Bliss

SPEAKER_04: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_14: You're listening to Radiolab. From WNYC. Rewind. SPEAKER_22: Hello hello. Hello. Hi. How are you? We are super super excited to talk with you. Oh, SPEAKER_10: same with me. I'm sorry about the delay and so. Oh, that's fine. No, it's a. Life is crazy. SPEAKER_13: Life is crazy. Yeah, no. But you were so enthusiastic so I just. I need to talk to these guys. They SPEAKER_10: really mean it. This is Alex. Alexander Gama. Gama. Are you Norwegian all the way back? Yeah. Typical Norwegian. You know, if typical includes things like. Biking in Sahara and SPEAKER_10: climbing Everest and things like that. He's kind of a professional adventurer and we got SPEAKER_13: him into the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips. I gotta tell you this video. It's maybe the most amazing internet video I have ever seen. I think so too. So let me just set the scene for you. Okay. What you see in the video is this guy SPEAKER_13: Alex kind of moving along this. He's on skis. This snowy snow scape. He's filming himself. He's got the camera in his right hand. Where is he exactly? Antarctica. Oh, he's on a three month trek to the South Pole and back by himself. And what he'd been doing is every couple of days on his trip, you know, every 200 kilometers or so he would bury stuff in the snow. Some SPEAKER_10: some fuel and and sometimes a little bit of gear that I didn't use. Was that just to lighten SPEAKER_13: your load? Yeah. You know, because every ounce of unneeded weight has to go. So in this video, it's day 86 almost three months since I left. That's three months of walking 10 hours a SPEAKER_10: day and I lost almost 25 kilos 55 pounds. He's exhausted. SPEAKER_13: And it's come upon his last cache. So on the last cache where this video is captured. What SPEAKER_13: you see is Alex kneeling in the snow start to dig. I'm telling that I'm quite hungry. SPEAKER_13: Whatever's in this last cache in the snow, it's been three months since he buried it. So I didn't really recall what was there. He hopes it's something good. So he digs up SPEAKER_13: this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it. Some Vaseline, some zinc ointment. It's SPEAKER_10: just a mess. Nothing. It's pretty much all trash. SPEAKER_13: But then. He holds up a double pack of cheese doodles. Then he throws it up in the air. SPEAKER_13: And then this is this is my favorite part. He just freezes and he's staring off into the distance almost like, did that happen? Is it real? So he starts to dig some more. SPEAKER_13: And then huge chocolate bar. It's milk chocolate. And then it's just like cementos. I find more SPEAKER_10: and more and more. Have you ever been that happy in your life? Well, I've been thinking SPEAKER_10: about that. How when did you shout last time you were so happy? I think that's why we've SPEAKER_13: been watching this video over and over again, because none of us can remember. It's like what stands between you and that feeling is a really interesting question. Yeah, it's SPEAKER_10: three months with hunger. Actually, I think the reason I like this video so much is not SPEAKER_13: just because he's happy. It's that he somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection. It's SPEAKER_10: just like a perfect situation. By being so tired and so hungry, and finding such a stash SPEAKER_13: of candy that he had forgotten that he left. He created a moment of just absolute complete bliss. In this hour on Radiolab, we're going to be searching for moments like Alex had SPEAKER_14: up in Antarctica. We're going to be searching for bliss. Bliss of all different sorts. Perfect SPEAKER_13: moments. Perfect worlds. The kind of bliss that slips right through your fingers. And SPEAKER_14: the kind of bliss that just might last. And last. And last. Alright, we're going to begin SPEAKER_13: with a story that kind of inspired this show. We would have never done a show about the word bliss were it not for the following story, which is about a bliss. A? What do you mean a bliss? That'll make sense in just a second. The story comes from our producer Tim Howard and it begins with a box of tapes. Alright, so check it out. We're in my office and you've got a rectangular package here. It is a very old looking box. It doesn't look like much. SPEAKER_11: It's just about like 15 cassettes. Tape number six, singing and playing to friends in America. SPEAKER_11: Okay so this is Charles. Charles Casiel Bliss. An amazing character. And that's Richard. SPEAKER_22: Richard Ewer. He's a fellow who gave me the cassettes. He was a friend of Charles. Yeah. SPEAKER_13: So these were just like sitting in his attic or something? Garage I think. He looked like SPEAKER_22: I suppose a little gnome, a little leprechaun almost. He was short, bald and laughter the SPEAKER_22: whole time. He was a lovable character. Simple as that. This is my favourite one. Wait a SPEAKER_17: second. Just explain why we're talking about this guy. Sure. Because these tapes tell an SPEAKER_11: amazing story about a guy who really embodied his name and he tried to save the world but ultimately just tried too hard. The turning point in my life came in 1908. We can start SPEAKER_11: the story here. This is from a lecture that he gave decades later. So the story goes, it's 1908 and he's a little kid living in what's now the Ukraine. Okay. And his name is Carl Blitz. Not Charles Blitz? Not Charles Blitz. Carl Blitz. B-L-I-T-Z. That's his original name. And little Carl was fascinated by tales of discovery and adventure. My name is Erica SPEAKER_02: Okrent. Erica wrote about Charles Blitz in this great book called In the Land of Invented SPEAKER_11: Languages. Getting back to the story, one day she says when Carl was 11, a lecturer SPEAKER_02: came through town about some polar expedition to explorers talking about their trek across SPEAKER_11: the North Pole and he was so inspired by what he saw and heard at that lecture that even decades later he couldn't talk about it. And my father took me to this, excuse me. SPEAKER_11: Without getting choked up. My most, my father took me to this lecture and there I saw men SPEAKER_17: who left their warm homes to secure existence and went out into the Arctic, into the ice and snow in almost certain depths. For what? For what? For in search of knowledge. For an idea. As he tells it on those tapes, that was the beginning of his big idea that was SPEAKER_11: going to change the world. Fast forward a few years. When I came to Vienna after the SPEAKER_17: first world war. He did end up going to the Technical University of Vienna. I was suddenly SPEAKER_17: discovered to be the best mandolin player in Austria and one time I played with a full opera orchestra under the direction of the composer Franz Schrecker. Ah, those were the days. And then everything changed. In 1938, German troops swam across the Austrian border SPEAKER_23: on the historic... The Nazis came to town. The Nazis came to town. He was sent to Dachau SPEAKER_02: and then Buchenwald. You know, the concentration camps. One feeling, one wish, one desire to SPEAKER_17: end my life. All around him people were being worked to death or outright exterminated. SPEAKER_11: But his wife Claire was a German Catholic with connections. And Claire, my good wife, SPEAKER_17: smuggled my mandolin and my guitar into the concentration camp. I became so famous among the Nazis that for instance our block fitter would come into our barrack and say, let's give us the mandolin. And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Karl started SPEAKER_11: to develop his ideas about language. About the ways that you can manipulate words. For instance there was this one song that all the prisoners sang. The Bogeball Glied, one SPEAKER_17: of the saddest songs I can ever remember. Had the saddest lyrics in the world. At a SPEAKER_11: certain point Karl started to play around with the song. You know, he'd swap out some of the sad lyrics for some jokes, sing it for his fellow prisoners. And they laughed SPEAKER_17: and laughed and laughed and forgot for a few minutes that they are the darkest and the most terrible holes on earth. And on the flip side, every evening the guards would march SPEAKER_11: all the prisoners outside, force them to stand there in the cold in front of these loudspeakers, make them listen to these speeches. Speeches of Hitler and Goebbels screaming Nazi slogans. Deutschland Giberales! Which means Germany above all. In our town, many of the soldiers raised ducks. There are certain words which make you mad. SPEAKER_17: Which drives you mad. But after about a year, his wife somehow wrangled a British visa for SPEAKER_02: him and he gets out. Thank heavens those dreadful times are gone and now I can play here for SPEAKER_17: you an improvisation as it comes into my mind. In 1939 he went to Britain and got a job as SPEAKER_17: a manager of a factory. But he arrived in England just as... SPEAKER_11: The Blitz begins. The Germans start to bomb every major city in England. The noise that SPEAKER_03: you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren. And every time he'd introduce SPEAKER_11: himself to somebody new, they'd shudder. That can't be your name. Because of like Blitzkrieg and that association? Yes. SPEAKER_17: You can't go around here in Great Britain with a name like Blitz. And so I changed from the warlike Blitz to the peaceful Bliss. That was how he became Charles Bliss. SPEAKER_02: Bliss has all the right associations. So he went forward with the feeling that he was now Bliss and would bring happiness to the world. SPEAKER_11: And a year later he and his wife end up in China and Shanghai where there was a big population of exiled Jews. Shanghai was the only place that would take SPEAKER_02: them at that time. And there in China, and there in China I got SPEAKER_17: the opportunity of my lifetime. And now we come to his big idea. SPEAKER_17: I realized, but I did not know, that the Chinese have a different way of writing. SPEAKER_02: He became enraptured by the Chinese writing that he saw. SPEAKER_11: The Chinese use symbols. And each symbol is a word. And he writes about having this epiphany when he saw the Chinese symbol for man. He saw that the Chinese written form of man SPEAKER_02: sort of looks like a man. It looks like a six-figure man. And it means SPEAKER_11: man. He doesn't even know what the Chinese word for man is. He doesn't know how to say man. But that doesn't matter. He is skipping the word and going directly into the meaning. SPEAKER_02: So here was a way of getting beyond language. You could think the word in any language if you see it in the symbol. And that was a revelation. SPEAKER_11: Why? Well, I mean think back to the concentration camps when they were outside in front of those loudspeakers listening to Hitler's saying stuff like, Deutschland Uberales, Germany above all. That phrase? Mm-hmm. Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis. SPEAKER_17: That was coined a hundred years earlier in 1848. SPEAKER_11: And originally it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all of these separate principalities. The kingdom of Bavaria, the kingdom of Staxonia. SPEAKER_11: That spoke German, but these were not one country. So when they said Deutschland Uberales, it meant unification. The unified Germany. SPEAKER_11: The nation above the states. Oh, so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive SPEAKER_13: thing. No. But Hitler turned this around. SPEAKER_11: Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation above all other nations. Oh. SPEAKER_11: So you see what happened. This phrase that started meaning one thing, unification. Yeah, it became the opposite. Yeah. This is what the Nazis did. False words. Lies. SPEAKER_11: They would bend words to obscure the truth of what they were doing. Extermination, they would call it solution. By doing that, as he saw it, they were able to convince good, sane people, his neighbors, to go along with the genocide. SPEAKER_17: And I realized that something must be done to make language more true to nature. SPEAKER_02: Words were the problem. Words made people do cruel things to each other. They tear our society apart. SPEAKER_02: Words were dangerous instruments. They cause violence, they cause wars. SPEAKER_11: So when he saw the Chinese symbol for man, he thought this might be the answer. SPEAKER_17: And the idea came up to me that I should invent symbols. SPEAKER_11: Like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer. Which are so simple and pictorial that even SPEAKER_17: children can read them. If he could sit down and work it out, he would SPEAKER_02: look at the symbol and know what it meant instantly, regardless of what language you spoke. You wouldn't even need words, which he felt SPEAKER_11: could be manipulated. You could just have the symbol. SPEAKER_02: And get straight to the truth of the matter. And the way he saw it, right off the bat, SPEAKER_11: you'd have all of these benefits. Frenchmen and Finns, Englishmen and Estonians. SPEAKER_11: Language barriers would be out the window. Everything from traffic accidents to health SPEAKER_02: problems could be avoided, he thought, if his symbol system would just be adopted. SPEAKER_22: He had this vision that high-level political and commercial negotiations would be done in symbols. Did he say anything as grand as like, war SPEAKER_11: wouldn't happen? Constantly. And even of course, He reckoned Hitler wouldn't have happened, SPEAKER_22: basically. That if the German people had understood the symbols, they wouldn't have copped Goebbels propaganda. Now that's a pretty tall order, but it did seem to be what he thought. SPEAKER_02: Everything could be cured by this system. He's the biggest dreamer ever. SPEAKER_11: Yeah. How did he go about doing this? SPEAKER_02: He started working out what the basic lines and shapes would be. He also wanted to make sure you could produce it with a typewriter, so it had to be a limited set of shapes out of which everything could be created. Okay, so he works on it for seven years. Seven years? SPEAKER_11: And he comes up with that. Wow, that is a big one. This massive book called Bliss Symbolics. Semantology. Illogical writing for an illogical world. That says it all. Where he explains the logic of his system. For example, here, he has a symbol for sword, which looks exactly like a sword. And then, the sword plus a forward arrow means attack. I buy it. And then if you see a symbol for sword and another symbol for sword and they're crossed, that means war. So that's the idea that you take these basic SPEAKER_13: elemental symbols and combine them? Exactly. SPEAKER_11: Alright, here's another one. This symbol here is like the top half of a circle. Like a little rainbow, but just one line. That means mind. Mind. It looks like the top of a skull. Ah. Now, if I were to take that symbol for mind and I were to go like this. I were to put inside it a question mark. That means? SPEAKER_13: I don't know or I doubt. Doubt. SPEAKER_11: And there are also ways to indicate verbs and adjectives and first person, second person, the past, the future. But kind of the one thing that it did that no other language or symbol system or anything has attempted to do, at least as far as I know, is that it would make clear when something was what he called a human evaluation, you know, basically an opinion. And what you would do is you'd put this little V symbol and you'd put it above this symbol. And why V? Well, because you know how V is balanced on a point and it's unstable, it wobbles. To him that represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of the mind. Or take metaphors. If you say something which is a metaphor. SPEAKER_11: Metaphor, as he says. You must put up the metaphor sign. SPEAKER_17: To alert the reader, do not take this literally. Stop. Metaphor ahead. SPEAKER_13: Not exactly bulletproof, but I can see the thinking there. I actually think it's pretty SPEAKER_11: impressive and. Okay, so what happens next? Well, after he finishes this and he and his wife are living in Australia at the time. SPEAKER_02: They spent all their savings on producing this book and sent it out to professors, government SPEAKER_11: officials, heads of state, something like 6000 people. And they waited for the orders SPEAKER_02: to start rolling in. And no response from anybody. SPEAKER_02: And then they had nothing. Can't say I didn't see that coming. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. And with great disappointment, Charles went SPEAKER_02: to work as a welder in a factory. At General Motors, Holland's, he was working SPEAKER_22: on the production line almost as a robot. And a year later, his wife died. SPEAKER_02: You know, he had fought in World War One. He had been in a concentration camp. He had lived in exile. But he says this was the lowest point of his life. SPEAKER_11: So one day, 1971, this, as he said, this letter floated onto his desk. SPEAKER_13: A letter that would change everything. When Radiolab continues. SPEAKER_03: Hi, I'm Jason Ferminer calling from Brooklyn, New York. I just wanted to tell you that Radiolab is coming to life at the podcast experience. It's a brand new kind of immersive exhibition by the producers of On Air Fest. Travel across the history of the universe with Radiolab. Host Lulu Miller and Lata Thasur will be your guides as you lie down, look up at the stars and watch the journey through time unfold all around you. From the big bang to the farthest imaginable edges of the future. The experience will also include rooms designed by the creators behind other hit podcasts, including my favorite murder on being the heart and object of sound. 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Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_13: Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm Robert Krulwich. This is Radiolab. And we're talking about Bliss. We've got the story of Charles Bliss, whose name inspired the show, who had the dream of inventing a universal symbolic language. Now, before the break, he'd reached a real low point in his quest, when all of a sudden, as he said, this letter floated onto his desk SPEAKER_02: with this picture of this beautiful dimpled child proudly using his symbols. SPEAKER_05: Yeah, it was a poster. A poster. A poster. This is Shirley. SPEAKER_11: Shirley MacNaughton. And at the time, she was a nurse at a place called the OCCC. The Ontario Crippled Children's Centre, a SPEAKER_05: name that we were very happy to leave behind us. SPEAKER_11: And they've since changed the name. I started there in 1968. SPEAKER_11: And Shirley was part of this group of teachers and nurses who worked with these kids who suffered from cerebral palsy. If you have cerebral palsy, it's the motor SPEAKER_05: control from the brain that's been affected. Which meant that they had trouble moving their SPEAKER_11: arms or legs. And even in some cases, They couldn't speak. They couldn't form words. And in a film that was made of this class, you see these young kids, SPEAKER_05: Children from five to seven. All sitting in wheelchairs. SPEAKER_11: They're watching the teacher. She talks to them, and you hear them try to talk to her. But they can't. SPEAKER_02: These kids had no way to communicate. Couldn't they learn how to read? SPEAKER_02: They could, if you knew what they were understanding, and they have no way to communicate that to you. The only thing all these kids had were pictures SPEAKER_11: that they could point at. They had a picture of a toilet, a picture SPEAKER_05: of food, a picture of a drink, a picture of a bed. They were limited to that kind of communication. But I knew they were bright. SPEAKER_11: But if they couldn't move and they couldn't speak, how would you know? SPEAKER_05: My insight on that was the twinkle in their eyes. SPEAKER_11: But she says a lot of doctors and nurses at the time SPEAKER_05: Thought I was crazy. Thought there really wasn't much going on SPEAKER_11: inside these kids' heads. You know, they thought I was projecting into SPEAKER_05: the children. What she needed, she said, was a way to get SPEAKER_11: through to them. So one day she was at the library with a colleague and they come across this dusty old volume that had never been checked out called, you guessed it, The Symbolics. And what did you first think when you saw it? SPEAKER_05: Oh boy, can I get back to the group? How fast can I get back to the group with this? This is exactly what we need. So do you remember what the first symbols were? SPEAKER_05: I think it was I and you. I looked kind of like a standing person. SPEAKER_11: An upright line. A small horizontal line at the base. SPEAKER_11: Yep. Next to it, the number one. Which means first person. You is the same symbol but with a number two for second person. And then they had to have a verb. SPEAKER_05: And it was love. Heart with an arrow through it. SPEAKER_05: So now they've got a sentence. I love you. One of our mothers says the happiest moment she's ever had with her child was when her child came home and said, I love you. You know, so. SPEAKER_11: Shirley and her staff started to add more symbols. They caught on. And pretty soon they'd created this giant laminated chart. It had I and you and he, she, we and they. SPEAKER_05: Then it had mother, father, grandma, grandpa, doctor, nurse, teacher, therapist, postman, chairman, librarian, dentist. Eventually they added adjectives. SPEAKER_11: Happy, sad, and frustrated. All the verbs. SPEAKER_05: You had love and like and hate, want, need, understand. SPEAKER_02: Pretty soon the kids started to do amazing things with symbol combinations. SPEAKER_11: They started to improvise. Shirley remembers asking one kid, Terry Martin, what did you want to be for Halloween? SPEAKER_11: Terry pointed first at the symbol for creature. A creature, not a person. And he pointed at the symbol for drinks. Then? Blood. Then? Night. A creature who drinks blood at night. SPEAKER_13: Right. He wanted to be a vampire. SPEAKER_05: He spelt a new word. It sounds like an explosion with these kids. SPEAKER_11: It was. It was. SPEAKER_11: For the first time, she says, she could actually talk to them, like know who they were. Yeah, you got to know who the leaders were in the classroom. SPEAKER_05: Those who wanted to help others, those who copied others. SPEAKER_11: And it was around then that she and the other teachers decided to send Charles Bliss that letter. SPEAKER_05: We were sharing our excitement for this gift he'd given to the children. You know, he was in Australia. He was an elderly man. We had no thought that he would come and visit us. You know, it didn't enter our mind. SPEAKER_11: But Charles Bliss? SPEAKER_22: He was delighted. He had battled for so long for recognition, and now he had it. SPEAKER_02: He mortgages his house and flies over. I was so happy there, and I played my mandolin and told them jokes. SPEAKER_17: He dances around and kisses everybody effusively. SPEAKER_02: And they laughed and laughed and laughed their head off. SPEAKER_11: He had long conversations with the kids. In symbols. SPEAKER_05: He was very happy about the children. Join! Join! SPEAKER_17: That's it. Join. SPEAKER_11: But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Shirley, Shirley and the teachers had begun to augment the system. They'd begun to add their own symbols, such as... The opposite meaning symbol. SPEAKER_11: This allowed the kids to take one of Bliss' standard symbols and just invert the meaning. Opposite of happy, sad. SPEAKER_05: Opposite of up, down. Opposite of in, out. SPEAKER_11: It seemed to her this would effectively... SPEAKER_05: Double the number of adjectives. Which would be great for the kids. And we developed rules. SPEAKER_11: For how to combine symbols, for how to be more precise with the symbols. Yeah. She threw in some new pronouns that were missing. The difference between he and him and his. SPEAKER_05: In short... I would make the adaptations I needed to make. From the very beginning, we were using it to meet the children's needs. SPEAKER_11: Their specific needs. SPEAKER_05: And of course that is not what he had in his mind. SPEAKER_11: He wanted a system that was universal. Every change that she made created like a separate dialect. He would get very emotional about it. So when he got back to Australia, he started... Writing all these letters. Basically taking issue with her changes and her failure to understand how his system works. SPEAKER_11: Meanwhile... Thanks to Shirley, word about Bliss' symbols had spread way beyond Canada. To Hungary. France. Sweden. Israel. Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe? Yeah. And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia. It spread to all these places? Yeah. And in each place, the symbols would inevitably get tweaked to suit that country. For example, in Israel, because the writing goes from right to left. Yeah. The Bliss symbols went from right to left. But what really pained him the most, what really got him, was that these teachers were using his symbols... SPEAKER_02: As a step toward English. Or French or German or Hebrew or whatever. SPEAKER_11: It was just a way to get the kids to their native languages. SPEAKER_02: The teachers always saw it. The way they saw it, you start the kids on Bliss. SPEAKER_11: And then you introduce reading and letters and eventually they're fully literate. SPEAKER_02: At which point, you don't need the Bliss symbols. SPEAKER_11: This was the ultimate insult to him. They were using his system to bring these kids back to the very thing that he was trying to get everyone away from. Evil words. SPEAKER_13: Yeah. SPEAKER_17: If I try to explain it to them, they don't want to listen to me. They look through me. What should I do? What should I do? I don't know. I don't know. SPEAKER_11: And it's right about this point in the story that you start to hear a different Charles place. SPEAKER_17: That Shirley MacNaughton has perverted my world. Has perverted and perverted and perverted. SPEAKER_13: Is he saying perverted? Yeah. SPEAKER_17: She smiles, she beguiles, and she lies. SPEAKER_11: He kept sending Shirley and the other teachers letters and the letters got angrier and angrier. SPEAKER_02: This was not what the language was for. This was a universal language that had nothing to do with spoken language. You are ruining my system. You are abusing it. SPEAKER_11: And eventually he decided to take matters into his own hands and he traveled back to Canada. SPEAKER_05: And he started going to the various centres. Where the kids were using his symbols. And saying horrible things about me and getting them very upset. That's when I got upset. I got upset when he got them upset. SPEAKER_11: Not long after, Shirley receives a summons. SPEAKER_17: I have taken to court the OCC in the BCI. SPEAKER_13: Wait, he sued them? Yeah. SPEAKER_17: I added two more defendants. Mrs Shirley McNaughton. SPEAKER_11: On the tapes he even suggests that he's going to have Shirley put away. SPEAKER_17: For her whole life. SPEAKER_13: For life. Wow, why was he so upset with her in particular? SPEAKER_11: Well, because by this time she'd started... The international organization BCI. SPEAKER_11: Bliss Symbol Communications International. And she felt like this was a total unique and powerful tool which could and should transform lives around the world. And more teachers needed to adopt it. Definitely. What was he asking for? He wanted us to use the symbols in his way. SPEAKER_11: So in 1975 the BCI won a license agreement to use the symbols in the workbooks for the kids. But Charles Bliss... They should all be pulped. SPEAKER_11: ...didn't give up. SPEAKER_17: They should all be pulped. SPEAKER_11: He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who would listen. Please unite in helping to eradicate all falsifications of the Bliss Symbol System. SPEAKER_17: All in all, this went on for over a decade. SPEAKER_11: And the administration of the program where Shirley was working was desperate to make him go away. SPEAKER_02: He had basically destroyed the program. SPEAKER_11: And so in 1982 he and the BCI finally come to an agreement. SPEAKER_05: It was a financial settlement that satisfied him. What was the financial settlement? $160,000. SPEAKER_16: Wow. SPEAKER_05: You know, we were a little program in the basement of the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre. We were, you know, just a classroom. SPEAKER_16: Wow. SPEAKER_13: So a guy who wanted to save the world ends up robbing a bunch of disabled kids? I mean, that's kind of putting it crudely, but that's how it feels. SPEAKER_11: Basically, that's the... Yeah. SPEAKER_13: Did the symbols ever go anywhere? SPEAKER_02: Well, there was a lot of excitement about it in the beginning, but it never spread very far. It's used now at a few schools in Canada and Sweden, a couple other places. But it never went very far because he was constantly taking it down at every turn. SPEAKER_11: But here's what I find most surprising. When I talked to Shirley, she didn't have any bitterness toward him, not even in the worst moments. SPEAKER_05: When we were having the final legal action, we'd go through that in the morning. And as the lawyers were packing up their papers, Charles Bliss would reach across the table and he'd say, Shirley, will you help me? SPEAKER_11: So she'd go to lunch with him, sit with him. SPEAKER_05: And then he asked me if I would come to his hotel that night and put the ear drops in his ears. And I did that. Every night he was involved with this thing. That's just the way it was. SPEAKER_11: And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. You know, she felt and still feels that Charles Bliss had created something really new in the world. She even told me that when she uses Bliss symbols, she actually thinks differently. Yes, definitely. Really? Definitely. What's different? SPEAKER_05: Oh, I just think so much more about what a word means. And it's like poetry in its purest form. I've been playing with stained glass down here in my retirement. And you can, you know, you can just take the symbols and put them into one composite. And they say things that only art can say. It's beautiful. They transmit a meaning that is beyond any words. I'm so grateful. SPEAKER_13: I'm so grateful for what I have. Thanks to producer Tim Howard and Erica Oakrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages. SPEAKER_18: We'll be right back. This is Ginger, a socially awkward introvert from Cabot, Arkansas. Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being. SPEAKER_00: Bliss is political ignorance. This is Mahmoud from Moyaar. Bliss is your baby sleeping in your arms. This is the most important moment in your life. Bliss is your baby sleeping in your arms. SPEAKER_04: This is the most important moment in your life. These terms apply. SPEAKER_15: Right here in the physical world. Okay, so this story... SPEAKER_09: And we're going to do it with the perfect person. SPEAKER_13: Latif Nasser. SPEAKER_09: It begins with a birthday present. It's February 9th, 1880, six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont. And we're on a farm, a family farm, the Bentley family farm. And this scrawny 15-year-old kid named Wilson gets a microscope from his mother. So it's February and it's Vermont and so naturally the first thing this kid does is he grabs a handful of snow, picks out a single flake and he puts it under the microscope. And what he sees is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It's ethereal and perfect. He calls them masterpieces as if they're these great works of art. SPEAKER_13: He calls them that in his 15-year-old diary? Well, looking back he talked about that moment and what he was thinking when he sort of first saw it. SPEAKER_09: But obviously, you know, within minutes or maybe even seconds these masterpieces just disappeared without leaving any evidence that they ever existed. They just sort of evaporate. And as he remembers it, he sort of decides then and there that he's going to dedicate his whole life to documenting these masterpieces otherwise no one will ever know they even existed. He's going to spend his whole life documenting snowflakes? SPEAKER_13: Yeah. It's a good life, Jed, and it pays well. SPEAKER_09: Right, that's exactly what his father said. His father thought he was, you know, he was just was lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores. Oh, I see. SPEAKER_15: His father says, milk the goats. And he goes, no, dad, the beauty, the beauty. SPEAKER_05: Right, right. SPEAKER_09: And apparently he was really good at digging potatoes, but he just sort of was so busy futzing around with his microscope that, you know, I don't like this kid. I don't like him. Depends your work ethic. SPEAKER_14: It does. So what happens next? SPEAKER_09: So he takes his microscope and he moves it to this unheated woodshed behind the house. And he starts sketching these snowflakes, right? And while he's sketching, he can't even breathe because he was worried that his breath would melt his specimen. SPEAKER_09: So he's sort of holding his breath and drawing these, you know, these extremely complex crystals that can take you maybe, you know, maybe an hour to draw. But depending on the temperature, the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had at most, he had five minutes, right? At the end of that, he looks at them all and he's not satisfied. He just felt like he wasn't doing it justice, you know, what he calls these like miracles of beauty. So Bentley persuades his mother who persuades his father to buy him a camera. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. SPEAKER_13: 1880. We're in February 1880. Have we entered into in the era of picture taking? SPEAKER_09: Just, just barely. And for a farming family, this was like a lot of money, but they buy it for him. And he gets it and he sort of jerry rigs it to the microscope. And at age 19 Wilson Bentley is the first person ever in history to photograph a snowflake. SPEAKER_15: Okay, I'm going to cue the snowflake celebration music here. SPEAKER_09: Right. From then on, basically for the next 46 winters until he died, every snowfall, every blizzard, this guy Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack, holding out a wooden tray with thick mittens, because he would wear these, they're almost like oven mitts to make sure that his, none of his body heat would kind of leak out and inadvertently melt any of the snow. So he'd sort of stand there and sort of give it a once over with his eye. If nothing was promising, he basically had a turkey feather and he would sort of just wipe it clean with this turkey feather until he did find something he liked. And then he would, he would take this tiny little wooden rod and he would just, sort of really delicately tap the center of the crystal and like really, really, really gently lift it off and then transfer it onto the, onto a glass slide so that he could put it under the microscope and he could photograph it. Over the course of his life, he basically photographed about 5,000 snow crystals. For his whole life, he was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby, but he sold copies of these photos for five cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the U.S. Weather Bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. And I mean, you've already seen the photos. Like you've gotten them on a Christmas card. They're on your like ugly Christmas sweater in your closet somewhere. Robert's wearing a shirt with them on right now. Yeah. SPEAKER_09: They're everywhere. They're beautiful, symmetrical, really clean and complex. A lot of the greatest scientists who ever lived like Descartes and Kepler and Hooke they all tried to sketch and draw and kind of capture the essence of snowflakes. But none of them could do it as well as this one obsessive loner from Jericho, Vermont, whose photos were perceived to be kind of more faithful to nature than anybody else's. But that was until this other guy came on the scene, this German guy. Cue the other guy Germanic theme music. SPEAKER_15: Yes. Yes. SPEAKER_06: He was a German meteorologist named Gustav Hellmann. SPEAKER_09: Gustav Hellmann. Not of the Mayonnaise fame, I don't believe. I haven't even thought of that, actually. SPEAKER_13: So Hellmann, is he a contemporary of Bentley? Yeah, he is. SPEAKER_09: And he's working on his own book about weather. And so he hires a kind of a micro photographer who's another German guy named Richard Newhouse. A very teeny photographer who he kept on his desk. SPEAKER_15: Yeah, he's a microscopic himself and he just takes normal sized photographs. SPEAKER_09: Anyhow. He hires this guy and they take a bunch of photos using basically similar technology, a camera and a microscope essentially. But what they find is totally different. They do not find the elegant, symmetrical, ideal snow crystals that Bentley found. The crystals they found were flawed, lopsided, usually broken. SPEAKER_09: And the way I think of it, it was like a Martian who had only ever seen glossy fashion magazines, had just been given some random family photo album. And it was like, oh wow, they're not so broken. They're not so pretty. Like these are kind of ugly. You know, these humans are not all symmetrical. These Germans, they basically called him out. They basically thought Bentley was a fraud. SPEAKER_09: There was a particular way that Bentley prepared his photographs. What he would do is he would use a pen knife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which is what gave it that kind of nice black background, because he thought it would kind of put it in maybe Sarkar relief. And the German guys said it's misleading, that it kind of mutilates the snowflakes. Wait, so he's photographing these snowflakes and then significantly messing with the photograph? SPEAKER_13: Exactly right, exactly right. SPEAKER_09: So here's a quote from the photographer who said, quote, in many images, Bentley did not limit himself to improving the outlines. He let his knife play deep inside the heart of the crystals so that fully arbitrary figures emerged. Oh, so he's, well, I don't know. SPEAKER_15: That doesn't seem so no longer a candid, is it? SPEAKER_09: Well, that's that's the question. So then, but then, so they basically lobbed this and this is kind of going in these journals. But Bentley basically launches a counter attack. And what he says is that, in fact, those guys are wrong, that not correcting your photographs was, and he used this word like perverse to him. Why wouldn't you remove specks of dust or other imperfections? Why photograph a broken snowflake when you could photograph a complete one? So this is a quote from Bentley. He said, a true scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible. And if retouching will help in this respect, then it is fully justified. SPEAKER_13: So he thought his retouched snowflakes were truer than the normal ones? SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, exactly. The scientist is supposed to be kind of this very experienced, almost like a sage, who has seen every different variation on a snowflake, but can sort of bring that all together in one drawing, one sketch, one photograph. And that's the true snowflake. SPEAKER_15: So if I brought him a slightly gloppy snowflake and said, look, this is what fell on my nose. And this is a true snowflake because it actually fell from the sky. And it was unenhanced. SPEAKER_15: He would say that- He would say, Robert, you're an amateur. SPEAKER_09: Like this is not good work. You know, this is an aberration. This is an abnormality. Why would you choose to kind of highlight an abnormality as opposed to kind of this true ideal snowflake? And does that one exist? SPEAKER_13: I mean, that's the key question for me. Like, does the ideal snowflake exist in nature? You think there are such things as exquisitely beautiful- SPEAKER_15: I would like to think that there are. SPEAKER_09: No, so I think if my facts are right, the world snowflake expert is actually in Pasadena, California. SPEAKER_08: All right. Check, check, check, check, check. SPEAKER_15: In sunny Southern California? Yeah. SPEAKER_08: I'm wearing a t-shirt. I have sunscreen lathered. And I am going to talk to the world authority on snow. SPEAKER_09: How are you? His name is Ken Liebrecht. He's a professor of physics at Caltech. He is, in a way, he's like the modern day Wilson Bentley because he takes a ton of snowflake pictures. SPEAKER_07: I've taken about 10,000 now. SPEAKER_09: And he actually makes snowflakes. Oh yeah. Artificially. Okay, wow. So this is a giant tank. This is a nitrogen here? Never mind that. Okay. And to get to your question about the ideal snowflake, a few things. So number one, there are a bajillion different kinds. SPEAKER_07: Dendritic, crystal stellar, dendrites, needles and columns and hollow columns and the sector plates. So that's one thing. SPEAKER_09: The second thing is that snowflakes are never static. They're never one thing. So at every single moment as it falls to the earth, it's either growing or shrinking. Depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down. So there is no real platonic ideal form of a snowflake because it's so in flux. SPEAKER_07: I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect snowflake. But that doesn't stop Ken Liebrecht from looking. SPEAKER_09: You know, I tried up in Tahoe and Japan, Vermont, Michigan. SPEAKER_07: He travels all over the world looking for Bentley's perfect flakes. Alaska, I've been to Alaska, Sweden. But my favorite spot is Northern Ontario. A little town called Cochrane. SPEAKER_09: Population 5,487. So where do you go in Cochrane? Do you just anywhere? They're just falling all over the place? Mostly it's the parking lot of my hotel. SPEAKER_07: He says there's a lot of waiting involved. It only really snows well about once a week. Even then things have to be Goldilocks perfect. If the clouds are too high, then they evaporate a little on the way down. They don't look very pretty. Or if the clouds are too light or too heavy, that's bad too. And a lot of times the temperature is wrong. If you want those Christmas card supermodel snowflakes, SPEAKER_09: you need to have exactly minus 15. SPEAKER_07: That's five degrees Fahrenheit. You need to have high humidity, not so much wind, SPEAKER_09: so that they'll putter down slowly and have more time to grow. But every once in a while, I mean, when the conditions are right, SPEAKER_07: you go outside all hopeful and dissipating. And it's like, oh, crap. There's nothing garbage out here. So you go back inside and read some more email, and you come back a half an hour later. Nope, still lousy. And a half hour later, nope, still lousy. And you do this for hours, and then all of a sudden they'll get really good. And then I'm just out there frantically trying to collect as many as I can. One of the things I like to think about is, here I am with my little piece of cardboard in the middle of a continent. We're just snowing all the time. And so I am catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period and getting some really cool pictures. And so you kind of wonder what else is out there. What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down, totally unnoticed, and then they just disappear. I mean, stuff that is far prettier than the pictures I have, because they're out there. You know they're out there. Statistically, they're out there. And so there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things. Like you say, they're just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them. And they're falling constantly. So you sort of want to just stop the world and go look at them. SPEAKER_13: Thanks to Latif Nasser and to Ken Liebrik, who wrote the book The Secret Life of a Snowflake. SPEAKER_11: This is Matt and Neely Dawson from Asheville, North Carolina. And bliss is this sound. SPEAKER_11: That's the sound of my seven-month-old daughter reacting to my puppy dog licking her feet. Hi, my name is Igor and I'm calling from Novosad, Serbia. Bliss is Indiana Jones. All three parts. SPEAKER_06: I get to think about some kind of almost unattainable perfection. SPEAKER_06: Except then it is attainable. I just show up and there it is. This is Mary Roach and I'm in Oakland, California. SPEAKER_23: And I have a list of bliss. My bliss list. Number one, laughing uncontrollably. Number two, zero gravity. Number four, the first 10 seconds in a hot, hot bath. Number nine, a raw oyster. SPEAKER_23: Very fresh, but no larger than an infant's ear. SPEAKER_21: Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bresler, Rachel Cusick, Aketi Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Pascu-Díaz, Sindhu Nyanasanbandhan, Matt Cutie, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Khari, Ana Rasquette-Bass, Sarah Sandback, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Erica Inyankers. SPEAKER_19: Leadership support for Radio Lab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, Assignments Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. SPEAKER_01: I'm Krista Tippett of On Being, where we take up the big questions of meaning for this world now. In our new podcast season, we're going to have a different human conversation about AI and also the intelligence of our bodies, grief and joy, social creativity and poetry, and so much more. A conversation to live by every Thursday.