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This is 99% invisible I'm Roman Mars
Whether or not you're a fan of math it's undeniable that as a society we've always had a need to count things maybe it's to figure out the maximum weight an airplane can safely hold or the appropriate amount to tip after a meal or The exact number of minutes in a year so that you can accurately write the soundtrack to the hit Broadway musical rent Either way keeping track of numbers has always been a part of what makes us human So at some point along the way we created a tool to help us keep count and then we gave that tool a name We called it a calculator
But depending on what era you were born in and maybe even what country what constituted a calculator varied widely in elementary school I had a calculator watch which I thought was the coolest thing in the world when I visited my dad's house I would marvel at the slide rules that he had in his junk drawer his father a bookkeeper Had a monstrous metal adding machine in his office that I used to love to play with and if you go back far enough to a time before written numbers even existed a calculator was also an abacus a tally stick and our very own fingers and toes Regardless of the form it took though. What's clear is this without the calculator our built world as we know it just would not exist
SPEAKER_04: You trace it all the way back and it's like oh the entire recorded history of humanity is Kind of driven by the fact that we have to count things This is author Keith Houston. He writes all about the evolution of the calculator in his new book
SPEAKER_04: My name is Keith Houston, and I am the author of Empire of the Sun the rise and reign of the pocket calculator Well, let's talk about this need for a calculation and for accounting
SPEAKER_05: It seems like we you know as organisms seem to recognize that we always need to count more Then we have the tools to count Let's talk about like you know the historical origin of counting and that drive I think the funny thing is in a sense. There's not a historical origin of it. There's actually a biological origin of it
SPEAKER_04: It turns out that lots of animals count there were a series of experiments I think most prominently with a parrot and I think is the 20th century who was taught to count up to six Ravens or crows apparently had previously been found to be able to count up to seven So the parrot wasn't that impressive but the parrot also had a concept of zero, which is incredible the parrot The parrot understood that there was a thing which was there is nothing here to be counted And so so, you know animals can count insects can count Spiders are not very good. I think they some spiders can manage too and they're surprised if they see more than two things and Humans can count even human babies have some innate ability to count it I think there's a sort of canonical example which is if you show a baby some number of objects and Then you hide those objects and you take one away and you add one or you add one and then you reveal it again They are surprised that is to display surprise because the number of things that they're looking at has changed. So Humans can count even before we're old enough to be able to articulate what that means. Yeah Yeah, and then so, you know in an effort to count
SPEAKER_05: I don't know how the parrot does it but we tend to use our fingers and toes and you know different parts of our bodies You talk about that and then and then the process of you know, weaning ourselves off of that limitation
SPEAKER_04: There's been a bunch of different Ethnographic research that shows that we almost certainly learn to count using our fingers a lot of a lot of different Groups of humans at different times and in different places Have had number systems kind of with linguistic bases of five or ten because of course you have, you know, five digits in each hand Or maybe 20 because you maybe think of your fingers and your toes as being a kind of a complete set So we've always had this ability to count with our bodies. We got really really good at finger counting There are a bunch of clues in Sumerian writing. The Sumerians were the people who lived in Mesopotamia so the land between the Tigris and Euphrates River in the ancient Near East and Then what seemed to happen was the Egyptians got in on this finger counting lark as well And there are some paintings that show Egyptian merchants making interesting shapes with their hands. No one was really sure what this was and then the same thing recurs in ancient Rome There's a statue somewhere in Rome of the god Janus and He was said to be making signs with his hands that represented the number of days in the year And of course, this is even more than 10. It's more than 60 Someone is counting to more than 300 using their fingers But again, no one quite knew how so we went a really long way with our hands But of course at the same time we realized that this is not very practical. Your hands are good for recording numbers They're not necessarily good for manipulating them for actually doing maths with them. And that's where we start to think about calculating devices
SPEAKER_05: The first such calculating device to enter the picture was the abacus You've probably seen some version of an abacus before, you know, wooden frame with rows of wires cutting through it Those wires have beads strung onto them typically 10 beads per wire and you can think of it as
SPEAKER_04: Okay, this beads or this wire represents the units this one represents the tens of the hundreds and the thousands and so on It's unclear from where exactly the abacus originated
SPEAKER_05: But there are versions of this device in ancient civilizations all around the world as early as 300 BC There's a really elliptical reference to what could be an abacus in a book written in China and Rome and China
SPEAKER_04: We're talking merchants were moving back and forth and communicating between these two sort of superpowers So it's entirely possible that the idea for the abacus went in one direction or the other. I don't think anyone really knows But certainly by this point you have the concept of the abacus you have the word abacus as well In fact in Latin China and Japan and Korea seem to really love the concept of the abacus almost done to the present day Whereas it seems to kind of go away in the West
The tool really I think that succeeded the abacus for us was writing We got used to what we call Hindu Arabic numerals because they came out of a tradition in India and in the Arab countries to use Decimal numbers and a place value notation So, you know if I write down the number nine It means something different if I just write one nine and if I put another nine beside it that something means ninety nine That's the place value part of it. One of those nines means ninety one of them means nine and it turns out This is a really flexible way to write numbers. It's really good for maths. It's certainly far better than abacus So that's where pen and paper is is better So people use pen and paper were called Algoriths and the people who use abacus's were called abacus's and there was a bit of a Sort of a rivalry between the two of them for quite a long time and eventually of course in the West The Algoriths came out on top if we're doing maths by hand. We're not using an abacus We're doing up with a you know, a pen or a pencil on a piece of paper
SPEAKER_05: It sounds like one of the key advantages of being an Algorith using a pen and paper and a place value system Is that you could keep track of your calculations, you know outside of your own head. Yes. Yes, definitely
SPEAKER_04: You can show you're working you mentioned, you know, the abacus has a long and storied
SPEAKER_05: evolution but when it comes to these counting devices and calculators that you talk about in your book There's also this kind of like a complete obliteration of form sometimes and to get to the new one, you know Like in a way that's that's kind of unlike a lot of other sort of you know physical object evolution. Yes
SPEAKER_04: there's definitely a real step change between each sort of class of calculating devices and I think that is probably the reason why they're so different to one another you start off with counting boards and abacuses and
in the West we move towards pen and paper and Then really the next big innovation is a thing called the slide rule The slide rule was a major innovation that came along in the 1600s. It looks a bit like how it sounds
SPEAKER_05: It's like your average ruler often no longer than 12 inches marked with lots of numbers and equipped with a sliding mechanism The slide rule was created because a new discovery had come along something called the logarithm
Logarithms are basically this fancy math trick that makes multiplying big numbers together a lot easier But not so much easier that you can do it in your head So prior to the slide rule we had to calculate logs using these long charts known as log tables So the basis behind the slide rule were these very very long books of incredibly accurate
SPEAKER_04: logarithmic tables and you'd look one number up look another one up add the two numbers together look up the third one and you've multiplied Them and the slide rule was just a kind of physical incarnation of that So that's why it had a different physical form The slide rule made calculations a lot faster and less error prone than using the log charts and pen and paper
SPEAKER_05: It feels like magic
SPEAKER_04: It is this incredible thing because multiplication can be such a pain in the neck with pen and paper.
SPEAKER_05: I have a fondness for the slide rule as an object My father graduated with a degree in mathematics and I remember seeing slide rules around his house and this very cool-looking But tiny and humble tool was the basis of mid-century engineering I mean it was used to get the Apollo 11 to the moon. It was used to design airplanes It was used to build rockets and I have to admit it does look a little Complicated and daunting if you don't know how to use it
SPEAKER_04: So I'll have a crack at describing how to use a slide rule it's not a tool for radio so because it's like a ruler and Because it has these two movable sections or these two sections that move relative to one another you have to align them You have to look at a couple of numbers make sure they're aligned as precisely as you can and then you need to look up a result and so imagine Peering at a normal You know 12 inch or 30 centimeter ruler as closely as you can to figure out exactly where how long something is and eventually get to the point where The thing that you're measuring lies between two lines and so you just have to guess. Okay, is it you know, is it twelve point? 252 centimeters there's a twelve point two five three centimeters or whatever number it is You have to you have to start estimating it. They're not super accurate and this is what
SPEAKER_05: fascinates and confounds me It's that when you use a slide rule at a certain point, you're essentially needing to estimate your result It's this tool that we've used to help shape so much of our built environment and yet it's inherently kind of Imprecise by design like you make a measurement and you just have to eyeball it at a certain point and I'm curious How that might have shaped our built environment?
SPEAKER_04: Fundamentally if you're going to be doing a lot of calculations with a slide rule Everything has to be linear by which I mean most equations need to just be Multiplications or divisions or just adding some constant number and so this meant there was a real drive towards simplifying a lot of the equations that governed how for example buildings were built or Planes were designed. I seem to remember that University where I studied physics wasn't a very good physicist, unfortunately one of my teachers was an Aerodynamicist that was his thing and I remember being absolutely flummoxed because aerodynamics was so hard You know There are lots of cubes and square roots and much more complicated of higher-order Higher-order equations and this means that all if all you have is a slide rule You have to simplify you have to come up with some approximation to the much more complicated thing You're doing such that you have the ability to do enough calculations with it for it to matter And so we ended up with a kind of world where bridges were stronger than they had to be in buildings Where you know squatter and stronger than they had to be cars were less efficient planes were less efficient all because the slide rule just Simplified and reduced the set of complexity we could address It forced us to look at problems in a simpler way because it was the only practical way to do huge amounts of calculation
SPEAKER_05: Mm-hmm and when you're when you know that you're not as precise as you should be you err on the side of making planes heavier making Walls wider. Yeah, that's sort of thing exactly. Yes, that's amazing to me
SPEAKER_05: And Then there's a certain point as a society our math was getting more and more complicated We also had this desire to be more efficient and calculate faster. So what changes start to take shape here? So the calculator the thing that we might recognize as a calculator
SPEAKER_04:
Kind of has to have a different form because the slide rules form isn't cutting it pen and paper isn't cutting it What are you doing? You're manipulating the raw numbers. You're entering some numbers You're carrying out some operation and then you are entering some more numbers and carrying out another operation and so on After that, so I think the form of the calculator kind of had to change to accommodate that. Yeah, and of course This is where mathematics. So this is where mechanical calculators come along and you start to see things that They don't look like modern calculators, but they do in some way function like them
SPEAKER_05: Those early mechanical calculators were large and clunky some of them sounded a lot like a typewriter
This is the sound of an Olivetti Simplicissima MZ3 made in 1941 Its name is a bit of a mouthful and its size is a bit of a handful many large handfuls in fact
One of the earliest and maybe wackiest mechanical calculators developed along the way was called the Curta it was designed in 1945 by a guy named Kurt Hertzark and it was the shape and size of a pepper grinder the Curta
SPEAKER_04: William Gibson called it a math grenade in one of his novels. It's a plot devices, you know, I'm a guffin and it looks like It looks like a coke can with a bunch of sliders on the side
SPEAKER_05: The Curta was the first digital pocket calculator It could fit in the palm of your hand and it was known for its unusual cylindrical shape And it was the shape because it was driven by a very particular
SPEAKER_04: mechanical construct called a stepped drum and it's an incredibly clever piece of packaging and It meant that it was possible to have a genuinely pocket sized calculator that could add and subtract Really reliably. I mean the story how it came to be I think is as interesting as anything else It was developed by an Austrian called Kurt Hertz dark who ended up being interned in Buchenwald in the this this this horrific concentration camp in the Second World War and he was offered a chance by his captors if he designed that they somehow knew that he had been a calculator designer or maker and you know before he'd been arrested and He said if you can design this and you can make this we will give this to the fuhrer and perhaps he will see fit To you know to depart in you or to grant you freedom. So as this thing is this horrible Backstory to it that makes the fact that it exists and is such a gem of mechanical design It's really weird. I find it quite hard to hold those two ideas in my head at the same time
SPEAKER_05: We have more calculators after this but first we need to add up some ad money You
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SPEAKER_07: Lauren Mike, so we host a podcast for wired called gadget lab. We do we do
SPEAKER_06: Tell the good people some more about it Well, I think the good people should definitely tune in every week because they get to hear me roasting you know Alright, no really what gadget lab is is Mike and I tackling the biggest questions in the world of technology We cover the big news of the week in tech land But we also offer our expert analyses and opinions on all things consumer tech We release a new episode of gadget lab every week and you can listen and follow us wherever you pod
SPEAKER_05: So I want to talk about one particular event that you described taking place in 1946 in Tokyo what happened there? This is this is an incredible event
SPEAKER_04: The US Army newspaper, which is called Stars and Stripes Set up this contest in Japan post-war Japan between a private in the US Army, I think it was and an employee of the Japanese post office effectively His name was if I remember rightly Kyoshi the hands Matt's is a key Imagine his nickname was fight as part of the reason he was in the contest
SPEAKER_05: The contest was between the Japanese abacus and a newly developed state-of-the-art mechanical calculator from the US to basically see Which one was better both competitors were considered masters of their respective tools Matsuzaki used his abacus every day in his job at the Postal Service and Tom would worked in the finance department of the US Army They had to do a set of additions a set of
SPEAKER_04: Multiplications a set of divisions and a set of subtractions and the contest was whoever could finish them most quickly
SPEAKER_05: Tom Woods calculator was a luxury item. It was large and was powered by motors turning internal gears It probably rivaled the price of a car and the technology behind Matsuzaki's handheld abacus was about 2,000 years old
SPEAKER_01: The ancient abacus doing battle with a modern calculator That's what they come to see and who'd have thought that the bead and frame Still in common use in the Far East could stand a chance against a tool of modern science
SPEAKER_04: Matsuzaki won three out of four. I think the one that he didn't win was the multiplication and
The reason that he won was because he kind of internalized all of these shortcuts that you could do with the abacus It was it was you know, there was a special skill and so there was great great excitement at this contest
SPEAKER_05: after the competition newspapers reacted with melodramatic statements like the Machine Age took a step backward and Civilization has tottered as the 2,000 year old abacus beat the electric calculating machine but the competition also served as inspiration for new calculator manufacturers to push forward the evolution of what would eventually become the pocket calculator and in fact
SPEAKER_04: one of the knock-on effects Was that Casio the Japanese calculator manufacturer got started off the back of this this was Casio was started by a group of brothers one of them who's called Toshio, Casio Toshio had read about this particular contest and rather than being a Patriotic Japanese person and sort of cheering Matsuzaki for winning. He was more interested in This mechanical or this electrical electromechanical calculator, which had lost the contest and he thought I want to make these and The funny thing was at the time the Casio company The biggest selling product was a finger ring with a cigarette holder on it So that you could you could smoke a cigarette at work or you know in the bath
And he thought okay, we're gonna we're gonna build a calculator But Japan didn't have the industrial base to make these electromechanical calculators They couldn't they didn't have enough machinery to build them with sufficient precision
SPEAKER_05:
That limitation gave way to a new technological development in calculators The Casio brothers decided to build their Casio calculators off a device called a solenoid
SPEAKER_04: So solenoid is basically a metal sort of plunger inside an electromagnet So just a coil of wire that runs around it and if you energize that coil of wire the plunger Shoots along inside it and so you can use them to lock doors and I think car starter motors I've got solenoids in them and so on and he built a calculator out of solenoids and they acted as switches So every time you typed in a digit some solenoid would move and that caused another switch to close and there would be a cascade throughout the calculator to set the number and this all relates back to early computing and this is where I find it starts to get really interesting because
What calculators are doing is what computers are doing on a small scale on a scale where the average person would have the chance to buy a computing device A digital binary computing device in the sense that we understand it for the first time in human history Everything up to that point had been decimal, it had been gears, it had been rotating, you know gears and cams and so on The very first Casio calculator, the 14a, was about the size of a desk Then it chattered away as you typed in numbers and for it to compute the result, but this was the first kind of attainable digital calculating device that the world had ever seen That's when the modern calculator comes into existence, I think
SPEAKER_02: The world's newest and fastest and most amazing electronic calculator gets a workout in New York It can multiply and divide more than 2,000 times a second and add and subtract 16,000 times a second Supervised by a single operator problems like this that might take a person working with a desk computer Seven years now are solved in seven minutes
SPEAKER_05: And so how do you take this electromechanical calculator that's, you know, desk sized and make it smaller? What happens when you do that? It turns out that Thomas Edison had actually discovered a thing that would make this possible on a much larger scale
SPEAKER_04: You could build larger or you could build faster smaller computers. He had discovered this thing called the Edison effect where electrons would cross the empty space inside a bulb with no air inside it and He kind of discovered this he discovered this effect and he didn't really do anything with it But others who came after him figured out how they could turn these bulbs into amplifiers So I've got one strong current and I've got a weaker current that's changing and I can modulate the strong current So it matches the weaker current which is just an amplifier So, you know, I can amplify an audio signal for example, or I can amplify a telephone call
SPEAKER_05: People built on this development and discovered that you could use vacuum tubes as the basis for building computers And of course calculators these tiny little tubes meant that calculators could be built smaller than ever before They set out to build an electronic calculator one that be much faster and more flexible than these mechanical ones
SPEAKER_04: He'd been making previously and so they hired a guy who'd worked on some of Britain's earliest computing efforts And he said we are going to use vacuum tubes inside our calculator. It was called the Anita that's about the size of a cash register and Inside it had hundreds of these little tubes There's a fantastic video Somewhere on YouTube of an Anita with the case taken off and as someone types the numbers you see these little vacuum tubes light up And flicker it's like little fireflies darting around on the inside of the machine The Anita was just a huge set of electrical switches wired together And this is what drives the evolution of the calculator. The next thing to come along is the transistor So in Bell Labs in the States they develop Basically a tiny amplifier that can be made out of a single speck of silicon or germanium so you can make these things very small And people start making calculators out of transistors because they're just more switches vacuum tubes were switches transistors are switches and so now they make these completely solid-state calculators, which are just festooned with wires It's just circuit board after circuit board on the inside all of these components manually wired up And the next step is the integrated circuits someone at Texas Instruments a guy called Jack Kilby Figured out that why are we making all of these transistors on separate bits of silicon or germanium? where we could just make them all in a single bit and then wire them up on this tiny little bit of silicon and so that was where arguably the first ever honest-to-god pocket calculator came from by
SPEAKER_05: 1972 there were hundreds of calculator companies developing thousands of different models of pocket calculators All vying for that top spot in the market five million calculators sold that year averaging about three hundred dollars a pop
One of the most successful companies that came out of this period was Texas Instruments Ti and their line of calculators had a massive reign even though they weren't the first or the cheapest or the smallest or the most efficient and The rise of the Ti calculator is an interesting sort of deviation from the previous evolutionary steps of the calculator Whereas most of these developments were driven by a company's need to develop their own system to count their proceeds or a mathematical progression that necessitated a new tool a more powerful tool in this case Ti had invented the microchip and they came up with the idea to make and sell calculators really just as a way to Sell their microchips
SPEAKER_04: Absolutely, they came up with a solution and they were looking for a problem to solve with it So so Texas Instruments Had made a lot of money by selling microchips to the US military and in particular to the the nuclear missile program So all of those silos dotted across the Midwest with the missiles in them They would have lots of Ti chips sitting inside them in order to Run the show, but once you've built your fleet of doomsday missiles you don't need any more microchips or at least you don't need as many of them and Ti found that It just wasn't getting as many contracts from the military so they wanted to branch out They had a problem of we have the ability to make microchips but we need a market for it and so Hegarty the president and Jack Kilby the guy who'd invented the microchip in the first place were on a plane and By the time they'd landed they decided that we are going to build a pocket calculator And that is how we're going to sell more microchips any any American school child will know that Ti calculators are just everywhere in the classroom But the funny thing was they didn't want to make the calculators at first so they designed the chips for them
They figured out that it's gonna have a printer rather than a display because at that point LED displays were too power-hungry. They drained the batteries too quickly so had a tiny little solid-state printer quite clever piece of kit and They said to Canon we've designed what is effectively a pocket calculator It wasn't really it was like I think it was a couple of pounds in weight Maybe maybe a you know a pocket on a heavy overcoat or something and they gave Canon the design Canon brought it, you know, they designed a production version of it Ti couldn't actually produce the chips fast enough They still weren't quite there with their production techniques and by the time the the Canon pocketronic as it was called came out Other very small calculators are already caught up In fact, another Japanese company called Buzzycom had released a calculator which was basically the size of a packet of cigarettes Which was the absolute first pocket calculator incontrovertibly Of course, Texas Instruments eventually developed the TI-83 graphing calculator, which is still in classrooms everywhere
SPEAKER_05: How did that happen? How did they go from a place where? They're just trying to come up with a new way to sell their microchips to a couple of decades later Where having a TI calculator is often a requirement where your teacher tells you you have to buy one
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I
As I understand it, TI started to make more and more components of calculators and they become Quite good at it. They also seem to be quite good at lobbying so TI had a relatively large lobbying budget and They like to make sure that their calculators were required. Partly they would lobby actual lawmakers There was an attempt to have it written into law in Texas that all students had to take one particular Advanced math course the kind of advanced math course that you might need a TI graphing calculator to complete They didn't manage to get that passed but they did partner with textbook manufacturers so that when you got your maths textbook to be a picture of a TI calculator in it and the steps to You know the steps of the solution to the problem would be using a TI calculator They also started teaching teachers Which is a very very clever thing to do if you want to get pupils doing something So the a couple of teachers at Ohio State University had been quite early to realize that calculators could help Students who otherwise found maths quite hard if you put a calculator in front of a kid who's been discouraged for so long then it takes away some of the pressure becomes almost something to focus on and
SPEAKER_04: It makes it easier for them. You don't need to worry so much about addition and subtraction and multiplication and division they can focus on more complex concepts and so TI eventually started employing these two guys To run a teacher training program that of course used Texas product, Texas Instruments products To say this is how you teach this particular course. That's how you teach that particular course And so you had this perfect storm where? Textbooks showed you TI calculators your teacher had been taught by TI how to teach the course and I think this is Why TI ended up with such a dominant position in the States to be fair in the rest of the world? I think it's different in the UK. For example, it was pretty much Casio calculators It's all Casio calculators, but my wife was American very clearly remembers the TI 83 that she she had to use a high school Yeah, and so during this time
SPEAKER_05: I mean was there any kind of pushback or resistance to the infiltration of electronic calculators in the classroom? Yes, there was this panic in the same way that the Egyptians had panicked that they were going to forget about things when they were given
SPEAKER_04: writing You know five thousand years ago There was a whole swathe of people in the US in particular who were worried that kids were not going to learn the right sort Of maths because all of their parents had learned laboriously how to add and subtract and multiply and divide I Think they thought their kids had to learn the same things even if that meant Holding them back from more abstract or interesting concept. Mm-hmm
SPEAKER_05: It seems like there's always this sentiment, you know the kids today kind of sentiment That should learn how to do things the way we did things They did this about new math when my kids were were little and I felt that my kids Had a better innate sense of how numbers worked than I did in the way that I wrote memorized how to you know Manipulate numbers, but could you talk about the sunset of the pocket calculator book where it's persisting and you know stubbornly hanging on But also like what it means as a symbol today. I
SPEAKER_04: think in some ways TI's hold on calculators in the States or at least the classroom market is is sort of
It's almost the last gasp. It's a bit of a it's a bit of an outlier because calculators almost everywhere else have disappeared My opinion is that when the home computer came along and when Visi calc which is the very first computerized spreadsheet came along It suddenly became possible not just to do simple calculations on your on your computer Which was something that had been possible since the very earliest computers, but it was possible to do really complicated Calculations over and over again and to play around with well, what if we take this mortgage and go for this interest rate? What does that cost us? What if we charge this amount for this particular product and we sell this much it became possible to answer all these what-if questions that previously had been just a pain in the neck and so The spreadsheet I think becomes the tool of choice for really for people are really serious about these large complex ongoing calculations and so the calculator gets pushed out that way and
Then it just kind of goes from everywhere else I mean, you know if your cash register adds up the total do you need a calculator there? If your phone has got a calculator on it, do you need a calculator? Well, no you don't but I think our phones and these apps that still persist on Desktop computers. They are the afterlife of the calculator. They are the they are the calculator ascended to electronic heaven They no longer exist in physical form It's just their software their spirit lives on but their actual the actual body of the calculator has died off
SPEAKER_05: Well, the calculator as it existed may be obsolete I'm glad that the image that I am familiar with still lives on on my phone in my laptop So, thank you Keith so much. This is marvelous. It was so much fun and to look back at this sort of nerdy history Thanks, not so thank you again for having me
SPEAKER_05: 99% invisible was produced this week by Loshma dawn mix and tech production by Martine Gonzalez Original music by our director of sound Swan real Kathy to is our executive producer Colsted is the digital director The rest of team includes Delaney Hall Chris Barube Jason De Leon and mick Fitzgerald Christopher Johnson Vivian lay Jacob Maldonado Medina Kelly prime Joe Rosenberg Gabriella glattney Sarah bake and me Roman Mars the 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence Special thanks to Keith Houston go read his book Empire of the Sun the rise and reign of the pocket calculator Also while you're at it go read his other books to shady characters and the book They're all so good. Any 99 PI fan will love them We are part of a stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California Home of the Oakland roots soccer club of which I am a proud community owner as other professional teams leave The Oakland roots are Oakland first always you can find the show on all the usual social media outlets You know where they are you can find links to other stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 PI at 99 PI org
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SPEAKER_01: Paper it was so you could say it faster
SPEAKER_08: No, what it's to be more iconic must be a tech thing, but those aren't quite right
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SPEAKER_09: Coverage not available in some areas. See 5g details at t-mobile comm
