Transcript

8.27.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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Speaker 1: I will be reading from a special edition of Smithsonian Magazine,
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Speaker 1: America at 250, The Revolutionary Spark. As a reminder, Radio
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Speaker 1: Eye is a reading service intended for people who are
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Speaker 1: blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult to
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Speaker 1: read printed material. Please join me now for the first
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Speaker 1: article titled, In the Early Days of Machine Learning, Massive
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Speaker 1: computers said George Harrison was a woman. AI has come
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Speaker 1: a long way. A Cornell professor designed a room-sized network
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Speaker 1: of sensors that represented a single neuron. He claimed it
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Speaker 1: would grow wiser as it gained experience, and it has
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Speaker 1: never stopped. By Jenny Rothenberg Gritz Electronic brain teaches itself.
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Speaker 1: That was how the New York Times defined the Mark
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Speaker 1: I perceptron in a headline on July 13, 1958. Developed
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Speaker 1: at Cornell University by psychologist Frank Rosenblatt, who turned 30
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Speaker 1: two days before the article appeared, the Perceptron was a
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Speaker 1: room-sized grid of 400 light-registering sensors designed to perceive and
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Speaker 1: sort images. The idea that a computer could see was
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Speaker 1: revolutionary enough, but Rosenblatt also told the Times that the
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Speaker 1: machine was designed to, quote, grow wiser, as it gains experience,
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Speaker 1: end quote. The perceptron was the first step toward the
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Speaker 1: kind of artificial intelligence that's ubiquitous today, where machines learn
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Speaker 1: from experience in a way that mimics human brains. Like
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Speaker 1: so many other advances of the 1950s, its early history
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Speaker 1: now reads like a mid-century science fiction novel. When the
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Speaker 1: perceptron debuted, people heard, you can build a brain, it
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Speaker 1: can do everything that humans can do, says Killian Weinberger,
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Speaker 1: a computer science professor at Cornell who teaches classes on
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Speaker 1: machine learning. But scientists had a rudimentary understanding of the
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Speaker 1: human brain. They weren't able to study healthy, living gray
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Speaker 1: matter using technologies like magnetic resonance imaging, MRI. Instead, they
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Speaker 1: relied on indirect approaches, such as dissecting corpses or observing
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Speaker 1: the effects of brain lesions on patients' behavior. a theory
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Speaker 1: began to emerge. New experiences strengthened the connections between brain cells.
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Speaker 1: Once these networks formed, the brain weighed new information differently.
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Speaker 1: For instance, after a toddler was told over and over
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Speaker 1: that a round object was a ball, the child would
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Speaker 1: quickly and intuitively recognize other round objects as balls too.
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Speaker 1: Rosenblatt designed the perceptron to mimic this process. His machine
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Speaker 1: took in outside information, processed it through circuits, and transmitted
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Speaker 1: the resulting answer. Researchers trained the machine by using yes-no
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Speaker 1: feedback that updated how it weighed incoming information. Black-and-white footage
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Speaker 1: from the mid-1960s shows this type of training in action.
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Speaker 1: A researcher sits in front of the giant machine, teaching
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Speaker 1: it how to distinguish men from women. and uses two
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Speaker 1: simple switches labeled man, woman, and wrong, right. When the
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Speaker 1: machine identifies George Harrison of the Beatles as a woman
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Speaker 1: based on his shaggy hairstyle, the researcher gives the feedback wrong.
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Speaker 1: Through trial and error, the machine will learn that men
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Speaker 1: can have long hair too. Everything about this example seems
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Speaker 1: quaint today, but the real limitation was that the perceptron
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Speaker 1: mimicked a single neuron. One neuron was actually very impressive,
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Speaker 1: given the hardware they had at the time, Weinberger says.
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Speaker 1: It took a whole room full of equipment and a
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Speaker 1: lot of work. Still, the public eventually realized that the
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Speaker 1: much-touted electronic brain was less powerful than the brain of
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Speaker 1: a mouse. Rosenblatt died in a boating accident in 1971
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Speaker 1: at the age of 43. When David Tank began his Ph.D.
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Speaker 1: program in physics in at Cornell later that decade, the
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Speaker 1: Perceptron and its creator were already the stuff of legend.
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Speaker 1: Tank remembers going to a pig roast out in the country,
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Speaker 1: where the host took him to a barn and showed
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Speaker 1: him an experimental Perceptron machine built in Rosenblatt's lab. It
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Speaker 1: had all of these tubes and wires, and it was
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Speaker 1: just gathering dust. Around the same time, Tank read Rosenblatt's
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Speaker 1: 1962 book Principles of Neurodynamics. It was basically the first
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Speaker 1: textbook on artificial neural networks, and it's an inspirational book
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Speaker 1: in many ways, an absolute classic, says Tank, who became
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Speaker 1: a leading AI innovator at Bell Labs and co-founded the
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Speaker 1: Princeton Neuroscience Institute. What happened between the Beatles haircut lesson
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Speaker 1: and the age of modern AI? For years, it seemed
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Speaker 1: as though other forms of machine intelligence would win out.
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Speaker 1: Rule-based logic, for instance, used individually coded if-then instructions to
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Speaker 1: build an elaborate flowchart. The machine could obey those commands
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Speaker 1: to find a solution, but it couldn't learn. Neural networks
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Speaker 1: briefly entered the chat again in the late 1980s, when
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Speaker 1: researchers collaborated with the U.S. Postal Service to develop zip
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Speaker 1: code recognition. A team at Bell Labs, led by Yann LeCun,
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Speaker 1: successfully trained machines to recognize different types of handwriting. Instead
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Speaker 1: of foreseeing and specifying every possible way a person could
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Speaker 1: close the loop of an 8 or angle the line
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Speaker 1: of a 7, Lacoon and his colleagues trained their system
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Speaker 1: on many examples until it got the hang of human handwriting. Still,
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Speaker 1: neural networks weren't able to advance much until computers had
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Speaker 1: more storage and bandwidth. A crucial development came through the
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Speaker 1: computer games industry in the form of graphics processing units,
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Speaker 1: or GPUs, specialized circuits that generate images and videos. These
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Speaker 1: networks quickly and accurately performed thousands of calculations at once
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Speaker 1: in a way that finally brought truly useful machine learning
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Speaker 1: within reach. The other game changer was, of course, the Internet.
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Speaker 1: Forget about a lone scientist inputting photos of shaggy-haired musicians,
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Speaker 1: AI could now draw on sources ranging from ancient Sanskrit
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Speaker 1: scriptures to scientific papers to massive libraries of images and
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Speaker 1: videos to endless snarky social media threads. The new form
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Speaker 1: of AI could learn an unfathomably large amount about art, science, literature,
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Speaker 1: and human nature and weight its results accordingly. When Rosenblatt
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Speaker 1: introduced his Perceptron in 1958, He wrote in a research
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Speaker 1: paper that he wanted, quote, to understand the capability of
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Speaker 1: higher organisms for perceptual recognition, generalization, recall, and thinking, end quote.
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Speaker 1: His original Mark I machine, now in the Smithsonian's collections,
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Speaker 1: is ultimately a testament to the supercomputer inside the human skull,
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Speaker 1: with its relentless urge to expand its own powers, maybe
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Speaker 1: for worse and maybe for better. and accompanying this article,
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Speaker 1: Did You Know? The Past and Future of AI. The
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Speaker 1: term artificial intelligence debuted at a Dartmouth conference in 1956,
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Speaker 1: shortly before the perceptron appeared. The inner workings of neural
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Speaker 1: networks have become so baffling, even to their creators, that
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Speaker 1: a new field called explainable AI seeks to uncover the
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Speaker 1: processes at work so humans can provide proper oversight. Next,
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Speaker 1: a moment of divine inspiration helped Melville Dewey bring obsessive
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Speaker 1: order to the infinitely disorganized stacks in the library. The
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Speaker 1: Massachusetts student let his mind wander during a Sunday sermon
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Speaker 1: and created the decimal-based system that greatly simplified the search
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Speaker 1: for any book you were looking for. By Stephen Mim.
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Speaker 1: Melville Dewey was a cash-strapped Amherst College student in the
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Speaker 1: early 1870s, working at the school library to pay his bills.
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Speaker 1: An intense young scholar, Dewey felt at home among the books.
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Speaker 1: There was only one problem. They were so disorganized that
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Speaker 1: finding a given volume could prove impossible. One spring Sunday
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Speaker 1: in 1873, he made a breakthrough. He was sitting in
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Speaker 1: the college chapel, listening to a long sermon from the
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Speaker 1: college's president. His mind wandered and Thus was born the
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Speaker 1: classification system that now bears Dewey's name. His plan sought
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Speaker 1: to tame the chaos created by an ever-growing number of books,
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Speaker 1: and taught the world how to manage the exponential growth
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Speaker 1: of knowledge, that has defined the modern age. Born and
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Speaker 1: raised in a devout Baptist family, he internalized his era's
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Speaker 1: ethos of religious reform. Though he soon strayed from the church,
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Speaker 1: he never abandoned the conviction that the world could be
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Speaker 1: made a better, more ordered place. The Amherst Library was
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Speaker 1: his guinea pig. Like other libraries around the world, it
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Speaker 1: used a makeshift system of classification, lumping books by general
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Speaker 1: subject or even by size. As collections grew with astonishing speed,
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Speaker 1: after the invention of steam-powered printing presses, reformers sought to
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Speaker 1: organize the flow. Dewey found their ideas wanting. After meeting
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Speaker 1: the Boston Athenaeum's head librarian, Dewey returned to Amherst and
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Speaker 1: lamented in his diary, he puts the books on the
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Speaker 1: horse under horse and not under zoology. For months I
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Speaker 1: dreamed night and day that there must be somewhere a
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Speaker 1: satisfactory solution, he later wrote. Then came that fateful mid-sermon revelation.
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Speaker 1: Dewey's system closely mimicked the metric system, with everything built
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Speaker 1: around the number 10. There would be 10 major areas
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Speaker 1: of knowledge, from basic general works 000 to 099, to
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Speaker 1: geography and history 900 to 999. Each could be broken
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Speaker 1: down into 10 potential topical subdivisions, with infinite further subdivisions. Here, then,
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Speaker 1: was a system that could categorize everything from Aardvark's 599.31
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Speaker 1: to Zydeco's 781.62410763. As Dewey wrote in a formal proposal
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Speaker 1: published in 1873, the subclasses may be increased in any
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Speaker 1: part of the library without limit. Each additional decimal place
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Speaker 1: increases the minuteness of classification tenfold. This begat problems. Some
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Speaker 1: areas of study grew faster than others, generating ever finer
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Speaker 1: distinctions and unwieldy strings of numbers. Others barely changed at all.
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Speaker 1: Dewey doesn't seem to have anticipated these flaws. He continued
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Speaker 1: to hone his classifications at Amherst and in 1883 became
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Speaker 1: chief librarian at Columbia University, where he organized the collection
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Speaker 1: under his schemes. Other U.S. libraries copied the system, as
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Speaker 1: did many overseas. In 1900, a prominent British librarian concluded
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Speaker 1: that the Dewey decimal system was, quote, by far the
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Speaker 1: most widely used and influential of all the classification systems.
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Speaker 1: Its decimal numbers have attained an international significance, end quote.
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Speaker 1: Dewey established the world's first library school at Columbia in 1887.
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Speaker 1: and encouraged women to join the profession. But women librarians
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Speaker 1: alleged that he'd made unwanted sexual advances. He died in 1931,
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Speaker 1: but not before the allegations caught up to him. And
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Speaker 1: in 2019, the American Library Association stripped his name from
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Speaker 1: its highest award, citing his sexual harassment as well as
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Speaker 1: his prejudice against Jewish people, African Americans, or other minorities.
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Speaker 1: These revelations, and the coming obsolescence of brick-and-mortar libraries, diminish
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Speaker 1: Dewey's stature. Yet his legacy as an apostle of the
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Speaker 1: information economy remains. Confronting the prospect of a near-infinite expansion
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Speaker 1: of knowledge, his system anticipated a place for everything, and
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Speaker 1: put everything in its place. And accompanying this article, fun fact.
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Speaker 1: Melville Dewey's doomed quest for a phonetic English. Dewey was
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Speaker 1: obsessed with simplifying and increasing efficiency, including in spelling. Dewey
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Speaker 1: became a zealous spelling reformer, including a phonetic approach to
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Speaker 1: English orthography that did away with unnecessary consonants, non-intuitive diphthongs,
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Speaker 1: and other bugbears of the language. To take one example,
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Speaker 1: the man born as Melville Dewey began to write his
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Speaker 1: name as M-E-L-V-I-L-D-U-I. The Dewey, D-U-I approach to spelling did
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Speaker 1: not catch on. Next. After the concept of peaceful disobedience
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Speaker 1: was established in America, it traveled around the world before
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Speaker 1: taking hold. Force may subdue, but love gains. The Quaker
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Speaker 1: practice of conscientious objection evolved through Thoreau, Tolstoy and Gandhi
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Speaker 1: before becoming the hallmark of the civil rights movement by
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Speaker 1: Jeff McGregor. The 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama was
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Speaker 1: won by the simple act of refusal led in part
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Speaker 1: by Martin Luther King Jr., an American pastor convinced that
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Speaker 1: love was the only answer to hate. His commitment to
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Speaker 1: non-violent protest became the standard for the rest of the
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Speaker 1: century and At the same time, he was drawing on
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Speaker 1: a tradition that predates the establishment of the Republic. Long
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Speaker 1: before the states united, American Quakers in Pennsylvania, what founder
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Speaker 1: William Penn called a holy experiment, had espoused conscientious objection, pacifism,
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Speaker 1: and a peaceful refusal to do wrong. As Penn wrote
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Speaker 1: in 1682, force may subdue, but love gains, and he
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Speaker 1: that forgives first wins the laurel. In the century after
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Speaker 1: the Revolution, perhaps the most famous American proponent of civil
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Speaker 1: resistance was Henry David Thoreau. After spending a single night
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Speaker 1: in jail in Concord, Massachusetts, for refusing to pay his
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Speaker 1: poll tax, he produced one of America's foundational texts, his
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Speaker 1: 1849 essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. It is
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Speaker 1: not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so
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Speaker 1: much as for the right, Thoreau wrote. He endorsed such
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Speaker 1: tactics as the march and protest, which later became the walkout,
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Speaker 1: the sit-in, the boycott, the courageous and active willingness to
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Speaker 1: suffer punishment, even violence, in order to shame the state,
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Speaker 1: change the law, or raise the public's consciousness. But sometimes
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Speaker 1: ideas need to travel the world before they take hold.
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Speaker 1: In the late 19th century, Russian author Leo Tolstoy drew
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Speaker 1: deep inspiration from Thoreau, American Mennonites, and Quakers, and in
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Speaker 1: his 1893 book, The Kingdom of God is Within You,
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Speaker 1: argued persuasively for the virtues of nonviolent disobedience. Quoting from
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Speaker 1: the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy took the love and
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Speaker 1: conscience propounded in the Gospels as the path to the
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Speaker 1: highest good. Not long after, in South Africa, A young
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Speaker 1: Mohandas K. Gandhi read Tolstoy and refined his own ideas
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Speaker 1: about peace and moral refusal. King read Gandhi reading Tolstoy
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Speaker 1: reading Thoreau. And one of King's closest advisors, Bayard Rustin,
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Speaker 1: a quiet giant of the American civil rights movement, was
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Speaker 1: raised a Quaker. So civil rights protests joined American history's
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Speaker 1: long line of marches for abolition, suffrage, temperance, labor. Active
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Speaker 1: nonviolence is a protester's brave appeal to our better angels.
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Speaker 1: Our First Amendment guarantees us the right to organize and
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Speaker 1: to disagree and to refuse, especially contra our own government. Now,
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Speaker 1: as then, these are the rules of common conscience, of
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Speaker 1: moral conduct, and of love. And with this article, Did
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Speaker 1: You Know? Inside the Civilian Public Service Programs. During World
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Speaker 1: War II, the United States built a parallel army out
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Speaker 1: of conscientious objectors. Many Quakers, Mennonites, and other pacifist groups
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Speaker 1: joined the CPS rather than the army, fulfilling a range
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Speaker 1: of non-violent patriotic duties. Some spent years as fire watchers
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Speaker 1: in the American West. Others had agricultural roles. Some served
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Speaker 1: in domestic mental hospitals, yet others took part in sometimes
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Speaker 1: controversial experiments. These non-violent Americans of conscience were still often
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Speaker 1: required to wear uniforms. Next, five advances that helped turn
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Speaker 1: a night out at the movies into the all-enveloping experience
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Speaker 1: it has become. The power of film is often in
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Speaker 1: its ability to feel larger than life. moviemakers have been
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Speaker 1: developing ways to accentuate that aspect for more than a century.
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Speaker 1: By John Semley. The Close-Up. American cinema arguably owes The
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Speaker 1: Close-Up to controversial filmmaker D. W. Griffith, a director perhaps
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Speaker 1: best known today as the racist auteur behind Birth of
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Speaker 1: a Nation. In his 1912 short film Friends, Griffith moves
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Speaker 1: his camera from standard medium shots of the era to
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Speaker 1: tighter crop on his star, Mary Pickford, whose character is
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Speaker 1: torn between two suitors. The close shot of Pickford's stony
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Speaker 1: expression intimately conveys the character's ambivalence about her final decision.
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Speaker 1: The Vitaphone. The Vitaphone debuted in 1926, allowing sound recorded
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Speaker 1: on vinyl platters to play simultaneously with the projected image
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Speaker 1: in movie theaters. Developed by engineers at Western Electric, the
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Speaker 1: Vitaphone was deployed to astonishing effect in that year's Don Juan,
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Speaker 1: starring John Barrymore. A reviewer hailed the technology as a, quote,
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Speaker 1: marvelous modern synchronizer of sound and action, end quote. It
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Speaker 1: would usher in the era of sound motion pictures, or talkies.
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Speaker 1: Cinema scope. In the 1950s, home TVs were stealing audiences
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Speaker 1: from cinemas. The response, developed in part by Bausch and Lohm,
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Speaker 1: was to make movies bigger. Using unique lenses fashioned for
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Speaker 1: both film cameras and and theater projectors, filmmakers captured panoramic
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Speaker 1: scenes on 35mm film, and the projected image was about
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Speaker 1: twice the width of the previous standards. Spectacles like Bridge
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Speaker 1: on the River Kwai, 1957, lured audiences back into theaters.
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Speaker 1: MTV Editing The first music videos appeared on MTV in 1981.
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Speaker 1: These promotional works, marked by flashy graphics and rapid-fire jump
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Speaker 1: cuts between short shots, influenced movies. The sense of energy
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Speaker 1: increased at the expense of old-fashioned virtues like continuity. Within
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Speaker 1: a couple of years, films like Flashdance, 1983, and Top Gun, 1986,
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Speaker 1: incorporated these speedy new rhythms, creating a visual language that
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Speaker 1: would come to dominate pop culture. And finally, computer-generated imagery.
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Speaker 1: By the 1990s, blockbusters like Terminator 2, Judgment Day, 1991,
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Speaker 1: and Jurassic Park, 1993, were using computer technology to make
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Speaker 1: robots and prehistoric dinosaurs seem lifelike. By the release of
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Speaker 1: Toy Story, 1995, whole movies could be produced inside computers.
21:56
Speaker 1: Cinematic special effects became slicker and more realistic. It was
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Speaker 1: a revolution on par with the introduction of talkies. And
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Speaker 1: with this article, did you know the return of VistaVision? VistaVision,
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Speaker 1: a high-resolution film format, was developed by Paramount Pictures in
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Speaker 1: the 1950s. White Christmas was the first movie shot in
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Speaker 1: VistaVision to hit theaters. The film negative is twice as
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Speaker 1: large as regular film, giving directors the chance to create richer,
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Speaker 1: and more detailed images. It fell out of favor within
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Speaker 1: a decade and was only sparingly used for specific special effects.
22:40
Speaker 1: In recent years, auteur directors such as Brady Corbett, Paul
22:43
Speaker 1: Thomas Anderson, and Yorgos Lanthimos have resuscitated the format for
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Speaker 1: their Oscar-nominated films, sparking a resurgence of interest in film
22:53
Speaker 1: during the digital age. Next When patent protections couldn't keep
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Speaker 1: pace with ingenuity in the colonies, one inventive woman took
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Speaker 1: her case to Britain. Sybilla Wrighton Masters devised a novel
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Speaker 1: way to work with grains available to her in Philadelphia.
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Speaker 1: A long journey led to the first patent issued to
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Speaker 1: an American, though it went to her husband. By Lucia J.
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Speaker 1: Graves In the late 17th century, colonists in North America
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Speaker 1: faced a new problem. How to Process Maize, a new
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Speaker 1: world staple, using mills designed for softer European grains. Sibylla
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Speaker 1: Wrighton Masters, a Philadelphia mother of four, devised a solution.
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Speaker 1: Born circa 1676 and raised in Burlington Township, West Jersey,
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Speaker 1: Sibylla married the prosperous merchant Thomas Masters in the early
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Speaker 1: 1690s and moved to Philadelphia. After observing the way indigenous
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Speaker 1: communities pounded maize with wooden pestles, she conceived a machine
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Speaker 1: that produced coarse kernels used for making hominy meal, a
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Speaker 1: staple at the time, and similar to what we now
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Speaker 1: call grits. While some colonies granted exclusive privileges for inventions,
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Speaker 1: Pennsylvania was still young and did not yet issue patents,
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Speaker 1: so masters set sail for Britain in 1712 to seek
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Speaker 1: legal protection for her designs. I have been at great
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Speaker 1: trouble and expense and have ventured my life across the seas,
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Speaker 1: she wrote in her 1713 patent application. I have left
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Speaker 1: my country, my family, and all your comforts of life
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Speaker 1: for the good of the public. Married women could not
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Speaker 1: legally hold patents in their own name, neither in the
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Speaker 1: colonies nor in England, so Master's patent was issued to
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Speaker 1: her husband in 1715, specifying that the invention had been quote,
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Speaker 1: found out by Sibylla, his wife. Historians consider her the
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Speaker 1: first American colonist to secure an English patent, despite the
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Speaker 1: legal hurdles. While in London, Sibylla opened a shop selling
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Speaker 1: hats and bonnets made using a second innovation, a method
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Speaker 1: for preparing and weaving fibers from plants such as straw
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Speaker 1: and palmetto. In 1716, patent number 403 was issued to
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Speaker 1: Thomas for the weaving process. The same year, Masters returned
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Speaker 1: to Philadelphia, where her corn processing technology was used at
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Speaker 1: a mill established by her husband. Although the product never
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Speaker 1: sold well in England, it found some success in the colonies.
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Speaker 1: More significant was Masters' progression from observation to innovation and commercialization,
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Speaker 1: securing her a place in the canon of American invention.
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Speaker 1: And with this article, Did You Know?, a fashion entrepreneur.
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Speaker 1: Sybilla Wrighton Masters wasn't just an inventor. She was also
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Speaker 1: a fashion entrepreneur. In 1716, she obtained a further patent,
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Speaker 1: also under her husband's name, for a method of making
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Speaker 1: novel hats from palmetto leaves. From a shop she opened
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Speaker 1: in London, she sold the hats to some fanfare before
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Speaker 1: she and her husband returned to the States. And finally,
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Speaker 1: Because of a mathematician from rural Virginia's work on global positioning,
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Speaker 1: you have no excuse for getting lost. Gladys West had
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Speaker 1: an insatiable thirst for knowledge. She used computers, radars, and
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Speaker 1: satellites to make calculations that led to the GPS technology
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Speaker 1: that allows us to pinpoint any spot on the globe,
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Speaker 1: by Jenny Rothenberg Gritz. When mathematician Gladys Mae West died
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Speaker 1: this year at 95, she was celebrated for her work
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Speaker 1: on global positioning and Satellite Mapping. We didn't know exactly
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Speaker 1: where it was going because we worked for the military,
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Speaker 1: where everything is secret, West once recalled. As a child
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Speaker 1: in segregated rural Virginia, West attended what she described as
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Speaker 1: the stereotypical little one-room schoolhouse with rusty, decrepit furniture, sometimes
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Speaker 1: leaky ceilings, and always hand-me-down books. She won a scholarship
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Speaker 1: to Virginia State College, propelling her toward 42 years of
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Speaker 1: mapping and for the U.S. Navy. In the 1960s, she
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Speaker 1: helped train a computer to do 5 billion calculations to
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Speaker 1: measure the movement of Pluto. In the 70s, she began
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Speaker 1: using radar and satellite data to calculate the Earth's curvature,
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Speaker 1: accounting for ice levels, ocean currents, gravity, and tides. Her
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Speaker 1: work helped scientists create the precise model used by GPS
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Speaker 1: to pinpoint any location on the planet. After her retirement
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Speaker 1: in 1998, West went on to earn a Ph.D. in
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Speaker 1: public administration. I still had an insatiable thirst for knowledge,
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Speaker 1: she wrote in her memoir. I always had this sense
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Speaker 1: that there was more to accomplish. This concludes readings from
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Speaker 1: the Smithsonian Magazine for today. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore.
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Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and have a great day.