now more than ever pictures are everywhere, and we have quite a few people to thank for that. Now that it's easier than ever to take a picture, how do you two-- Joy, Elena, think that will change the future?

ELENA: Well, I mean it's easier, but the thing I don't really like about it is that people can get snooped on because of pictures and videos. And then there's Photoshop, and you can make it seem like it's really good when it's bad, or you can make it seem really bad when it's good. So that's what I don't like. But what I do like is that you can take pictures with your friends. You can record.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, I really like that idea of it's not just an activity you do by yourself. It's something you can share. You can share it with your friends. You can share with your family. And now, with the internet, you can put it on Facebook or Snapchat or Instagram. So it's like everyone can kind of be a part of your community. And I mean, it's a good thing, but like you were saying, it's also kind of a bad thing because--

ELENA: That's a bad thing. It can be.

JOY DOLO: It can be. Yeah, and I think part of that is if you're always in your phone, you don't actually get to connect with them face-to-face. You're connecting with them over these images or over the internet.

ELENA: Yeah, and I'm not saying it's bad, but I'm not saying it's good.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, what about you, Paulina?

PAULINA VELASCO: I think it's really great to take pictures, but I also like to remember to look up from my phone once in a while.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, something we can all keep in mind. Well, thanks so much for being with us, Paulina.

ELENA: Thank you.

PAULINA VELASCO: Thank you.

GEORGE EASTMAN: Fare thee well.

TOGETHER: Bye, George.

JOY DOLO: Nowadays, cameras can do so many cool things. Do you ever do anything fancy with your phone, like filters, Elena?

ELENA: Well, sometimes, my mom and I take pictures on Snapchat, with like, like the dog filter, and we do the face swap, and really funny videos.

JOY DOLO: You do the face swap?

ELENA: Yeah, we do the face swap.

JOY DOLO: You put your mom's face on your body and put your face--

ELENA: Basically.

JOY DOLO: Well, since she's your mom, can you really tell the difference, or do you guys look exactly alike?

ELENA: We basically look exactly alike.

JOY DOLO: That's so weird. Nuts. Well, what do you think cameras will be like in the future?

ELENA: I think that it's going to be like-- I think it's going to be so cool where you take a picture, and then you want to get the picture printed out, then you can click onto the picture, and then you'll be able to make it into a video. Like you can print out a video, put it in glass, and then pop it, and like tap it, like how you would do it like on your normal phone, and then you can watch a video, maybe.

JOY DOLO: That's interesting. Or like you could touch it, and it comes to life, and then you kind of control the movement of it.

ELENA: Yeah, so it's like if a man can go to the moon, I'm pretty sure that you can print out a video.

JOY DOLO: I'm pretty sure you're right. And that's exactly the kind of attitude we should have as inventors. If we can do that, we can definitely do that. Easy. We also asked our listeners what they think cameras will be like in the future.

ELENA: And they had a lot of ideas.

LISTENERS: My camera of the future, you could go inside your picture whenever you want.

You could press a button on it that, then, it prints it out as a toy, so then you have a little toy of your friends or a little toy of a tree or a little toy of anything.

Once you take a picture, you can literally display it in a holographic scenario, 3D and everything.

I think cameras will be able to transport you to any destination you want if you have a picture of it.

We could make a camera that's able to explore most of our oceans.

You are able to take pictures of ghosts and monsters and scary things, because I love scary things.

JOY DOLO: Now I want to tell you about some camera technology that's really incredible. It's pretty cool. It almost sounds like science fiction. It's called the Argus 2, and it uses digital cameras to help blind people see.

ELENA: Whoa, so like a bionic eye?

JOY DOLO: Exactly like a bionic eye. The Argus was created by a team of researchers at USC, led by Dr. Mark Humayun. It uses a tiny implant placed behind the eye and a digital camera, which Dr. Humayun says had to be super small.

MARK HUMAYUN: It couldn't be this big gigantic camera because nobody could wear it on their head or in the glasses.

JOY DOLO: They made special glasses for the Argus that have a tiny camera in between the lenses, right above your nose. And this camera sends the images to the implants in the eye. The Argus is designed for people with a specific type of blindness called retinitis pigmentosa. It makes people lose their sight over time. And Dr. Humayun says the device works differently for every patient.

MARK HUMAYUN: Some of these patients haven't seen for 50 years. So initially, it's not like putting on the glasses and hooking them up to a camera and they immediately see. It takes them a period of time to-- their brain to get used to seeing again.

JOY DOLO: And what people see with the Argus isn't anything like normal vision. They only see shapes and outlines of things when the lighting is just right. And there's no color.

MARK HUMAYUN: In the beginning, what I was seeing just didn't make any sense to me that's one of Dr. Humayun's patients, Terry Byland.

TERRY BYLAND: And little by little, I could see these little pinpoints of light. I thought that was pretty cool. I mean, it wasn't much to it, but it was neat to be able to see it.

JOY DOLO: The technology improved over time, and Terri got better at interpreting what he saw with the Argus. And he figured out that he could see things much better if there was a lot of contrast-- like a very bright thing in a very dark space, like the fireworks on the 4th of July.

TERRY BYLAND: I could see the vertical light go up, as they were going up in the air, and I could see it when it exploded. I got to see it all. When I saw that last year for the first time that good, I thought that just-- it really got me.

JOY DOLO: Terry is hopeful that the Argus will just get better and better because Dr. Humayun and his team are working on improvements all the time.

MARK HUMAYUN: I don't know how far the technology can go, but I'm hoping that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that, in fact, using this device, patients can actually read, recognize faces, and then watch TV, and perhaps, someday, drive. But that, right now, is not what you can do with the current device, but that's something that I hope we can do in the near future.

JOY DOLO: It's pretty crazy to think that without all of those ancient philosophers and astronomers experimenting with the camera obscura, we wouldn't be talking about bionic eyes today.

ELENA: Or without George Eastman deciding to cancel his tropical vacation.

JOY DOLO: Maybe one of you out there listening has an idea for the next big camera innovation.

ELENA: Head over to foreverago.org and tell us about it.

JOY DOLO: Forever Ago is brought to you by Brains On! and American Public Media. It's produced by Molly Bloom, Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and Elyssa Dudley. We had engineering help from Parker McDaniels and John Miller.

ELENA: Production help comes courtesy of Lauren D. Our fact checker is Ryan Katz.

JOY DOLO: We'd also like to thank Austin Crosse, Marlee [INAUDIBLE], Alyssa John Perry, and Jeffrey [INAUDIBLE]. Is there anyone you want to thank today, Elena?

ELENA: I would like to thank Paulina and Joy for inviting me to be on the show.

JOY DOLO: Oh, yeah, anytime. Hey, how about a selfie before we go?

ELENA: Sure.

JOY DOLO: 3, 2, 1--

TOGETHER: --cheese.

JOY DOLO: Bye.

ELENA: Bye.

[LAUGHTER]

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Cameras: From Pinholes to Perfect Selfies

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Did you know that the ancestor of our smartphone cameras was just a box with a tiny hole in it?

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JOY DOLO: Hey, Kira. What are you up to?

KIRA: I'm just trying to keep track of time by dropping a grain of sand into this bucket every second.

JOY DOLO: That sounds like a lot of work.

KIRA: It is pretty boring. But at least I know that I'm a 315,576,000 grains of sand old.

JOY DOLO: Happy 315,576,000th birthday. Kira, there might be a better way.

KIRA: For counting time? I don't think so. This is the latest in technology.

JOY DOLO: That used to be true. But now,

KIRA: Now?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOY DOLO: There's only one device that will have you rocking and rolling and telling the time.

KIRA: What's that?

JOY DOLO: A clock.

KIRA: A clock? That sounds great

JOY DOLO: It is great. And there's no sand required.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING): Telling time is not a crime now that clocks are here. Telling time is cool and fun when you have a track near. All right!

JOY DOLO: Not a second will go by without you seeing it.

KIRA: I'll know when it's a quarter past 2?

JOY DOLO: You'll know when it's a quarter past 2, half past 3, 22 minutes past 5 or just straight up noon.

KIRA: Wow. Clocks sound tubular. Imagine getting somewhere on time.

JOY DOLO: You get it, clocks.

(SINGING): Want to show up, not be late. A clock will make sure you get to your date. Clocks are cool, clocks of fun, clocks are numbered from 12 to 1, yeah!

KIRA: How am I going to get all of this sand out of my room?

JOY DOLO: I'll go find a shovel.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOY DOLO: I'm Joy Dolo. And this is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning. Today is all about clocks. And here to help me out is Kira. Hey Kira!

KIRA: Hey.

JOY DOLO: Kira, I have to be completely honest with you, I don't really give a second thought to clocks.

KIRA: Me either.

JOY DOLO: It seems like it's just something that's everywhere, all the time. When was the last time you saw a clock today?

KIRA: In my classroom, I was looking at the time for when my mom would come pick me up.

JOY DOLO: So would you say that you are normally a punctual person? Are you on time?

KIRA: Sometimes I am late. I usually want to be on time, but that never happens.

JOY DOLO: Girl, you are singing my song. I'm usually 2 to 5 minutes late. And I have a watch and I have a clock, and I have it on my phone. But I just I look at the time. And time goes by faster than I think it happens. Does that make sense?

KIRA: I know, yeah.

JOY DOLO: Like, my perception of time is just different. So we all know where time begins. It's the beginning of time. But when did we start measuring it, tracking all the years days, minutes, and seconds?

Today, our phones keep time with precision. We wear watches on our wrists. There are clocks on buildings in classrooms and cars. Clocks are everywhere.

KIRA: But where did they come from?

JOY DOLO: We asked one of our ' friends to help us answer that question, timekeeper extraordinaire, Carla Javier.

CARLA JAVIER: Hey guys!

JOY & KIRA: Hey.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CARLA JAVIER: Kira, Joy, you wouldn't happen to know what time it is, would you?

KIRA: Time to learn about clocks.

CARLA JAVIER: Yeah, but what time is it?

KIRA: 3:03.

CARLA JAVIER: How did you know that?

KIRA: I looked at the clock up there.

CARLA JAVIER: And what if you didn't have a clock up there?

KIRA: I would probably look at my mom's phone?

CARLA JAVIER: And if you didn't have that?

KIRA: I don't know,

CARLA JAVIER: Well, one way to figure out what time it is is to go outside and see where the sun is in the sky. And I looked a little earlier. It looks like the sun is right overhead, so we're just in time for one of my favorite shows. Want to check it out?

KIRA: Sure

JOY DOLO: Sure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 4: The history of timekeeping in 2 and 1/2 minutes.

CARLA JAVIER: That doesn't seem like a lot of time.

SPEAKER 4: It is a lot of time for a quick summary.

CARLA JAVIER: Ha.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

What did people do before clocks? How did they measure time? Well, they had to use what they had available, all supplied by Mother Nature.

Our story starts in ancient Egypt. There, people had a couple types of clocks. One of them was a sundial. It told time by using the movement of the sun.

Sundials were tall structures. Picture a round plate with numbers around the edge, kind of like a clock, but laying flat. Instead of an hour or a minute hand, there's a piece of stone or metal sticking from the middle of the plate. This casts a shadow on the plate.

As the day passed, people knew what time. It was by looking at where the shadow fell. But sundials have limitations. First, they were hard to carry around with you.

SPEAKER 5: Hey, are you going Abar's game night later?

SPEAKER 6: Yes, I'm going to dominate Trivial Pursuit tonight.

SPEAKER 5: Want to walk over together?

SPEAKER 6: Sure, what time?

SPEAKER 5: I don't know. What time is it now? Let's go check the sundial.

SPEAKER 6: But it's like so far away.

SPEAKER 4: And when the sun went down.

[KNOCKING ON DOOR]

SPEAKER 6: Hey, what's the deal? I thought we were meeting tonight. I have been studying royal family trivia all day.

SPEAKER 5: I stared at the sundial for a really long time, but I couldn't find the shadow. I think it's broken.

SPEAKER 6: Maybe we should talk a little about how shadows work. No light, no shadow.

SPEAKER 4: Ancient Egyptians had another way of keeping time-- the water clock. It was basically a bowl with a little hole in it that you'd pour water in. As the water slowly dripped out, markings on the inside of the bowl showed how much time had passed. It wouldn't tell you what time of day it was, but rather how long something took.

In China, they had invented similar clocks. One used the burning of incense to track time. And in the 1300s, people started using sand in hour glasses. You turn the hourglass over, and the sand starts to trickle through to the other side. When the sand finished falling, you would a certain amount of time had passed. People would use them to time things like a sermon or a class, or how long something had been in the oven.

[BELL DINGS]

SPEAKER 7: Mm! Fresh leaven loaves.

SPEAKER 4: And time's up. That concludes this episode of the abbreviated history of clocks. Tune in next week to hear about the magic of gears.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOY DOLO: What a cliffhanger. Now I'm supposed to wait until next week to hear about gears?

CARLA JAVIER: You don't have to wait. I'm here. OK, so when we think about time passing, what is the sound that you think of?

KIRA: I usually don't think of a sound for time. It's mostly just silent or maybe a ticking of a clock.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, I'm there with the ticking of like a tic tok or tic tok, or Jeopardy-- doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

CARLA JAVIER: I don't know about the Jeopardy sound, but that ticking sound is thanks to gears. Those are metal wheels that move together while using interlocking teeth. If you hold both of your hands together and you stick one of your hands fingers between the other ones.

Anyways, the first clock with gears showed up in the 11th century, so about a thousand years ago. A guy named Ibn Khalaf al-Muradi made it. It was still a water clock, but a sophisticated one, with this very complicated set of gears. Basically, the movement of the water moved the gears.

[WATER FLOWING AND CLOCK TICKING]

And in the 1300s, completely mechanical clocks hit the scene, no water required. Over the next couple of hundred years, the technology got better and clocks got smaller. By the 1600s, people had pocket watches and wristwatches they could take with them everywhere. But some things hadn't improved. Because these clocks had to be wound up by hand--

[WINDING OF A CLOCK]

--if you forgot to wind them up every day, you were out of luck.

[BOING]

And even if you did do that, the parts inside these watches would slow down over time.

JOY DOLO: Interesting. Kira, have you seen one of those clocks, like a pocket watch, that has a little knob on the front that you twist and then winds up?

KIRA: No, I've never seen one of those.

CARLA JAVIER: Wasn't it in Alice in Wonderland, I think the rabbit? Have you seen that movie?

KIRA: Oh yeah.

CARLA JAVIER: But after that, a major breakthrough for precision--

[GRANDFATHER CLOCK CHIMING]

--the pendulum. Do you know what a pendulum is, Kira?

KIRA: Is it one of those big clocks that you have in your house?

CARLA JAVIER: Kind of. It's a part of one of those big clocks. It's kind of like a thing that swings back and forth. Have you ever played tetherball--

KIRA: Mm-hmm.

CARLA JAVIER: --on a playground? I like to think about it like that. It swings back and forth. And pendulums would change the way clocks were made forever. It all started with this Italian guy named Galileo Galilei.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Galileo would go on to become a famous astronomer. But when he was just 17, he was a student at the University of Pisa. Legend has it that he was--

[CHURCH BELLS RINGING]

--in church one day when he kind of drifted off.

SPEAKER 8: Maybe I'll grab some takeout on the way home. Giovanni has that incredible gnocchi. Mmm! Oh, but the trout is so good, too. Is it overkill to get both? Could have the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

CARLA JAVIER: And then something caught his eye.

[CREAKING SOUND]

MAN: Huh.

CARLA JAVIER: The breeze had drifted in and set the chandelier above him swinging.

[CREAKING SOUND]

And as he watched it, he had a revelation.

MAN: It looks like the chandelier takes the same amount of time to swing back and forth no matter how hard the wind is blowing, whether it's a big gust or a little one.

CARLA JAVIER: Galileo ran home to test his theory.

[CREAKING SOUND]

And he was right.

MAN: Aha!

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CARLA JAVIER: He had discovered that a pendulum took the same amount of time to move from side to side no matter how wide its swing was. All that matters is how long the pendulum is for example, if you take two pieces of string that are exactly the same length and tie marbles to their ends, they'll swing back and forth in sync, even if you push one really hard--

MAN: Off you go!

CARLA JAVIER: --and the other one just a little bit.

MAN: Like the flap of a butterfly's wings. Here's a tiny little boost.

CARLA JAVIER: That's because if a pendulum swings wide, it travels farther up on each side and gets pulled back by gravity, making it move fast. If it's making a narrow swing, it's not going as high and isn't getting as much pull, making it slower.

This idea was going to be a big deal for clockmakers. Almost 100 years later, one named Christiaan Huygens made the first pendulum clock. The swing of the pendulum took exactly the same amount of time every time, even between different pendulums and different places. And this allowed Huygens to make the most precise clock the world had ever seen.

Before Huygens came along, no one bothered putting minute hands on clocks. But that changed soon. Once pendulum clocks became the norm, clockmakers could promise accuracy within 15 seconds.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There were a bunch of other ideas over the centuries, like using springs instead of pendulums, and small portable clocks, like pocket watches. But soon clocks would run into a problem that no amount of engineering ingenuity could solve.

JOY DOLO: OK, Carla. Big problems on the horizon. But before we hear about them, I think it's high time for a break.

All right, Kira, we're going to play a game of First Things First.

[BELLS RINGING]

KIRA: Awesome.

JOY DOLO: First Things First is where we hear a list of three things and try to put them in chronological order.

KIRA: Like, did ice cream come before gelato? And where does sherbet fall on the timeline?

JOY DOLO: Yeah. Where does it fall? In my mouth is where it goes. Today's three things are stopwatches, cuckoo clocks, and daylight saving time.

KIRA: The order is sealed away inside a top secret envelope.

JOY DOLO: I don't know the answer either. So let's try to figure this out. Cuckoo clocks.

KIRA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: Those just sound old, right?

[LAUGHTER]

KIRA: But who would invent that, just a bird coming out?

JOY DOLO: Is it like Disney movies or like cartoons, those old cartoons, where they have the cuckoo clocks, and then usually pop them out, and then like Mickey Mouse dances on them? Have you seen that before?

KIRA: Yeah, I've never actually seen a real cuckoo clock. I've only seen animated ones.

JOY DOLO: Me too. We'll assume that it's at least from the '50s, I want to say?

KIRA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: And then daylight saving time, I feel like that's just been around forever, but I know it's not.

KIRA: OK. I think it's cuckoo clocks--

JOY DOLO: Mm-hmm.

KIRA: --then daylight saving time, and then stopwatches.

JOY DOLO: I think I'm going to say cuckoo clock, stopwatch, daylight saving.

KIRA: Mmm. OK.

JOY DOLO: Because I feel like maybe there was a-- maybe not like traditional stopwatches, but there might have been an old school stopwatch. I don't know. We'll have the answer a little later in the show. Time is ticking.

KIRA: Forever Ago will be right back.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 9: Did you know that alarm clocks used to just be people?

[RAPPING ON WINDOW]

SPEAKER 10: Up and at 'em.

SPEAKER 9: In the early 1900s, clocks were commonplace, but alarm clocks had not yet been perfected. So in Britain and Ireland, early risers turned to their friendly neighborhood knocker-upper, who would come rap on your bedroom window to wake you up in the morning--

[RAPPING ON WINDOW]

SPEAKER 10: Rise and shine.

SPEAKER 9: --for a small fee.

[COIN HITTING METAL]

SPEAKER 10: Thank you kindly.

SPEAKER 9: If you didn't live on the first floor, they'd use a long stick to reach up and tap on your window.

[TAPPING ON WINDOW]

SPEAKER 10: The early bird gets the worm.

[TAPPING ON WINDOW]

You're burning daylight.

[TAPPING ON WINDOW]

Breakfast is the most--

SPEAKER 9: Eventually, alarm clocks replaced knocker-uppers and, thankfully, gave us the ability to hit snooze.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOY DOLO: This is Forever Ago, the show where we start at the beginning. Before we get back to the tick-tock of clocks, it's time to hear the answers to First Things First. Today's chronological conundrum comes in the form of timekeepers. We have stopwatches, cuckoo clocks, and daylight saving time. And, Kira, remind us of what you went with.

KIRA: I went with cuckoo clocks first, then daylight saving time, and then stopwatches.

JOY DOLO: I went with cuckoo clocks, stopwatches, and daylight saving time.

KIRA: OK, Joy, here's the top secret envelope with today's answers.

JOY DOLO (SINGING): Here we go, opening up. This is going to be intense. Let's see.

Oh, wow, look at this. So first up was cuckoo clock. They're at least 389 years old.

KIRA: Oh, yay. We both got it right.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, we did. Woo-ooh! So yeah, 1629, that's the first record of them existing. That's a while ago.

KIRA: Wow.

JOY DOLO: And the second one was the stopwatch.

KIRA: Oh.

JOY DOLO: The first device like this was actually made for doctors to use, so they could measure a patient's pulse.

KIRA: Oh.

JOY DOLO: And then last but not least, daylight saving time in 1916. Germany was the first country to do daylight saving time, and they did it to save electricity.

KIRA: Uh-huh.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOY DOLO: All right. Let's get back into today's Time Zone with reporter Carla Javier.

CARLA JAVIER: Hello, again.

JOY DOLO: So before the break, you were telling us about a big problem.

KIRA: Oh, yeah, one that engineers couldn't solve?

CARLA JAVIER: Right. This was more of a human relations problem. Let me get you up to speed.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In the 1800s, the world was changing fast. It was the Industrial Revolution, which meant factories started making things, like clocks, faster and in greater numbers. And the United States got way bigger when the government bought a piece of land in something called the Louisiana Purchase. Railroads crisscrossed the country, and the world started getting bigger and more confusing.

[TRAIN WHISTLING]

JOY DOLO AND KIRA: Is that our train?

CARLA JAVIER: I think so. Hop on.

[STEAM ENGINE TRAIN CHUGGING AND WHISTLING]

Here's the thing, though. Up until this point, people had clocks and stuff, but they didn't travel too far away from home. So as long as their clock lined up with the one at church, and lined up with the one at school, and anywhere else they needed to go, things were OK.

But think about it. Where is the sun when it's 12:00 PM in the middle of the day?

KIRA: Um, I don't know. I never really looked at the sun.

JOY DOLO: Probably like, high noon is, like, the sun's right up in the air right above us, right?

CARLA JAVIER: Yeah, exactly. But the sun isn't overhead everywhere at the exact same time, right?

JOY DOLO: Right.

KIRA: Right.

CARLA JAVIER: Yeah. So when it's up overhead in California, it's already moving down towards the horizon on the other side of the country in New York. It really just depends on where you are. And to make things even more confusing, the railroads themselves operated on their own times, too.

[TRAIN CHUGGING ON THE TRACKS]

CARLENE STEPHENS: Hi. Do you mind if I sit with you guys?

CARLA JAVIER: Sure. I was just about to get into train travel and standard time.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Oh, standard time, that's one of my favorite subjects. My name is Carlene Stephens, and I study time.

CARLA JAVIER: Oh my gosh. Where do you do that?

CARLENE STEPHENS: Well, I'm a curator at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, and I take care of the clocks and watches there.

CARLA JAVIER: So maybe you could explain why railroads made people realize there was a problem.

CARLENE STEPHENS: Communities could differ from each other by odd minutes and seconds. There was Washington, DC, time, there was Philadelphia time, there was Boston time, and there was Charleston time, for example, just on the East Coast. And that became very confusing. For anybody who wanted to ride a train, it was necessary to know not only what time it was, but what time the line was using. It was very confusing.

SPEAKER 11: This is the 12:00 PM train.

SPEAKER 12: Wait. My clock says it's 12:02 PM.

SPEAKER 13: And my clock says it's 12:07.

SPEAKER 14: Mine says 11:15 AM. Wait!

[TRAIN WHISTLING]

JOY DOLO: So what did they do about it?

CARLA JAVIER: It became so much of a problem, there was this big meeting in Chicago organized by the railroad companies, the 1883 General Time Convention.

[GAVEL POUNDING ON TABLE]

SPEAKER 15: We hereby propose a standard time.

SPEAKER 16: To unite trains across the country.

SPEAKER 15: The general public is going to love this.

SPEAKER 16: They'll throw a parade in our honor.

CARLA JAVIER: Which is not exactly what happened. I mean, a lot of people thought it was a good idea, and some people didn't seem to care too much one way or the other, but some people were not happy about it.

SPEAKER 17: Wait. You want me to do what with my watch? I can't just turn back time like that.

CARLA JAVIER: Kira, can you imagine if someone told you the time you had on your clock was wrong?

KIRA: Well, that does happen once a year--

CARLA JAVIER: Once a year?

KIRA: --in daylight savings.

CARLA JAVIER: Oh, that is a really confusing time, isn't it?

KIRA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: Oh, yeah.

KIRA: It is confusing, because then, suddenly, all your clocks are wrong. And when daylight savings ends, you got to change it again. But I just change it and just go with it.

CARLA JAVIER: Well, there were some people back in the day who were really against changing their clocks. Maybe we can ask Carlene, why were some people so against changing their clocks?

CARLENE STEPHENS: Some people thought the railroads were too powerful. The railroads were in control of so many aspects of economic life and daily life in terms of taking up space in cities, polluting the air with all kinds of railroad garbage, taking land, and wielding so much money.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CARLA JAVIER: So it might be hard for us to imagine getting so upset over resetting our clocks today. But for people back then, it felt like just one more big, scary change to the world on top of so many big changes already. Some mayors and newspapers came out against standard time. They thought it seemed like a dangerous suggestion, tampering with time.

But on November 18, 1883, many of the railroad stations around the country made the switch.

CARLENE STEPHENS: And the Earth didn't shake. The heavens didn't part. It was just, OK, now we're on zone time.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

CARLA JAVIER: So depending on where you lived, you'd set your clock ahead or behind that time by increments of exactly one hour.

KIRA: Ooh, like time zones.

CARLA JAVIER: Yeah, exactly. Two cities might be in different time zones, like how New York is always three hours ahead of Los Angeles, but now they were lined up to the minute. So if it was 3:15 in New York--

KIRA: Uh, so then it'd be 12:15 in Los Angeles.

JOY DOLO: That's right.

CARLENE STEPHENS: A year after the railroads in North America adopted zone time, there was a meeting in Washington, DC, to standardize time in 24 zones around the world.

CARLA JAVIER: Suddenly, more and more people were able to be in sync. And eventually, the world got onboard.

CARLENE STEPHENS: And this kind of coordinating around the world made it easier for certain groups of people to work together.

CARLA JAVIER: Like scientists, artists, business people. Once everyone was on the same standard time, it was easier to work together. You could schedule meetings and deadlines, plan events, and know, for the first time in human history, that everyone was on the same clock. And I think that helped make the world feel like a smaller place, united by a common language of time.

[TRAIN COMING TO A STOP]

SPEAKER 18: I think this is your stop.

CARLA JAVIER: Oops. I lost track of time. Come on, guys let's go. Thanks, Carlene.

CARLENE STEPHENS: You're very welcome. Bye-bye.

CARLA JAVIER: What time is it by the way?

KIRA: Oh, it's already 3:30.

CARLA JAVIER: Wow. It's getting late, and there's so much to talk about, but so little time. But the point is, people still needed more precise clocks to work together, even after gears and pendulums, like satellites, the ones that communicate with our phones. They need to be super precise. They can't be off by even a millisecond. So we keep making better and better clocks. And that's something scientists are still working on. Even though we live in different countries and we may speak different languages, it's cool that we live in a world where we do have one thing that helps us work together, time.

[CLOCK TICKING]

[ALARM CLOCK RINGING]

I guess that means I'm out of time. Bye.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

KIRA: Thanks for all of that history, Carla.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, thanks.

CARLA JAVIER: Any time.

JOY DOLO: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, belly chuckle.

We've come a long ways since people used sand or water to keep track of time. But who knows? Maybe one day people will look back on our digital watches and smartphone clocks, and think they're totally archaic. So Kira, do you have any ideas for the clock of the future?

KIRA: Yeah. Maybe in the future, clocks will be waking you up with the smell of bacon or something.

JOY DOLO: Ooh. That sounds on time and delicious.

KIRA: (LAUGHS) But that would probably just make me want to sleep even more and just have dreams about bacon.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, the food clock, like a clock that could make breakfast.

KIRA: Ooh.

JOY DOLO: So it's like, it wakes you up, but your food is just sitting there.

KIRA: Hmm.

JOY DOLO: (LAUGHS)

KIRA: We asked our listeners to dream up some fantastic futuristic clocks.

JOY DOLO: And here's what they had to say.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 19: My clock of the future would probably tell me what will happen in the future. So you could be like, tomorrow at 9:00 AM, what will happen? And it will literally just say, like, you'll eat breakfast, but then your bowl will spill over.

SPEAKER 20: Mine would have, like, you could transport to the future and to the past.

SPEAKER 21: Maybe it's like a robot, like Siri, but she's not on your phone. She's in your house. And you can just say something like, set alarm, and then when you wake up, it'll just be all around your house, so it'll make sure that you wake up.

SPEAKER 22: In the future, I think clocks will be able to freeze time and skip ahead or go back to whatever time you want. Say you're taking a math test, and you're like, I just want this to be over already, I want it to be the part where you finished this, and then you could just say then the clock takes you to after you're done.

SPEAKER 23: Like every time you were going to be late to somewhere, you could pause time, so then you don't have to be late to anywhere. Like say you're swimming, and then you have a class at 6:00, and it's 5:59, you could pause time, and go there, and then you're not late.

JOY DOLO: Personally, I'm wondering if alarms are going to be less annoying in the future. Have you ever heard an alarm like this?

[BEEPING AND CHIMES PLAYING]

KIRA: Oh, wow. No, I have not. That sounds like an alien abduction or something.

JOY DOLO: (LAUGHS) It sounds like aliens are coming to Earth. Yeah, that's one of the 3,628,800 chimes that will come out of a project called the 10,000 Year Clock or the Clock of the Long Now. Each chime will only be heard once over the next 10,000 years.

ZOE STEPHENSON: The clock is installed inside of a mountain in the middle of West Texas.

JOY DOLO: That's Zoe Stephenson. She's a mechanical engineer. Part of her job is to build gears for that clock. And those gears need to last 10,000 years.

KIRA: Wait. Why 10,000 years?

JOY DOLO: Well, let's do a little thought experiment. What do you think about when I say the future?

KIRA: I think of 100 years from now, like riding jetpacks to school or something. Half of the world will be robots and then the other half will be humans that will be freezed so that they live longer.

JOY DOLO: Would people be robots or would dogs be robots?

KIRA: Maybe dogs will be robots. And maybe in the future, people will be going to the moon on vacation.

JOY DOLO: Ooh, yeah.

KIRA: Like, it'll be a vacation.

JOY DOLO: So the idea behind the Clock of the Long Now is to get people thinking beyond the next 10 or 20, or even 50 years, and try to understand what the world might look like in 100 or 500 or 10,000 years.

ZOE STEPHENSON: Are we being good ancestors? What will someone think of us, what will our seven times great-grandchild think of us today, not what will somebody think about me tomorrow?

JOY DOLO: Kira, would you have any advice for the people 10,000 years from now?

KIRA: Don't turn everyone into robots, please.

JOY DOLO: That's solid. I would say my advice to people 10,000 years from now was just be nice to each other, just be kind.

KIRA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: Yeah.

KIRA: And don't start any new wars.

JOY DOLO: Yeah. Yeah. And also, don't turn people into robots.

KIRA: Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

We might take them for granted today, but think of how much our lives revolve around clocks.

JOY DOLO: From sundials to pendulums--

KIRA: From local time to time zones--

JOY DOLO: Clocks help us do everything, from meeting up for lunch--

KIRA: To taking off for space with a successful launch.

JOY DOLO: Plus, clocks give the world a common way of understanding time, which is pretty rad. Listeners, we want to hear from you.

KIRA: Do you have an idea for the coolest alarm clock ever?

JOY DOLO: Head to ForeverAgo.org to send us a message or just a high five.

KIRA: Forever Ago is brought to you by Brains On and American Public Media.

JOY DOLO: It's produced by Elyssa Dudley, Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and Molly Bloom. We had engineering help from Cory [? Shreppel ?] and Parker McDaniels.

KIRA: Production help comes courtesy of Lauren D and Kristina Lopez. Our fact checker is Ryan Katz.

JOY DOLO: We'd also like to thank Tracy Mumford, Eric Ringham, Geoffrey [? Bisoy, ?] Joanne Griffith, Sam Chu, Amanda [? Lilly, ?] and Julie [? Seipel. ?] What about you, Kira? Any special thanks you want to give today?

KIRA: Thank you, Darby, for putting me on this show.

JOY DOLO: All right. I think it's time for us to say, see you later.

KIRA: Bye.

JOY DOLO: Bye.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Long before clocks, humans found creative ways to track time. From falling sand to burning incense, we tried it all. But it took a daydreaming astronomer and a whole lot of inventors to get us to the precise clocks we use today.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
[BIRDS CHIRPING] [ALARM BUZZING]

JOY DOLO: Ah, good morning, Camp Chronology. [SNIFF] Ah, I love the smell of a cabin in the morning. Asa, are you stoked for the first day of summer camp?

ASA: Of course, Joy. I slept in my bathing suit so I'll wake up ready.

JOY DOLO: That's the kind of genius thinking we're going to need if we're going to have--

[DRUM ROLL]

--ultimate summer fun.

OK, I've got my sunscreen, my shades, my flip-flops, my ultrasonic radar-powered mosquito zapper. [BUZZ] [BUZZ]

[BOOM]

ASA: Was it supposed to do that?

JOY DOLO: No, I think it's supposed to do that. [CLEARS THROAT] I also have my lakeside reading, 101 Ways to Tell Mayonnaise Lovers They're Wrong. Plus, my towel, my snorkel, my extra large water bottle for hydrating, and the most crucial of all summer staples--

ASA: A hat?

JOY DOLO: No, my s'mores canon.

[AIRHORN]

[POP]

You get a s'more. [POP] And you get a s'more. [POP] And I get a s'more. [POP] Mm, food just tastes better when it's shot out of a cannon, you know?

ASA: Not soup, trust me. But that cannon is definitely ultimate fun. Joy, we're all set for the most epic summer ever!

[THUNDER]

[RAINING]

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not today.

JOY DOLO: Don't worry, Asa, it's probably just some clouds in the distance.

[THUNDER]

[HEAVY RAIN]

Oh, wow. It's really coming down out there. Well, I'm sure the storm will pass quickly.

[BING]

CREW: Attention, campers. There's a massive storm overhead that will not pass quickly.

ASA: Oh, no. Summer is ruined.

JOY DOLO: No, it's not. We can still have ultimate fun. We'll just splash in puddles.

[BING]

CREW: Update, the rain caused the camp's beehive to fall over and now there are bees swarming everywhere.

JOY DOLO: We'll just wear thick rubber suits and--

CREW: Now hungry bears are looking for the bees' honey--

[GROWL]

JOY DOLO: We'll--

CREW: And there's mudslides--

[CRUMBLE]

JOY DOLO: We'll--

CREW: --and sinkholes, probably. Just whatever you're thinking, don't. Just stay inside, OK? Have a camptastic day.

ASA: This is it. Somewhere is literally trashed now. We are having zero fun. And, listen, I really needed the summer to be awesome, amazing, you know?

JOY DOLO: I get it. I was looking forward to this too. Here, I know how to make you feel better.

ASA: A hug?

JOY DOLO: Better. Sympathy s'mores!

[POP]

This is Forever Ago, where we explore the before. I'm Joy Dolo.

ASA: And I'm Asa, I guess, whatever.

JOY DOLO: I'm sorry this terrible weather is bumming you out. The camp counselor said it should pass in a few hours.

ASA: It's just bringing up a lot of bad memories. You know, in 2020 when the coronavirus shut everything down? I had big plans that summer too. And all of them were canceled. I was hoping to make up for lost time this year.

JOY DOLO: Oof, yeah, 2020 was a hard year.

ASA: It really was. People were worried. Some people got really sick. Some even lost loved ones. Being stuck inside is reminding me of all that.

JOY DOLO: But, luckily, this is just a temporary indoor moment.

ASA: I mean, you wouldn't get it. You're like a full adult. You lived through, what? 50, 100 summers?

JOY DOLO: Wow, Asa, actually, I--

ASA: I've only had a few. I don't want to miss out on another.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, I totally get it. Well, how about we focus on all the things we'll do when the rain clears? Asa, what are your favorite things to do in the summer?

ASA: Stay at home, sleep, eat.

JOY DOLO: You sleep during the summer? [CHUCKLING] Well, what about do you like any sports or swimming or anything like that?

ASA: Oh, I am doing basketball in the summer.

JOY DOLO: Oh, that sounds fun.

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: So you like basketball. And then you take a nap and then you eat something and then you basketball.

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: And do you like to hike or anything like that?

ASA: Oh, absolutely not. I have asthma. I have asthma, nope.

JOY DOLO: Oh, so hiking isn't for you. Do you have a dream summer getaway, like a vacation?

ASA: Probably to Los Angeles. Because I have a few friends there.

JOY DOLO: Oh, that sounds like fun. I bet it's not raining there. But, hey, I know what we can do and tell this rain clears up. Let me tell you about 1816, the year without a summer.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

ASA: Was it really rainy then too?

JOY DOLO: No, I mean like America had snow in July.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC]

There were record cold temperatures around the world, dead crops, frozen wells, monster floods. As one person put it, the weather was just backward.

ASA: For real? It sounds like some kind of weird science fiction world.

JOY DOLO: Oh, 1816 was so wild, it helped inspire the entire genre of science fiction. But let me back up. If I'm going to tell you this story, we got to do it right. Let me just grab my portable campfire.

ASA: Wait, you have a portable campfire?

JOY DOLO: Yeah, in my closet.

ASA: Joy, we are in a cabin at Camp Chronology, not your bedroom.

JOY DOLO: I know, packing stresses me out. So rather than pick and choose, I decided to just pack my whole closet. [ZIP] Let me just pull this door out. [WHOOP]

ASA: How in the--

JOY DOLO: It's a family packing trick. Mary Poppins is a distant aunt. Anyway, [CREAK] here is my closet. And--

[RUSTLING]

[CLINK]

Where is it?

[WHOOP]

[DOINK]

Oh, not that.

[RUSTLING]

[RIBBIT]

God, I still have that? Ah, here's my campfire.

[WHOOSH]

ASA: How--

[ELEPHANT TRUMPETING]

And there's a whole elephant in your closet?

JOY DOLO: Of course. Where else are you going to fit an elephant? His name is Hermie. Sup, Hermie?

[ELEPHANT TRUMPETING]

Ah, you want a peanut?

ASA: No, he said he wants to hear the story about 1816 too.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

And since you mentioned it, he would also like a peanut.

JOY DOLO: Wow, how'd you get so good at interpreting animals?

ASA: I use that language for elephants, Dumbo Lingo. They say elephants are all ears. But they really appreciate it when you listen to them. Oh, and also compliment them. Their love language is words of affirmation.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

Ha, good one, Hermie.

JOY DOLO: What did he say?

ASA: It's an elephantese joke, you wouldn't get it.

JOY DOLO: Well, OK, then. [CLEARS THROAT] All right, Asa and Hermie, the elephant that lives in my closet, gather round and let me tell you about the year without a summer.

[TENSE MUSIC]

It all started one year earlier in the spring of 1815. In the part of the world that's now Indonesia, this volcano called Mount Tambora began to erupt. And this was a big eruption. [RUMBLE] 100 times bigger than Mount St. Helens, which erupted in the 1980s in Washington State, and 1,000 times bigger than the volcano that erupted in Iceland in 2010.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

Yeah, it was so big that the technical scientific term is a colossal eruption.

ASA: Colossal yikes.

[BOOM]

JOY DOLO: And it was as tragic as it was large. The volcano is on the island of Sumbawa. At the time, there were villages around the base. And the eruption pretty much destroyed all of them. Many, many people died too. Ash and smoke went everywhere, making it hard to find fresh food. So lots of people ended up moving off the island.

ASA: That's awful.

JOY DOLO: Truly. Today, we're much better at monitoring volcanoes. So we know when they're more likely to erupt. Plus, we can get warnings to people really quickly and help them move before things get dangerous. But people didn't have that kind of help back then.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

ASA: Hermie says an eruption that size is also really, really rare.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

Apparently, Hermie minored in volcano studies at elephant college. But Joy, what did this giant volcano eruption have to do with cold weather across the planet?

JOY DOLO: Oh, it was the volcano that caused the cold weather. It sent up massive amounts of ash, rock, and gas into the sky. That stuff was blown all around the world. By the following summer, that volcano spew was blocking out so much sunlight that temperatures dropped around the globe.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

I know. In North America, there were reports of summer blizzards, icy ponds, and frozen birds dropping out of the sky. It would go from normal to near freezing in just a couple of hours. In Italy, there was red snow because of all the ash and volcanic gases in the atmosphere. In Hungary, there was brown snow. In China, there was massive floods. And there was even snow in tropical Taiwan.

ASA: Wow, a volcano in Asia could change the weather in places all over the world? It's wild how interconnected this planet is.

JOY DOLO: Absolutely, for real. But people at the time didn't know this. Remember, this is the early 1800s. There were no telephones, no TV, no radio, no cars, no electricity even. Like in Europe and America, picture a time of horse-drawn carriages, steamboats, and gas lamps, fashionable men in pantaloons and fancy ladies and bodices and hats with long feathers. They definitely didn't have the kind of satellites and scientific equipment we have today. So they had no idea why the weather was weirding out on them.

ASA: Wait, so what did they think was happening?

JOY DOLO: Oh, they had theories. Some of them are interesting, some straight-up bananas. Here's a smattering of actual ideas people floated.

SUBJECT: I blame the ice on the Great Lakes. It's cooling us all off. We must chip it down and put it in our drinks immediately or it shall freeze us all.

SUBJECT: No, no, no, no, no, this is divine punishment. We must pray for salvation.

SUBJECT: You're all wrong. It's because of the end of the wars carried out by French general Napoleon. Without all the gunpowder in the sky, the air is cooling off. We should probably start more wars.

SUBJECT: Heed me, fellow freethinkers, I have looked at the sun with my mighty telescope and it appears to have a spot on it. I'm no sun doctor, but this seems like a case of [GASP] sun measles. The sun is sick. It shall die soon. Alas! Alas! Aladdin!

SUBJECT: Hear me, hear me, I know the true culprit. And it is as dastardly a villain as e'er there was. It's Ben Franklin. It's all his fault. Boo, Ben Franklin, boo.

SUBJECT: Uh, sir, Ben Franklin's been dead for more than 20 years.

SUBJECT: Yes, but he made us put up all those infernal lightning rods. He says they're to stop lightning from hitting our homes and burning them up, but they're actually stopping the planet from releasing heat. It's his fault, right? He ruined everything. Franklin's the worst, yeah.

SUBJECT: Seems like you really got a beef with Ben Franklin?

SUBJECT: Yeah, maybe bring that up in therapy or something?

SUBJECT: No, it's definitely his fault.

ASA: Wait, someone really blamed Ben Franklin?

JOY DOLO: Yeah, without a real scientific understanding of what was happening, it was hard to come up with an explanation. It wasn't until over 100 years later that scientists figured out that the volcanic eruption caused that weird weather. Imagine something so big happening and being completely in the dark about the science behind it. That's what life was like for most of human history. But most people didn't think so much about the cause as they did about the effect.

Because 1816 wasn't like today. Today, we have restaurants and grocery stores and friendly drivers who bring your ramen with a push of a button. Back then, people mostly grew food for themselves in their communities. And when this freezing summer hit, the crops froze and died. The cost of grain and corn went sky high and a lot of people went hungry. There were even riots.

ASA: Wow, OK, now I feel really bad for complaining about some weird rain. That sounds like a much worse summer.

JOY DOLO: It was. But, also, during all those hardships, some amazing things happened because humans are amazing. They dream, build, and invent when the going gets tough. In fact, it was this cold summer that kicked off ideas that would later change the world for the better.

[BING]

CREW: Attention Camp Chronology campers, the storm is almost over.

ASA: [GASP] Did you hear that, Joy?

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

CREW: Sorry, speaker must have cut out. As I was saying, the storm is almost over the camp, right above us. Oh, it's really boring. Much like the campers staying in our glamping yurts, the storm is in-tents. Get it? A yurt is like a tent so they're in tents. [CHUCKLE] [CLEARS THROAT] Is this thing on? Anyway, don't go outside. Bye.

JOY DOLO: OK, I know that wasn't the news you were hoping to hear, but I have something that will take your mind off of it, Asa. How about we pause the story and play a round of--

[AUDIO LOGO] First Things First.

JOY DOLO: That's the game where we try to guess the order things came in history. Since we're at camp, let's look at camp-related stuff. We've got the three C's-- compasses, canoes, and coolers, specifically those lightweight ones you store your food in when camping. So which do you think came first, which came second, and which came most recently in history? Asa, which one of these do you think is the oldest?

ASA: Maybe canoes?

JOY DOLO: Oh, that's the oldest you think? Why?

ASA: Um, I see a lot of old people using them.

JOY DOLO: Oh, no, I think I'm an old person Yeah, yeah, so it's probably been around for a long time if they're using it.

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: All right, so if you have canoes first and then we have coolers or compasses?

ASA: Compasses.

JOY DOLO: So we have canoes and then compasses. Why do you think compasses came second?

ASA: Oh, well, I thought it came-- wait, I thought compasses came first.

JOY DOLO: Oh, OK, so you want compasses to be the oldest?

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: So you have compasses first and then canoes or coolers?

ASA: Canoes.

JOY DOLO: Canoes--

ASA: They didn't really have frozen stuff.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, that's right because you have to think about ice, right?

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: That's good. I think that was most recent invention. And, also, compasses help canoes. So maybe they kind of like were a buy one get one kind of thing.

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: That seems logical. So we have compasses and then canoes and then coolers. Is that your final answer?

ASA: Yes.

JOY DOLO: I think that's a pretty good guess. We'll be back with the answer after the credits.

ASA: So keep listening.

JOY DOLO: You're listening to Forever Ago with me, Joy.

ASA: And me, Asa.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

And that's Hermie, the elephant that lives in Joy's closet.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

Joy, Hermie wants another peanut--

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

--and an extra fuzzy blanket--

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

--and some s'mores from your s'mores cannon.

[POP]

JOY DOLO: Well, bam, I love using this thing. We're sitting around this indoor portable campfire. Don't worry, it's podcast magic so it's totally safe. Don't think too hard about it.

And I was telling everyone the story of 1816, the year without a summer. So, basically, a giant volcanic eruption spat out all this ash and gas. And it clouded the sky around the world, cooling things down a lot.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

ASA: Hermie says that's called a volcanic winter, even if it happens in the summer.

JOY DOLO: Wow, who knew it would be so helpful to have an elephant well versed in volcanology in my closet? Anyway, yes, this volcanic winter caused a very cold summer.

ASA: Yeah, like so cold, there was literally snow in July.

JOY DOLO: Oh yeah, imagine sledding in the summer. Ew, that's got to feel wrong.

ASA: Like wearing a suit in the shower?

JOY DOLO: Or eating an orange with the peel on.

ASA: Or seeing a dog stretch and not saying, oh, get that stretch, ooh, that's a good stretch.

JOY DOLO: Exactly, you took the words right out of my mouth, so wrong. But maybe fun? Asa, is there a winter activity you wish you could do year round?

ASA: Christmas every day.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, every day, yeah. Presents and cookies and turkey or ham--

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: --and hanging out with people and all that good stuff too. But also cookies, absolutely. Well, this chaotic weather also inspired some big changes in the world, some of which went on to do a whole lot of good. Let's start in Germany.

So there's this baron with a very barony name. Get ready for it. It's a lot, Karl Friedrich Christian Ludwig Freiherr Drais Von Sauerbronn.

ASA: Oh, that is a very long name.

JOY DOLO: Seriously, he was hogging all the names. Now, Karl was as good at inventing things as his name was long. Over the years, he'd come up with a version of a typewriter, a meat grinder, a railway vehicle, and a device for recording piano music. But back in 1816, he ran into a problem that needed the old Karl Drais touch. You see, since so many crops had died, people couldn't feed the horses.

SUBJECT: [? He ?] [? gods, ?] all the horses have perished. How will a young lad like myself get around? By foot? That could take days in this year of 1816 in which we don't have things like cars.

SUBJECT: What even is that word you said, Karl? Ca-cla-clar-car?

SUBJECT: I have no idea, dear friend. I made it up because it clearly doesn't exist. Anyway, without horses, one must procure a new way of getting around. I shall invent something.

JOY DOLO: Karl decided to create something like a horse that didn't need food. He came up with a long machine with handlebars, a padded seat, and two large wooden wheels-- one in back and one up front that you could steer. In 1817, he was ready to test it out.

SUBJECT: OK, I simply start running and then, whoop, hop up on my seat. And, woo, this is a pure delight. I'm gliding along on my new invention. And unlike a horse, it requires no food or grooming. And it leaves no unsightly poopage along the road either. What a truly remarkable thing I have here. Quick, someone take a video.

SUBJECT: Karl, what is this word, "video?"

SUBJECT: No idea. I must be so excited I am speaking gobbledegook because this is the year of 1817 and there is no such word as "video." But look at me go--

[WHOOSH]

ASA: Wait, that invention sounds a lot like a bicycle.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

JOY DOLO: Bingo. Karl invented the early ancestor of the bicycle. It didn't have any pedals, but many believe this was the start of horseless transport. And like Karl, his invention had a lot of names. It was known as the Laufmaschine or running machine, the draisine, the velocipede, a hobby horse, or the dandy horse. Do you use a bike, Asa?

ASA: Well, I used to until I was riding on gravel. And let's just say I had a little tumble.

JOY DOLO: Oh, no, oh, no. Did you like skin your knees?

ASA: I skinned everything. It washed off my bookmarks and--

JOY DOLO: Oh my goodness. Yeah, I understand why you wouldn't want to get back on that. I've had a bike in my garage for like 10 years. And I swear one day I'm going to take it out and we'll take it for a stroll.

Well, next time you hop on a two-wheeler think about old Karl and how a summer of bad weather forced him to get creative. Let's meet another big thinker who was influenced by this year. Justus von Liebig was the son of a hardware merchant who sold paint and chemicals. As a kid, he'd watched his father do what's called bucket chemistry.

ASA: Oh, yeah, that's when you combine ingredients in a bucket to make things like varnishes, paints, polishes, and pigments.

SUBJECT: So astounding. My papa just adds ingredients in a bucket and they make something totally new. Truly, that is the coolest thing I have ever seen.

JOY DOLO: He fell in love with chemistry and soon had a dream of being a big time chemist himself. He was only 13 when the year without a summer hit. He lived in Germany too like Baron Karl. And there are lots of farms that lost their crops. People were starving. Justus saw all this and it stuck with him.

SUBJECT: If only there were a way to add ingredients to a bucket and make something that would help bring back the farmlands. That would truly be a miracle.

JOY DOLO: Justus went to school, studied hard, and eventually became a total chemistry expert. But that memory of failed crops and empty bellies haunted him. So he turned his mind to the problem of growing food.

SUBJECT: I bet chemistry can unlock the secrets of the soil. Then we could rid the world of crop failure and famine forever.

JOY DOLO: Justus ended up creating one of the first artificial fertilizers.

ASA: Oh, like something you can add to plants to help them grow faster and better, even in bad weather?

JOY DOLO: Exactly.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

ASA: Yeah, Hermie, elephant dung makes a great fertilizer. But Joy is talking about artificial fertilizers, like something made in a factory or a lab, not an elephant's butt.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

JOY DOLO: Right, Justus found that if you add certain chemicals to plants, they grow better. His fertilizers helped kick off the modern age of farming. Thanks in part to him, people the world over can grow more food than ever before. On top of that, he also invented one of the world's first baby formulas.

ASA: Wow, he really went all in on feeding the world. And he actually seems to have made a huge difference. Now that's what I call career goals.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

JOY DOLO: Yeah, Hermie, it is bananas.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

Oh, you want bananas. Sorry, my elephant is so rusty. What was that app you used again?

ASA: Here, Hermie, I have one in this picnic. I packed for me and Joy, but I guess we're not going to need it now.

JOY DOLO: Hey, we can have a picnic here inside the cabin. It's practically the same except, you know, instead of the sky, we have wood. And instead of scenic vistas, we have wood. And instead of the soft forest floor, we have also wood. This cabin is really one note when it comes to decor.

ASA: Yeah, that sounds fun.

JOY DOLO: Here, I made you this meal. It's the best summer ever burger with ultimate french fries, [BRING] like french fries, but like a lot more fun. I even added edible glitter to both of them for ultimate fun. [BRING] I don't know about you, but I'm having fun just hanging with my pals. And speaking of, I've got one last story for you that involves a few friends stuck inside on a rainy day.

ASA: Just like us.

JOY DOLO: Exactly. Pass the ketchup. Thanks. OK, it was 1816 still and a group of friends went on a vacation to a lake in Switzerland. They were planning on sailing, but the weather turned bad and they ended up stuck inside.

[THUNDER]

[RAINING]

SUBJECT: Confound it! This dastardly weather has conspired to ruin our adventure.

SUBJECT: Oh, this is a total sail fail.

SUBJECT: Oh, go to Switzerland, they said. It'll be fun, they said. Ugh.

JOY DOLO: After they'd read everything they could read and talked about everything they could talk about, they got desperate.

SUBJECT: If I have to stare at this wall one second longer, I will surely snap.

SUBJECT: Ah, I know. What if we tell stories?

SUBJECT: Boring.

SUBJECT: Scary stories, like bone-chilling scary. Like what if we try to make up the scariest story ever and see who wins?

SUBJECT: OK, I'm listening.

JOY DOLO: The group took some time and plotted out the creepiest, spookiest, bloodcurdling stories they could think of. Then they shared their tales of terror. One of them came up with an idea that was truly horrifying. It was about a brilliant scientist who bent the laws of nature in a twisted way.

[THUNDER]

SUBJECT: He takes dead material and adds to it the spark of life, creating something not quite man, but tall, lumbering with long black hair. It stares at its maker with a dull yellow eye.

[THUNDER]

SUBJECT: Is it a monster?

SUBJECT: Um, do you mind if we light a few more lamps? I'm not scared. It's just I think I'd like to be able to see what's in the corners of the room a little better.

JOY DOLO: That storyteller was Mary Shelley. And her story became her masterpiece novel Frankenstein. It was one of the first stories ever to blend scientific ideas with wild fantasy. Some say it was the first true work of science fiction.

ASA: OK, that's super cool. Imagine if we never had that story. Just think of all the movies we might miss out on.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

ASA: Right, Hermie. And all the Frankenstein's monster Halloween costumes we literally wouldn't have.

JOY DOLO: Exactly. And it's very possible Mary Shelley would have never dreamed it up if the weather was nice and calm as expected.

ASA: You know, this is making me feel better.

JOY DOLO: About the storm?

ASA: No, about 2020. Yeah, it was tough to miss out on so much. And it was really, really hard for so many people. But what if it sparked some good changes? Like what if we look back after a few decades and we see that, just like with 1816, us humans innervated and invented after 2020? And what if that made the whole world a better place?

JOY DOLO: I like that thought. I really hope.

[BING]

CREW: Attention, campers, I've got some bad news. I've lost my lucky sandals. They're green and they're usually on my feet and-- oh, look at that. I'm wearing them. Crisis averted. Oh, and the rain stopped. You can go outside now. Bye.

JOY DOLO: You hear that? Summer's back on.

[ELEPHANT TRUMPET]

Woo!

ASA: Yes, it's not too late. Now, let's get out there and make the most of it.

JOY DOLO: That's right. It's time for [DRUM ROLL] ultimate fun. [BRING] Ugh, I love laying by a lake. It's the perfect vibe. I'll just be here for the next three or four months.

ASA: Yeah, it feels so good to soak up that sun. [SIGH] You know, learning about the year without a summer really made me appreciate things.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, like how when a big volcano erupts, we're all affected.

ASA: And how we're all more connected than we think. That volcano may have turned the weather backward, making it so cold in the summer that it snowed and crops died, but it didn't stop humans from dreaming and scheming. We learn and grow from tough times.

JOY DOLO: Well said. Now, can you pass me that book? I--

[SNORT]

Oh, no, it's one of those hungry bears from before. Don't worry, Asa, I got this. Hey! Bear! You want to eat something? Well, chew on this.

[POP]

S'more cannon!

This episode was written by Sanden Totten with production help from Molly Bloom, Anna Goldfield, Nico Gonzalez Wisler, Aron Woldeslassie, Rosie DuPont, Ruby Guthrie, and Anna [? Weigel. ?] It was edited by Shahla Farzan. Sound design by Rachel Brees. Theme music by Marc Sanchez. Beth Pearlman is our executive producer.

We had engineering help from Alex Simpson, [? Zach ?] [? Hani, ?] and Anna Haverman. The executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati, Joanne Griffith, and Alex Schaffert. Special thanks to [? Raymond ?] [? Nu, ?] Vernon Neal, and Brant Miller.

ASA: Have a topic that you really want to know the history of? Send it to us at foreverago.org/contact.

JOY DOLO: OK, Asa, ready to hear the answers for First Things First?

ASA: Let's do it.

JOY DOLO: OK, just a reminder, you said compasses, canoes, and coolers.

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: So let's see what the truth is. Da-bada-ba! Oh my gosh, that's so funny. You were right the first time. It's canoe. Canoe was first.

ASA: What?

JOY DOLO: Yeah. Canoe is at least 10,000 years old.

ASA: 10,000?

JOY DOLO: I know. It's hard to say when exactly the canoe was first invented, but the oldest one found so far is called the Pesse canoe it was found in the village of Pesse in what is now the Netherlands. Archeologists think it's not just the oldest canoe, but the oldest boat of any kind. It was a single hollowed-out tree log. Other similar dugout canoes, also thousands of years old, have also been discovered in present day Nigeria and China.

The English word "canoe" comes from the Taíno word "canoa." The Taino people lived in the Caribbean before the Spanish arrived and traveled between islands and dugout canoes. First of all, I did not know anything like that about canoes. I knew they were made from trees, but I didn't know they were like--

ASA: Same.

JOY DOLO: --they were like in China and Nigeria. Mind blown. Well, that was the first. And then second, which you were correct on--

ASA: Yes!

JOY DOLO: --was compasses. And that was made in the 11th century.

ASA: Oh.

JOY DOLO: Yeah. Historians think China may have been the first civilization to develop a magnetized compass for navigation. Civilizations in Europe followed, developing their own compasses by the 12th century. Because people in these civilizations would have been skilled at navigating using the sun or stars, early compasses were probably a backup to be used when it was cloudy. [CHUCKLING] I think I would use a compass. I get lost all the time. So last, but certainly not least, is coolers.

ASA: Yes.

JOY DOLO: Coolers, which you were also right about, Asa-- high five-- they were made in the 1950s.

ASA: Oh.

JOY DOLO: Humans have found ways to keep food cool for millennia. But a smallish lightweight box that keeps your sodas and sauerkraut chilly, that's pretty new. In 1951, Richard C. Laramy filed a patent for a portable ice chest for storing food and the like.

This portable icebox quickly became a household staple for lots of people there. Lots of other coolers have hit the market since then. Today, you can get ones that charge your phone or play music.

ASA: Wow.

JOY DOLO: Isn't that something? Were you surprised by any of those answers.

ASA: I was very surprised. I don't know how they made canoes. Maybe the first one looked like really weird but then it started evolving, probably like that.

JOY DOLO: What if the first one was just like an actual trunk that they just sat on and they didn't carve it or anything?

ASA: Yeah.

JOY DOLO: It just floated down the water, the tree trunk.

ASA: They just stood on it, like not saying a word.

JOY DOLO: Yeah, straight ahead, dead face. We'll be back next week with an episode all about the history of pride flags

ASA: Thanks for listening.

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How a freezing summer gave us Frankenstein, bicycles and more

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