About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of Modern Marvels: 60s, 70s, & 90s Tech — Blast to the Past! *Marathon* — History from HISTORY, published June 11, 2026. The transcript contains 18,307 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"It was a decade when technology rocked, creating a phone you didn't dial, a watch that never ticked, and a camera that captured a giant leap for mankind using the same power it takes to light a Christmas bulb. Discover the secret under the hood of this Mustang rental and find out what's inside the..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: It was a decade when technology rocked, creating a phone you didn't dial, a watch that never ticked, and a camera that captured a giant leap for mankind using the same power it takes to light a Christmas bulb. Discover the secret under the hood of this Mustang rental and find out what's inside the toys that etched an enduring and super legacy. Now, 60s Tech on Modern Marvels. In the words of the generation that defined it, the 1960s were groovy. And if one 60s gadget traps the spirit of the time in a bottle, it's this psychedelic icon, the lava lamp. Part of its intrigue then and now is that the company that makes it won't divulge precisely what's inside that makes it work. Employees at the lava lamp factory take an oath of secrecy when they're hired to ensure that the mysterious ingredients stay
[00:01:22] Speaker 2: a mystery. We don't really know what's inside here because it's a closely guarded trade secret. But what we do know is that the two substances are very close in density and one of them is a waxy substance and the other is a liquid. If we pop the top, we can actually separate them and see the differences. Here comes the wax. The wax is already starting to harden and you can see it's just like candle wax that's been melted.
[00:01:59] Speaker 1: The key to the motion of the blobs within the lamp is the light bulb in the base.
[00:02:04] Speaker 2: The wax keeps the wax from hardening and sinking to the bottom. The heat melts the wax and then expands it just a little bit so that it's less dense than the liquid around it and it can rise. As it gets up to the top, it cools, contracts just a little bit, gets more dense and is able to fall back down to the bottom and that heating and cooling, expanding, contracting process is what gives this its amazing, mesmerizing look.
[00:02:32] Speaker 1: As lava lamps were making globs of hot wax cool, another fad of the 60s was making pint-sized cars huge. America's slot car craze began in 1960 with two commercial raceways. But by 1968, their numbers had swelled to almost 5,000.
[00:02:53] Speaker 3: Some of them were as large as bowling alleys. I remember a track I raced in having nine large tracks.
[00:03:01] Speaker 1: Early slot car hobbyists like Ed Harris built their own elaborate tracks and even their own cars.
[00:03:07] Speaker 4: We built them ourselves from a static model kit and then you found a motor somewhere, usually old train motors, and then you put it together yourself. I had scrounged up gears and tires and so forth and we went from there.
[00:03:25] Speaker 1: 60s slot cars may have resembled real automobiles, but their unusually high power-to-weight ratio gave them acceleration that could make Mario Andretti drool.
[00:03:39] Speaker 3: Slot cars are the world's fastest motorsport. A slot car goes from zero to 130 miles an hour in under half a second. There's no real car that comes close. All slot cars get their power from the track, so they have a motor, but no batteries or power source in the car.
[00:04:03] Speaker 1: Pulling on the trigger of the controller causes electric current to pass from the power source to the track. From there, rails feed the electricity to the car's motor. The more the trigger is depressed, the greater the current, and the faster the car drives.
[00:04:17] Speaker 4: In a way, you might say like driving a car, you come into a corner, you've got to slow down, and you either let back off on the throttle, and then you've got to time the speed going around the curve. Go too fast, and you're going to go off, and if you don't go fast enough, somebody's going to pass you.
[00:04:41] Speaker 3: By the late 60s, slot cars had really reached a peak. There were thousands of tracks all over the country, but interest started to wane, so the manufacturers looked for another way to appeal to the racers, and they came up with the Thingy. The Thingy was a dramatically styled car that they thought would appeal to the youth and racers, and these are some examples. An ASP by Classic, the Gamma Ray by Classic. This is a Garvin car and an AMT car. They were popular, especially with kids. In fact, Classic's Manta Ray was the best-selling slot car of all time, but they were very unpopular with those who had hand-built accurate models. So it really split the industry, and many people believe began the collapse.
[00:05:32] Speaker 1: By the end of the decade, the slot car craze was on its final lap. But the decade produced other toys so enduring that they're now hitting middle age, including everyone's favorite, the Etch-A-Sketch. Its origins date back to the late '50s, when inventor Andre Cassanias devised a contraption in his Paris garage he called "L'Ecromes Magiques," the magic screen.
[00:06:00] Speaker 5: "Etch-A-Sketch, that toy you'll never tire of."
[00:06:04] Speaker 1: In 1960, the Ohio Art Company brought it to America, renamed it the Etch-A-Sketch, and sold millions of them.
[00:06:11] Speaker 6: It was very, very popular in the '60s because the whole nation was TV-crazy, that everyone was crazy about the television, and here was a toy that, you know, was on the market that basically looked like a TV, kids could draw in it. Also, Etch-A-Sketch was one of the first toys to actually have a commercial on television.
[00:06:32] Speaker 1: The timeless, two-knobbed Teledoodler has remained relatively unchanged since its introduction.
[00:06:38] Speaker 2: If you've ever wondered what's inside, we have the taken-apart Etch-A-Sketch here, and it's really simple. You've got a stylus, which is what pushes the powder off the glass to make it draw. We have a pair of rails, and really what we have is the essence of a computer plotter here. And then we have the magic ingredient that allows you to erase, a combination of aluminum beads and aluminum powder. And you might be wondering, why would this aluminum powder stick to the glass? And it's because this aluminum powder sticks to everything. It's really clingy stuff.
[00:07:16] Speaker 1: The left and right knobs enable you to draw horizontal and vertical lines. Most of us have mastered stairs, maybe a house, but Etch-A-Sketch artists, like Christophe, are etching and/or sketching their way to a whole new artistic level. To approach such expertise, you have to master a basic but important technique.
[00:07:40] Speaker 6: Basically, the secret is you have to use both knobs at the same time. If you use the knobs inward, like this, you create a diagonal line. Now, if I were to use the knobs side to side, in motion, you're creating the other diagonal line. And then, if you use the force, you can create a circle.
[00:08:02] Speaker 1: And from there, the possibilities are endless. But be warned, once your masterpiece is finished, be sure not to shake it. The Etch-A-Sketch isn't the only '60s toy that continues to fascinate us. Case in point, that lively ball with a super-duper bounce.
[00:08:24] Speaker 7: Superball regular, made from Zektron, with 50,000 pounds of compressed energy.
[00:08:29] Speaker 2: When the ball was introduced, it was so revolutionary and so high-bouncing that it started to develop rumors around it about where this magical rubber had come from. And, you know, there was stuff about outer Mongolian, specially bred rubber trees and all kinds of crazy stuff. People wondered, is there some kind of magical device or spring or something inside here that gives it its bounce? But if you go and actually cut it with a knife or a saw and look inside, it's just solid rubber all the way through.
[00:09:02] Speaker 1: The ball's ingredients are essentially polybutadine rubber, the same kind of rubber used to make most tires, and sulfur. The mixture is forced into a mold, heated to 320 degrees Fahrenheit, and pressurized upwards of 1,000 pounds per square inch, so that the sulfur molecules cross-link the polybutadine chains. The secret to the super-sized bounce is adding about four times more sulfur than in conventional rubber products, forcing more connections. More crosslinks make the superball more resilient, enabling it to bounce back to 92% of the height from which it's dropped, no matter how high that happens to be. But the super-ball's real superpower comes when you chuck it.
[00:09:54] Speaker 2: You could just whack it into the ground, and it would go, like, three stories higher, so it was shocking how bouncy these balls were. And that was what made such a huge impression. Wham-O sold millions and millions and millions of these things, just because there had been no ball like this ever in the history of mankind. It truly was a super-ball.
[00:10:19] Speaker 1: Although kids had a ball playing with innovative toys in the '60s, the decade was anything but all fun and games. We were reaching for the moon, and we relied on one custom camera to bring the singular moment back to Earth. That's your piece, underneath you. When American Football League founder Lamar Hunt watched his children playing with the Super Bowl, he came up with a new name for the so-called AFL/NFL World Championship game, the Super Bowl. We call it everything from the boob tube to the idiot box, but there's no denying many of us are totally hooked on television. We can trace our obsession to the beginning of the '60s, when the evolving medium had found its way into 90% of American homes. It was influencing everything from our shopping choices to politics.
[00:11:18] Speaker 8: The Nixon-Kennedy debates was probably the first time that television had a significant effect on the outcome of the election, purely because of the way Nixon looked compared to Kennedy.
[00:11:32] Speaker 1: TV's influence blasted to new heights on July 10th, 1962, when NASA launched Telstar, the world's first commercial communications satellite. Three Earth stations stood ready to transmit television signals to, and receive signals from, the orbiting satellite. One in Gunhilly Downs in the United Kingdom, one in Plumour-Boudou, France, and one in Andover, Maine. Fifteen hours after Telstar's launch, Andover technicians crossed their fingers as they tried it out for the first time.
[00:12:14] Speaker 7: The first broadcast was made over Telstar 1 from here, and it was an image of the American flag flying in front of the control building to Plumour-Boudou, France, the Earth station in Europe.
[00:12:33] Speaker 1: The pioneering event marked the beginning of the instantaneous global communications revolution. The Andover Earth station is still in operation today. Its location is ideally suited for satellite communications.
[00:12:47] Speaker 7: We're in a ball here with the mountains completely surrounding this Earth station, and the mountains around here in this ball prevented unwanted radio interference to the satellite signal. And also, we're in the northeastern part of the United States, which gave us a short loop to Europe for satellite communications.
[00:13:11] Speaker 1: Andover's equipment may have gone through four decades' worth of upgrades, but its transmission process has remained essentially the same. To transmit TV signals, Andover's engineers in the '60s uplinked broadcasts, then beamed the signals toward Telstar.
[00:13:30] Speaker 9: Ascending station identification.
[00:13:39] Speaker 1: Telstar traveled in an elliptical orbit between 600 and 3,500 miles above Earth. It was equipped with antennas that received the signals. Then Telstar amplified them 10 billion times, using traveling wave tube amplifiers, and transmitted them to one of the other Earth stations. Technicians at those stations were able to move their ground antenna to optimize the connection.
[00:14:06] Speaker 10: In the days of Telstar, the antenna that was used for that was very large and very mobile, because it had to rotate on an axis and then travel on a track as it followed the satellite across the sky. So the antenna would literally move in order to be able to follow the satellite clear across the horizon, from one side to the other.
[00:14:25] Speaker 1: Telstar's oblong orbit caused the satellite to be in position for transatlantic relay for only 20 minutes every two and a half hours. Today, most communication satellites are in geosynchronous orbits, matching the speed of Earth's rotation and staying fixed above one specific point below, enabling them to relay signals 24 hours a day. After our TVs capture those signals, we take it for granted that we'll be seeing the images they carry in color. But until the 1960s, most of us were still staring at screens filled with black and white.
[00:15:04] Speaker 8: Color television as we know it today was invented in the '50s, and the first sets were introduced to the public in 1954. But they didn't sell very well. There were a number of reasons for this. One was that the technology was crude, the sets weren't reliable. Another was that the networks didn't do much color programming because it was very expensive and they had few viewers. Finally, in the mid-60s, television took off because many of the technical problems were solved. So how did they get color TV to work?
[00:15:35] Speaker 1: You might be surprised to find out that the encoded analog signals broadcast by the networks and local stations weren't in color. The color on your screen then and now is made by interpreting wave frequencies,
[00:15:48] Speaker 8: here inside the television itself. The television signal comes into the antenna connections here. It goes into the tuner, which is located up inside where the channel is selected. The signal is then processed by these circuit boards which create the black and white signal. This circuit board is to extract the color signals, red, green, and blue. They are then sent to the picture tube and you can see I have another tube here. Inside the tube is three electron guns, one for each color.
[00:16:25] Speaker 1: These guns shoot beams of electrons toward the screen. The beams pass through a shadow mask, a plate dotted with thousands of holes. Behind each hole is a group of three phosphores, substances that emit light when excited, one for each color. When the electron beams strike these phosphores, they light up. If all three beams fire at the same time with the same intensity, they produce a white dot. If all three are turned off, they produce a black dot. Combinations with varying degrees of intensity create all the other colors. Pull far enough away from the individual dots and you get the big color picture. The technology won over 60s consumers. Minnie plunked down upwards of $395 for a new 24-inch color set.
[00:17:25] Speaker 11: There was more detail, there was more to see, it was more graphic. Something like watching news of the Vietnam War, all of a sudden people could see blood in color, and that was very striking and very memorable to people and had an influence on the anti-war movement.
[00:17:42] Speaker 1: Despite the revolution in color TV, the '60s most eventful television moment would be broadcast in black and white. On July 20th, 1969, more than 600 million mesmerized viewers tuned in to watch man's first steps on the moon. It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. It was a broadcast television feat that would require an unprecedented technological leap. It began when Stan Labar, a Westinghouse engineer, was given a seemingly impossible task. This challenge was to design a compact camera, rugged enough to operate in the extremes of the moon environment, and transmit the video signal 238,000 miles back to Earth.
[00:18:36] Speaker 12: And when we were faced with this, it was rather amazing as how the group that we pulled together suddenly became so focused in on this particular problem, unlike anything we had ever done before.
[00:18:49] Speaker 1: Labar and his team had to make the camera simple enough for the astronauts to handle while wearing their space suits, and strong enough to withstand lunar temperature extremes of 250 degrees Fahrenheit to 250 degrees below zero. One of Labar's most daunting challenges was to make the camera function using extremely limited electrical power. NASA project leaders had to allocate the lion's share of power to more essential hardware, leaving precious little to spare.
[00:19:22] Speaker 12: They limited the amount of power that we could use on a camera to seven watts. Seven watts is the power from one Christmas bulb.
[00:19:33] Speaker 1: Power restrictions also limited the bandwidth of the camera's signal to only 500 kilohertz, one-eighth the bandwidth of a conventional television signal. This forced the team to come up with a radically new format for the camera.
[00:19:48] Speaker 12: Your home television works at 30 frames a second. This one scans at 10 frames a second. Your home television had 525 lines, scan lines. This one only has 320.
[00:20:01] Speaker 13: I was informed at the time that this camera would be of a format that had to be converted or it would not be able to be seen on regular broadcast. So we had contracted with the RCA corporation to build a converter so that when we received this signal at the ground site, we would be able to convert that prior to transmission back to Houston and release to the public. We had a 210-foot dish in the Mojave Desert, we had one in Madrid, Spain and we had one in Australia, which covered a 360-degree earth as the earth turned and our view of the moon changed. When we landed, at that point, I would say within 30 minutes, it became a realization that this television that was nice if you could get it but not required became the event and it became the quote-unquote requirement, "Oh, we better see the first step on the moon."
[00:20:58] Speaker 1: Apollo 11's camera and the complex transmission and conversion processes worked almost without a hitch. The images lost a fraction of their clarity on their way from Australia to Houston. But even though the image broadcast was blurry, it captured Neil Armstrong live, making a giant leap for mankind. Ironically, NASA has lost the tapes of the cleaner transmission beamed to Australia. All that remains of it is this filmed image of the Australian monitor, shot by a technician at the relay station. But the lunar camera has had a lasting impact, raising the bar of TV technology. '60s TV also introduced us to the car that captured the decade, a stylish beauty that many Ford execs never wanted to make. At the beginning of the '60s, an ultrasonic remote control added about 30% to the cost of a television set, or $100 for a $350 set, the equivalent of roughly $700 today. There's just something about a '60s Mustang. If any car could claim the decade, this was it. More than 40 years since its introduction, this legend of the American auto industry still has the ability to turn heads and trigger envy. It's no wonder everyone had to have one in the '60s. And why many still want one today. In the early '60s, Ford General Manager Lee Iacocca realized that the boomer generation was coming of age, an untapped market crying out for a car to call its own. In 1964, Ford unveiled the Mustang.
[00:22:55] Speaker 14: It caught the entire United States' fancy. Everyone wanted a Mustang. Everyone wanted to be seen in a Mustang. And sure enough, within the first two years, they sold over a million cars. The first-year sales had set records. No other car had sold in those numbers. It was all because the car was the right car, the right price, the right time, and it had the right look.
[00:23:18] Speaker 1: Ironically, this automotive icon was almost the car that wasn't. Board executives had to be convinced by Iacocca that they needed his car instead of their Falcon.
[00:23:29] Speaker 14: Well, when he first pitched the idea of this youthful young car, it was basically summarily thrown out. And the answer was no, no, over and over again, no. So that's when he decided, let's leave the Glass House. Let's get out of there on Michigan Avenue, drive up the street, stop in a little motel called the Fairlane Motel, run a room, and think outside the box, if you will. I mean, go there, go off campus. Let's think this through. And sure enough, that's where the
[00:23:55] Speaker 1: Mustang was born. Although Iacocca's design team did just that, they also used the Dowdy Falcon
[00:24:01] Speaker 15: as their starting point. This was a typical Falcon, 1963. The Mustang is based on the car, except for the styling. Basically the same platform as the Falcon. It's a unit body car, which means it's all one unit. It doesn't have a separate frame that the body bolts to. And then they added these torque boxes out here, which again is just steel plates, but it added strength to the frame of the car and kept it from flexing. Ford designers took the Falcon's platform and engine
[00:24:44] Speaker 1: assembly, then shortened the wheelbase, lowered the seating position, reduced the trunk space, and elongated the hood. They also gave it a well-appointed interior and wrapped it in its sleek signature
[00:24:59] Speaker 5: body style. When they went ahead and they decided they were going to build a four-seat sporty car, there was a lot of debate about what the name should be. Some people wanted to call it a Cougar, and the name Torino was tossed about. The debate ended when they turned their eyes on this unusual car. This car in front of me is known as the Mustang One. This little car came out in 1962 as what they call a concept car. It was the first Ford car to bear the name Mustang. And it was a sensation when it came out. Ford really just borrowed the name Mustang from this car. And eventually they decided to take advantage of all the good publicity that this little car had generated to call a production car a Mustang.
[00:25:54] Speaker 1: In the spring of 1964, Iacocca's brainchild finally hit the market.
[00:25:59] Speaker 14: And when it finally hit, it took the country by storm. There are great stories about people staying outside their dealerships and crowds that couldn't be contained. Every car that was in the dealership on the
[00:26:11] Speaker 1: first day selling out. Boasting a starting price of around $2,500, the Mustang appealed to just about everyone. You could buy a Mustang as a hard top, a fastback, or a convertible.
[00:26:26] Speaker 5: One of the keys to the Mustang success was that you could make it your own. And it's very hard today to find two of these early Mustangs that are exactly alike. Any proud classic Mustang collector will tell you the same.
[00:26:44] Speaker 16: This is a 1966 convertible. It has options of power steering. The most exciting thing is it has air conditioning. We don't find options like air conditioning on convertibles.
[00:26:59] Speaker 17: This is a 1967 fastback. And it's got a neat option in here for people who like to ski. You can open up the trunk and set your skis in and they go all the way through to a fold down rear seat.
[00:27:12] Speaker 18: This is a 1968 GT. It's a high performance 302 motor with a factory four speed. The wood option in the car is a deluxe interior. I have totally rebuilt this car from ground up.
[00:27:28] Speaker 1: There was even a Mustang for drivers who demanded something brawnier under the hood.
[00:27:33] Speaker 19: This is a '66 GT350. Carroll Shelby took the regular Mustang in '65 on up and modified it to be a little more performance oriented. What he did was a few modifications to the car that you normally don't
[00:27:49] Speaker 1: have on a regular fastback. Modifications included a V8 racing engine and a special intake manifold and carburetor to increase its power from 271 to 306 horsepower. Most people would prefer to to have
[00:28:07] Speaker 19: these if they're a little more speed oriented, a little more racing, a little more prestige. It's more of a rarer car than a regular Mustang. Shelby didn't make that many of them.
[00:28:21] Speaker 1: Not everyone could own one of these wild Mustangs, but that didn't mean you couldn't drive one.
[00:28:26] Speaker 5: Hertz realized that there could be a real marketing opportunity here for renting cars to people who couldn't afford to buy these things, but wanted to be able to drive one. And they worked with Shelby, created a number of special GT350s. They were painted black and gold, which were Hertz's colors. They were called GT350 Hs. And you could go in and rent one.
[00:28:50] Speaker 15: And people used to come in and rent them for the weekend. That's why they called it a rent eraser. And they'd take them out to the drag strips, or they'd take them out to the oval tracks, and they'd race them. And then they'd bring them back Monday, and they had a good weekend, and it didn't cost much. Then guys started deciding that, hey, we can take these engines out of the Shelby's and put our less powerful engines back in them and use these in our everyday cars. And Hertz didn't know the difference. They were not car aficionados. They were just in the rental business.
[00:29:33] Speaker 1: Today, you can still rent your own racer, as Hertz is once again offering the Shelby to its customers. What the Mustang did for the '60s car industry, this push-button wonder would do for communication. And this humming watch would do for timekeeping. In 1999, a man in Tennessee applied for a license to marry his Ford Mustang. He listed his fiancee's birthplace as Detroit, her father's name as Henry Ford, and her blood type as 10W40. His application was rejected. The '60s was the first decade to rock and roll from beginning to end. And you could take the dance party wherever you went.
[00:30:21] Speaker 2: No one had ever had that ability before. You could walk around and listen to your music, and even though it sounded like crap, no one really cared. It was so amazing to be able to do it that you were happy about it.
[00:30:33] Speaker 1: The gizmo that made the transistor radio possible was, of course, the transistor. In the late '60s, this tiny electrical wonder was making a huge impact.
[00:30:44] Speaker 2: Transistors are a pivotal technology, like a wheel or, you know, fire. They are so amazing in electronics, in computers.
[00:30:54] Speaker 20: We have here what are called discrete transistors. These are probably from the '60s and '70s. Called discrete not because they don't tell secrets, but because they're individual transistors, each one packaged in a separate header, as they're called in the business.
[00:31:13] Speaker 1: The transistor had been invented in 1947 by three scientists at Bell Laboratories, looking for a replacement for inefficient and bulky vacuum tubes.
[00:31:22] Speaker 20: They found out that they could control the current through this piece of crystal by the voltages they put on the wires. And they could put just a little bit of voltage, a little bit of current on the wires, and it would cause a large current change through the crystal.
[00:31:35] Speaker 1: In the case of a transistor radio, a weak signal travels from the antenna, through various components, to a transistor. There, it's amplified. The amplified signal is then directed to the speaker, that translates the signal into audible sound. Electronics manufacturers of the '60s wasted little time capitalizing on the new technology. Transistor radios hit the market by the mid-1950s. But it wasn't until Japanese companies like Sony streamlined production that they became as affordable as they were desirable.
[00:32:17] Speaker 2: In the '60s, Hong Kong and Japan took over the transistor marketplace and began producing really cheap radios, to the point where they dropped from $40 to $30 to $20, down to $10, and then everybody could have one. And everybody did want one.
[00:32:35] Speaker 1: As transistors helped give our radios a makeover in the '60s, they did the same for that other electronic necessity, the telephone. Until 1964, all home telephones featured a rotary pulse dial, where the series of pulses corresponded to each of the digits on the phone. Consumers at the 1964 New York World's Fair got a sneak preview of things to come, as touch-tone phones were put to the test.
[00:33:06] Speaker 21: Hi, this is the Bell System's new touch-tone dialing. With this indicator, you see how many seconds you save the new way. Let's try it! Okay, I'll raise you. Ready? Go.
[00:33:17] Speaker 1: They were an instant hit, and literally set the tone for the future of telephone dialing.
[00:33:22] Speaker 11: I beat ya. Once you tried the touch-tone phone, you just did not want to go back to the rotary phone, because it was so darn slow. It was just, you had to turn it, and you had to wait. If you had to do a zero, forget about it. It just took forever.
[00:33:35] Speaker 1: Your finger and your patience both got some relief.
[00:33:39] Speaker 2: If you look at this phone, you can actually see how simple it is. When you push a button, you're generating like a contact between two pieces of metal here, and that contact is hooking to a tone producer. And there's four tone producers down this line, and there's three across here. When you push the button, two separate tones are combined, and that's what's sent down the line. The reason they wanted to use two tones was that they didn't want your normal voice or any whistles in the background or something to get picked up and interpreted by the system.
[00:34:22] Speaker 1: In the 40-plus years since its inception, the touch-tone phone has saved each of us an average of over 400 hours of dialing. Innovations in the '60s not only revolutionized the way we made phone calls, but also changed the way we kept time. For 300 years, watches ticked. But Accutron had a fluid motion and hummed.
[00:34:50] Speaker 22: What I have here is one of the original Accutrons from the 1960s. It was originally launched in the 1960s by Boulevard Corporation. It was the first revolution in 300 years in timekeeping. Prior to that, all watches were mechanical. They had a balance wheel which rotated from three to five times per second.
[00:35:11] Speaker 1: The Accutron was different. Instead of a rotating balance wheel to create the watch's constant regular motion, it used an oscillating tuning fork.
[00:35:21] Speaker 22: This is actually a tuning fork that was in one of the movements. And what happened is you had a circuit that created an electromagnetic field.
[00:35:33] Speaker 1: The electromagnetic field created by copper coils vibrated the magnets at the end of the tuning fork 360 times per second. As the tuning fork vibrated, an index finger attached to it pushed and retreated, forcing a gear wheel to turn.
[00:35:53] Speaker 22: A tuning fork was not new to timekeeping. Actually, in 1866, there was a patent issued to Breguet to put a tuning fork into a clock movement. But it wasn't until the miniature of the transistor that it was capable of being put into a watch that one could wear on the wrist.
[00:36:15] Speaker 1: Bulova engineers had begun working on the concept of an electronically driven wristwatch in 1953. After years of effort ticked by, Bulova introduced the Accutron to consumers in October 1960.
[00:36:31] Speaker 22: This was one of the most popular models of the 214 movement with an open face. It was called the Space View. And it was actually the jeweler's suggestion that we have the watch with an open dial. When we showed them the technology in a prototype, they said, "Boy, it would be great if we could show off that technology to the consumers to explain how it works."
[00:36:51] Speaker 1: Consumers purchased over four million Accutrons until production stopped in 1977. Surprisingly, it still attracted buyers well after quartz crystal technology, with its ability to oscillate at over 32,000 vibrations per second, had trumped it in accuracy.
[00:37:10] Speaker 22: People are very passionate about their Accutron, not only because it is a historic item, but it's also a collectible.
[00:37:20] Speaker 1: Time was running out on the 60s. But the trip wasn't over, as the freewheeling counterculture still had its technological mark to leave on the decade. The 9-volt battery was introduced in 1956 specifically to power portable transistor radios, which required a higher voltage than supplied by conventional 1.5-volt batteries of the time. Among its many signature features, the 60s had a distinctive sound all its own. A sound that expressed the rebellion of a new counterculture that felt free to tune in, turn on, and drop out. This restless generation gathered to create the ultimate youth event of the 60s: Woodstock. The sound guru who made the music blast at Woodstock was audio engineer Bill Hanley. Hanley still has the audio artifacts from the festival tucked away in his backyard sheds.
[00:38:28] Speaker 9: These are the mixes that we used at Woodstock, and this one and that one. These are different style ones that we had.
[00:38:36] Speaker 1: Hanley's greatest challenge at Woodstock was to make the music audible to the audience furthest from the stage.
[00:38:43] Speaker 9: I actually picked the site for Woodstock and designed and laid it out so that the crowd went up in an amphitheater-type operation. I designed the walls to funnel everybody in so that they would be in the range of the speakers. We never expected that big a crowd, so what we ended up with is people everywhere.
[00:39:05] Speaker 1: The audio requirements of large rock festivals compelled sound engineers to mic the instruments, an innovation of the 60s that's now commonplace.
[00:39:14] Speaker 23: That's the change. That's the big change in technology that we used. So I mic'd all the drums. I mic'd tom-tom, the floor tom-tom, the kick drum, the snare, the hi-hat, the cymbals up above. I had five or six mics on the drums, which was, you know, not really done until '68, '69, except for people like Bill on large shows.
[00:39:39] Speaker 1: Before the 60s, engineers had purposely avoided micing the instruments, since gathering too many mics on stage created a greater potential for feedback. Feedback is that annoying noise we've all heard, caused when an audio loop generates between the microphone and the loudspeaker carrying its signal. But a solution to the problem arrived with the introduction of the Shure Unidyne III family of microphones in 1959.
[00:40:10] Speaker 9: This microphone was the most important advancement for the public address systems and sound reinforcement systems of the 60s era.
[00:40:18] Speaker 1: Before this generation of microphones, the most popular mics picked up sound in a wide pattern around the front. But this new end-firing model picked up sound in a narrower pattern from the top end.
[00:40:32] Speaker 9: It's like a Christmas tree, like that, upside down, facing in. And people, if you talk in that way, you've got a good pickup. If you talk in this way, you've got very little pickup.
[00:40:45] Speaker 1: The compact conical end-firing design, with its innovative acoustical chambers, gave it incomparable feedback control. Engineers could now put numerous mics on stage and use massive speakers to amplify the sound, powering the rise of rock concerts and festivals as we know them today. Sixties rock shows were not only an auditory spectacle, but also a visual one. Visual artists like Joshua White were the men behind the psychedelic curtain.
[00:41:23] Speaker 24: What was there before light shows came on the scene? Nothing. There was nothing there. It was a completely different time. It was the 50s. And everybody, everything was gray. And you went to a concert and you sat and watched the band. And there would maybe be a curtain in the background, and maybe there'd be a follow spot. But at the end of the 60s, the music began to really change and grow. And it took on a very distinctive American, psychedelic flavor. And there was nothing to look at. It was brilliant to listen to, and there was nothing to look at. And there was a window of opportunity for the creation of the psychedelic light show, which was something you looked at while you listened to the music.
[00:42:05] Speaker 1: So how did light show producers like Joshua White create this larger-than-life psychedelic art?
[00:42:12] Speaker 24: This is the heart and soul of what the original light shows were. It's an overhead projector, the kind that we used in high school. And then we took clock faces. And this is literally a face-off of a clock. And then we began with the first and most primary thing that everybody remembers about a light show, which was the liquid part of the light show. So we took water, and then we took oil, common, ordinary, mineral oil. And we would squirt it on top of the water. And this is the great secret reveal of psychedelic light shows, is that oil and water don't mix. And then we would add a little bit of color. Now you can add other elements to it, so that you can take something as simple as alcohol and squirt the alcohol in. And the plate begins to take on psychedelic qualities of its own. Everybody thinks I'm doing this amazing thing, but I'm really not. All I'm doing is supervising.
[00:43:18] Speaker 1: Light show teams had a virtual arsenal of tools they could incorporate, like color wheels, filters, and light sticks. All so that the youth of the 60s could revel in their own psychedelic fantasies. The 60s could be described as the nation's bipolar adolescence. We changed during those 10 tumultuous years, lost our innocence, and developed many technologies for the decades to come. It was a decade of excess, fueled by disco fever, the supersonic Concorde, and the blazing Trans Am. You know, a guy in high school had one of these cars. He was considered the king. The Intel chip got small, and speak-and-spell sales got big. You all right? Pressing a button created nuked meals and Polaroid instant snapshots, and served up an arcade game that launched a revolution. Now, 70s tech on Modern Marvels. Can you dig it? Big froze. Funky threads. Far out fads. In the 1970s, Americans left conformity at the door and adopted a hedonistic lifestyle. The self-absorbed era became known as the "me" decade. And the breakthrough technologies that help power this attitude have matured into the way-cool gadgetry we now take for granted. Case in point: video and computer games. Each year, hundreds of millions of dedicated gamers drop upwards of $20 billion of cold, hard cash to feed what's become a national obsession. And the monster success of this multi-billion-dollar industry can trace its origin to a simple blip of an icon that's totally 70s.
[00:45:39] Speaker 25: Pong. Don't miss the ball.
[00:45:45] Speaker 1: But before there was Pong, there was the video game Ping Pong, the brainchild of television engineer Ralph Baer. It all began in 1966. While employed by a defense contractor, Baer came up with the idea of a device that would allow people to play games using their television sets.
[00:46:07] Speaker 25: The motivation was very simple: 40 million TV sets are out there in the U.S. alone. If you attach something to 1% of those sets, that's 400,000 units. Multiply that by a sales price of 25 bucks, that's $100 million worth of stuff.
[00:46:24] Speaker 1: Within two years, Baer and several associates completed construction of a prototype. They called it the Brown Box. Like the original Brown Box, this replica stores only 128 kilobytes of memory, equivalent to a one-page Microsoft Word document. But that's enough brain power to generate simple shapes. In 1968, using these simple shapes, Baer's team came up with an idea destined to help create an entertainment renaissance.
[00:46:58] Speaker 25: Let's have a machine control spot, a spot that's moved by some logic in the circuitry. The instant we had the spot moving back and forth, we knew we had something.
[00:47:09] Speaker 1: And that something evolved into ping pong. This rare 1967 footage featuring Ralph Baer is one of the earliest recordings of a video game.
[00:47:19] Speaker 26: Here we go, up and down and up. He's getting tricky. Missed it, one up.
[00:47:32] Speaker 1: A series of circuits controlled ping pong's gameplay. When the ball appeared to come in contact with the paddle, an electronic signal was sent to a logic circuit that triggered an output signal to a so-called flip-flop switch. The signal caused the flip-flop to alter its state and change the direction of the ball. This phenomenon occurred every time the ball touched a paddle or a wall. Although groundbreaking, Baer's ping pong lacked some fundamental gaming elements, such as sound and a score counter. The racket didn't alter the trajectory of the ball. Instead, a player used an English knob on the controller, which, as seen here, dramatically changed the direction of the ball after it left the racket.
[00:48:21] Speaker 26: Down I go. Now watch me fake them up.
[00:48:25] Speaker 1: Despite ping pong's limitations, Baer sensed in 1970 that he had a marketable game. He licensed his brown box to TV manufacturer Magnavox. Magnavox renamed it The Odyssey.
[00:48:40] Speaker 25: They built about half a dozen boxes and they took them all over the country for consumer acceptance testing.
[00:48:46] Speaker 1: In September 1971, Magnavox tested The Odyssey in Burlingame, California. A young engineer named Nolan Bushnell, who designed one of the first arcade games, Computer Space, was in attendance.
[00:49:01] Speaker 27: I'd been in the video game business for about two years at that time. And I'd heard about this video game coming to Burlingame, so I went up to take a look at it. And I thought it was a pretty dreadful game, actually.
[00:49:16] Speaker 1: Even so, Bushnell recognized its potential. And the new company he founded, Atari, decided to create an arcade version of ping pong called Pong.
[00:49:27] Speaker 27: We turned it into a game. The Odyssey really wasn't a game, you know, in a lot of ways. It wasn't a lot of strategy. There was no scoring, no sound. But the most important characteristic was the algorithm by which where the ball hit on the paddle, it created an angle. So it allowed a paddle to be an offensive weapon, rather than just blocking the ball.
[00:49:55] Speaker 1: In 1972, priced just under $100, the Odyssey hit store shelves. Priced at a quarter per game, Atari's Pong debuted at a local tavern in Sunnyvale, California.
[00:50:09] Speaker 27: It was in the bar for a day and a half or two days. We get a service call. The service call says, "Hey, get this machine out of here. It doesn't work." And we go down, open it up, and it had taken so many quarters, it had totally jammed up the coin box.
[00:50:25] Speaker 1: By 1974, when Atari's Pong was still gobbling up quarters, the original Magnavox Odyssey had ceased production. Three years later, Bushnell invested the millions he made with Pong to develop a home video game console dubbed the Atari 2600. Featuring the now familiar eight directional joystick with a single red button, the revolutionary console produced an offspring of the Mii decade known as the gamer. A multi-billion dollar industry was off and running. The key component that made the Atari 2600 sing was a tiny high-tech wonder born in the 70s, destined to transform technology. The microprocessor, or simply, the chip. The electronic ancestor to the chip was the bulky vacuum tube. It was replaced by the smaller transistor in the 1960s. By the 1970s, engineers were building transistors of microscopic size. A transistor can turn the flow of a current on or off, allowing it to process the binary language of a computer. By placing thousands of transistors onto a semiconductor, engineers generated the processing power of a large computer on a single chip. In 1971, Intel engineered the world's first microprocessor and designated it the Intel 4004.
[00:52:07] Speaker 28: It was the first computer on a chip. In fact, when we advertised it, and that was November of 1971, it was not a modest ad. We said announcing a new era of integrated electronics.
[00:52:22] Speaker 1: As chip integration got big, the size of electronics started getting small. One of the first new gadgets produced by this giant leap towards miniaturization was the pocket calculator. Leading the way in 1972 was Hewlett Packard's HP 35. Its $395 price tag may have been a few too many numbers left of the decimal point for some, but it provided a lightning-fast alternative to every engineering geek's best friend, the slide rule.
[00:52:54] Speaker 29: What I have here is a slide rule. This is what I used to get me through college.
[00:53:00] Speaker 24: What I have here is a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition.
[00:53:05] Speaker 1: Like the old HP 35, this modern calculator made by Texas Instruments has a speed limited only by how fast the operator can push its buttons. But exactly how much faster is it than a slide rule? Contestants, what's the square root of 23?
[00:53:25] Speaker 29: Done. It's going to be a while. You don't mind me singing while I'm doing this, do you? It's about 4.8.
[00:53:47] Speaker 24: 4.79.
[00:53:50] Speaker 30: When you look at the calculator, it gave you incredible accuracy to the right of the decimal point that with a slide rule, you just, you can't get that.
[00:53:58] Speaker 1: Although the microchip was integral in creating hand-held consumer electronics, it required another '70s breakthrough to translate its binary language into a readable display. The light-emitting diode, or LED.
[00:54:14] Speaker 31: An LED is a semiconductor junction and you pump in voltage and current, basically, and that excites electrons in the material. And then when the electrons drop back down to their normal state, they emit a photon. The photon is light.
[00:54:31] Speaker 1: Combining microchips and LEDs not only created portable electronics for work, like the pocket calculator, but also hand-held toys for fun, like Mattel football. And in a decade known for questionable style, LED watches became a fashion statement.
[00:54:52] Speaker 30: The concept of an LED watch is kind of odd. It's very difficult to read in the daylight, for example. You need two hands to tell the time. So that's not too good in a watch.
[00:55:02] Speaker 1: LED watches didn't survive the '70s. But the technology they harnessed is alive and well, and lighting up a style of high-definition TVs known as DLP, or digital light projection.
[00:55:16] Speaker 31: This is a sample of red, green, and blue high-powered devices. They're not fully on here. I'd be blinded. But you can see that by turning the lights on and off, you can generate different colors. In a DLP TV, we turn these devices on and off in microseconds. And they shine on our device and the mirrors flip on and off and generate exactly the right color for each pixel.
[00:55:43] Speaker 1: While LEDs had us seeing red in the '70s, one iconic gadget of the decade was filling our ears with sound. Spell extra. E-X-T-R-A. That is right. Now spell once. In 1978, Texas Instruments introduced millions of Americans to the first handheld electronic device with something to say. That is incorrect. The speak-and-spell. While it may look like child's play,
[00:56:13] Speaker 29: inside was state-of-the-art '70s tech. If you were to open it up, and we tried to make sure that children couldn't open it up, you would find a microprocessor, a TMS-1000. There were two memory chips that stored all of the speech data. And then the fourth was the DSP or the speech synthesizer. And its purpose was to take the speech data out of the memory devices.
[00:56:41] Speaker 1: A DSP, or digital signal processor, is a specialized microchip that can perform a multitude of complex mathematics in the same amount of time it takes to press a button.
[00:56:50] Speaker 29: It was, in many views, including mine, the first digital signal processor that was ever created.
[00:57:03] Speaker 1: When speak-and-spell hit the market in 1978, Texas Instruments couldn't produce them fast enough to keep up with demand. Kids loved it, partly because it was user-friendly in the truest sense possible.
[00:57:16] Speaker 29: It felt more like a friend giving you your words than a teacher. It never raised its voice, it never yelled, it never screamed at you. And that made it a very nice environment for a child.
[00:57:33] Speaker 21: For settings, press one.
[00:57:34] Speaker 1: Today, DSP technology is pervasive, utilized in cell phones and car navigation systems. Make a U-turn, if possible. The refined speech of these gadgets is a product of advancements in the processing power of digital signal processors. So, the next time your electronic device starts wrapping, give props to the Speak-and-Spell, a way cool gadget from the '70s. While Speak-and-Spell produced ground-breaking sounds, another technological wonder of the decade was breaking the sound barrier. In the 1970s, commercial air travel was turning supersonic. Atari derived its name from a Japanese term used in the game Go. It describes a scenario in which the opposing player's game piece will be captured on the next year's turn. 70s tech will return, on Modern Marvels. Its style, regal. Its passengers, elite. Its velocity, twice the speed of sound. In 1976, the Concorde ushered in the age of supersonic air travel with a ferocious sonic boom. Although it flew for nearly 30 years, only 2.5 million travelers ever climbed aboard, a tiny fraction of the 54 million Americans that now fly each month.
[00:59:08] Speaker 32: It was the same. It was the same. It was the same. It was the same. To be a passenger on the Concorde was luxurious. It was the individual attention that you received, the nice leather seats, the drinks, the Chateaubriand. You were just treated royally.
[00:59:23] Speaker 1: Beyond the luxury was the unique thrill of supersonic travel. At maximum speed, the Concorde covered 23 miles a minute, soaring faster than the rotation of the Earth. And when cruising at 60,000 feet, safely above air turbulence, passengers claimed they could view the curvature of the Earth. This entire spectacle was available for as much as $6,000, one way. The story of Concorde begins in 1962. While the Americans and Russians were engaged in the space race, Britain and France shocked the world when they agreed to combine resources in another contest for technological superiority, the race to build the world's first supersonic airliner. They named their consortium the Concorde.
[01:00:13] Speaker 33: There were plenty of supersonic airplanes, but no attempt had been made to carry passengers comfortably, reliably over long distances at supersonic speed. Britain and France saw in the supersonic transport an opportunity to build an opportunity to make one of these technological leaps that would focus attention upon themselves and surround them with glory.
[01:00:37] Speaker 1: The proposed Concorde was designed to reach a maximum speed of 1,350 miles per hour, seat 100 passengers, and fly from Paris or London to New York City nonstop in just over three hours, less than half the time of a 707. The intrepid move by Britain and France compelled both the United States and the Soviet Union to take action.
[01:01:05] Speaker 33: Once the ball started rolling, Russia quickly got involved. And shortly after that, the United States decided that if all these other people were building supersonic transports, we certainly couldn't get left behind.
[01:01:16] Speaker 32: Kennedy in a speech to the Air Force Academy said, we must go there, we must be bigger, we must be better, we must be faster, and we must do it by the end of the 1960s.
[01:01:29] Speaker 1: By 1965, a government plan was in place to allocate funds for 75% of the development cost for an American SST. The remaining tab would be paid by the company awarded the contract.
[01:01:43] Speaker 33: That honor went to Boeing. The American program was a kind of psychological freak on its own terms. Seemingly in response to some sort of patriotic notion that if ours wasn't way bigger, way better, faster, heavier, and in every way more glorious than theirs, we would somehow be humiliated. The United States set out to build an airplane of almost unimaginable
[01:02:09] Speaker 1: ambition. The proposed Boeing 2707 was a giant. Its fuselage would span 300 feet in length and seat 300 passengers. At maximum speed, it would travel at Mach 3, or 2,100 miles per hour. Compared to its European rival, the Concorde, the Boeing aircraft would be 100 feet longer, hold three times as many passengers, and travel 60% faster. But instead of ripping through the skies at Mach 3, the Boeing 2707 is sitting still at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, California. This mock-up, built by Boeing in 1969, is the closest the United States ever came to building an SST.
[01:03:00] Speaker 34: We're in the fuselage of the Boeing 2707-300. This is actually the first wide-bodied aircraft ever designed. First class section on the Boeing 2707 is going to be 30, with about 270 people for the rear.
[01:03:13] Speaker 1: But the inordinate cost of such an ambitious plane made it an economic loser. By 1971, the federal government voted to withdraw funding, ending the program.
[01:03:26] Speaker 34: There was approximately $1 billion spent on the program, and it did almost bankrupt Boeing. There was a billboard in Seattle, and allegedly it said, "Will the last person leaving Seattle
[01:03:36] Speaker 1: please turn off the lights." While America's attempt at building a supersonic airliner was a spectacular failure. The Concorde faced its own obstacles before it could take to the sky.
[01:03:49] Speaker 33: The issue with a supersonic airplane is trying to get fuel consumption down enough so that you can go a good distance, and that means getting dragged down. The drag of the airplane was going to be largely conditioned on two items, the fuselage and the wing. The fuselage of the Concorde would be built long and
[01:04:10] Speaker 1: slender, tapering to a point at the nose and tail to minimize drag. The wing design was far more complex. Unlike the straight wings of conventional airliners, the shape of the Concorde wing needed a continuous curvature to optimize airflow during supersonic flight. A design known as an OG Delta wing. The Concorde's engineers performed exhaustive wind tunnel tests to optimize its performance.
[01:04:40] Speaker 33: In order to get it to work efficiently at supersonic speed, it had to be tailored very carefully to the particular shape of the flow. And that shape, it resembles a wave which curls around the sides of the fuselage and then breaks over the upper surface of the wing. And that wave is triggered by the long extensions along the fuselage sides. And then as the wing broadens out, it droops down at the front. And all of this just has to do with accommodating this sort of beautifully curling airflow.
[01:05:17] Speaker 1: During its over a quarter century of service, this sleek design would allow the Concorde to cut through the air with optimal efficiency. But it would also create a problem. The aerodynamics of the wing forced pilots to take off and land at an abnormally high angle, producing a major blind spot. The engineering solution became one of Concorde's most unique physical traits: the droop snoot.
[01:05:45] Speaker 33: The technology was really fairly crude. I mean, you know, well, can't see through the nose? All right, we'll just lower it. Crude, but effective.
[01:06:01] Speaker 1: So with the aerodynamics in place, four engines, each capable of producing 38,000 pounds of thrust, were fitted underneath Concorde's wings, generating enough power to propel the aircraft through the sound barrier and up to Mach 2. By 1973, three Concorde prototypes had been built and were undergoing test trials. Meanwhile, the last player in the battle for supersonic air supremacy, the Soviet Union, had finished building its SST, the TU-144. At the 1973 Paris air show, it would go head-to-head against the Concorde in a public demonstration. But several minutes into its flight, tragedy struck. While performing a turn at high speed, the pilot lost control of the aircraft. The TU-144 crashed, killing all six on board and eight people on the ground. Although the Soviets cited pilot error as the cause of the crash, they opted to discontinue their SST program. In a battle against the two preeminent superpowers, Concorde was the victor. It now had a monopoly on the supersonic transport business. For nearly 25 years, the Concorde flew across the Atlantic. But as the new millennium dawned, a crash that killed 113 people, combined with a drop in transatlantic travel and escalating ticket prices following 9/11, doomed the Concorde.
[01:07:42] Speaker 32: To purchase a seat from London to New York in the early 1980s on the Concorde was about $3,600. And this cost kept escalating with expenses over the air price of fuel and operations. So the early 2000s, that price was over $6,000.
[01:08:00] Speaker 1: The Concorde was permanently grounded in October 2003. Of the 14 that entered commercial service, 12 now reside in museums throughout the world.
[01:08:12] Speaker 32: I think the Concorde is the end of the era of supersonic passenger travel, at least for the airlines. The economics aren't there. I think the only future for supersonic travel is with the business community.
[01:08:28] Speaker 1: While the Concorde symbolized the fast-paced lifestyle of the Mi decade, other technologies followed suit by producing results in a flash. During supersonic flight, air friction heated parts of the Concorde's fuselage to well over 200 degrees Fahrenheit, causing it to expand as much as 10 inches in length. 70s Tech will return on Modern Marvels. Point. Click. Download. That's all it takes to capture an image with a digital camera. But in the early 1970s, most amateur photographers had to send the film they shot away for processing before a single image could be viewed. Bummer. Those in the Mi decade were eager for a quicker alternative. They got it in 1972, when the Polaroid Corporation released the SX-70, a camera that could spit out a snapshot and process it in a matter of seconds, even in direct sunlight. Far out.
[01:09:41] Speaker 35: The world at large seemed to be very excited about the SX-70 when it arrived on the market. It was like nothing they'd ever seen before. It was magical.
[01:09:52] Speaker 1: At the height of its popularity, Americans spent more money on SX-70 film at the corner drugstore than they did on toothpaste and snapped an estimated 1 billion Polaroid prints. The SX-70 was the creation of Polaroid founder, Edwin Land. His camera may have been instant, but the technology behind it was years in the making. It began in 1943.
[01:10:18] Speaker 35: It was all really stimulated by a question that his daughter, Jennifer, made when they were taking pictures. And she said, "Why can't I see the pictures now, Daddy? Hmm, you know, why can't you?"
[01:10:31] Speaker 1: Four years later, Land answered his daughter by producing Polaroid's first instant camera.
[01:10:37] Speaker 36: The first camera here, the Model 95, was introduced in 1948. And it was the first camera that was available on the market that enabled you to produce pictures instantly without having to send them away for
[01:10:52] Speaker 1: development. Now we have a picture. How does this ancestor to the SX-70 work? After taking the picture, the operator pulls a tab, sliding the negative and the receiving sheet through a set of rollers, which causes a pod of chemicals embedded in the receiving sheet to burst. The rollers spread the chemicals evenly across the negative, starting a chemical reaction that processes the image. By 1949, professional photographers like Ansel Adams championed the Model 95 as a landmark achievement. But Land was focused on a bigger picture.
[01:11:31] Speaker 35: Land's idea really was to have something that was an absolute one-set photography. And what that meant to him was being able to take the picture and really have everything else done for you.
[01:11:49] Speaker 1: For nearly 25 years, Land strived to make such a camera a reality. To do it, he needed to develop a chemical that would allow the exposed film to process in broad daylight. In 1972, he succeeded with a stylish SX-70.
[01:12:07] Speaker 36: The SX-70 was the world's first folding single lens reflex camera. It was made out of brush chrome and real leather panels. It was sold back in 1972 at over $200, which was a lot of money in those days.
[01:12:26] Speaker 1: Similar to the operation of the Model 95, as the film exits the SX-70, it passes through two rollers that burst a pot of chemicals, spreading them across the negative. While the image is developing, a so-called "opacifier," a highly colorized dye mixed in the chemical pod, shields the negative, acting like a liquid darkroom door. The opacifier absorbs all ambient light. After 60 seconds, the picture is processed and the opacifying dye becomes colorless, gradually revealing the image as if it's magically appearing before your eyes. In 1972, the flashy SX-70 became the instant friend of millions of amateur shutterbugs. The '70s not only introduced America to the instant camera, it also introduced us to the first appliance with a surname: Mr. Coffee, the original automatic drip coffee maker. Since its debut in 1972, Mr. Coffee has been the world's number one coffee maker, selling over 50 million units. Before Mr. Coffee, Java junkies relied on percolators. They worked well enough, but their method of operation was to boil the coffee grounds, which created a bitter brew. So what's the method behind Mr. Coffee's refined brewing prowess? Let's brew a pot and find out.
[01:14:00] Speaker 37: We pour the water into the water tank. That's this assembly. It's got a heat-activated valve on the bottom. And that valve responds to the heat generated by this coil on the inside of this heater. As that heats up, it opens up the valve and lets water into the coil. And that water flows out through the middle, above the brew basket. And the result of all of this is coffee that is made at the proper time and temperature for the best extraction possible.
[01:14:28] Speaker 1: When Mr. Coffee was released in 1972, it quickly became America's number one coffee maker. 35 years later, he's had a few facelifts, but he still brews a mean cup of joe. Mr. Coffee wasn't the only new appliance in the '70s to guest star in America's kitchens. By 1970, the microwave oven started nuking meals in a fraction of the time required by conventional ovens. The secret to its cooking efficiency is the magnetron.
[01:15:03] Speaker 30: The magnetron, which is essentially an X-ray emitting source which is steered through electromagnets. What it does is very precisely put out a spray of microwaves and cooks by jiggling the water molecules in your food.
[01:15:18] Speaker 1: The invention of the microwave oven stems from the Raytheon Company's work in building radar magnetrons during World War II.
[01:15:28] Speaker 38: The magnetron was developed to increase the ability of World War II radars to detect airplanes, create a smaller frequency of wavelength, which is called the microwave. Towards the end of the war, the Raytheon Company, which was the major manufacturer of magnetrons for the military, they needed to come up with some other use for the magnetrons that they had. So what they thought was, well, let's see if we can use them for cooking. Let's see if we can develop an oven for them.
[01:15:53] Speaker 1: In 1954, Raytheon produced the first commercial microwave oven. Fittingly, it dubbed it the radar range.
[01:16:02] Speaker 38: They built the first microwave ovens to be very robust, almost military grade. They were in the range of 2,000 or 3,000 pounds each. They were also extremely high-powered. They could cook a roast in 75 seconds.
[01:16:17] Speaker 1: The radar range was a giant in size, but not in sales. Only a few restaurants had the floor space and the cash for the $2,000 behemoth. But by 1976, advancements in manufacturing created smaller-sized magnetrons that were cheaper to produce. The once pricey luxury item had radiated into a $100 appliance. Well suited for the me first generation that was eager to spend its free time letting it all hang out. Groovy. Today, microwave ovens can cook anything. Well, almost anything.
[01:16:56] Speaker 30: Well, there are lots of fun experiments with microwaves you can do. Metal you can't put in because it's reflecting the waves back into the magnetron.
[01:17:05] Speaker 1: You might not want to try cooking an egg in a microwave either. Nuking meals in the '70s provided quick results for a generation living life in the fast lane. Some motorists lived that life literally behind the wheel of the blazing, screaming chicken. One of the baddest muscle cars to ever hit the road. In 1952, expendable 3D glasses made by Polaroid enabled filmgoers to watch the first American 3D movie shot in color. What a devil. '70s tech will return on Modern Marvels. And they were cool, you know, a guy in high school had one of these cars, he was considered the king, right?
[01:18:08] Speaker 39: The shaker hood scoop, the screaming chicken on the hood, and then the ducktail spoiler on the back. The entire design of the car just screams performance.
[01:18:20] Speaker 1: The most powerful Trans Am engine of the decade was a 455 cubic inch big block eight cylinder. Pumping well over 290 horsepower. The Trans Am's screen performance, not only on the streets, but also on the silver screen. Propelling Smokey and the Bandit to box office glory in 1977. The Trans Am may have embodied the '70s, but it was born out of the muscle car craze that was rooted in the '60s.
[01:18:50] Speaker 40: Traditionally, a muscle car is a mid-sized automotive platform with a huge engine in it. The biggest engine usually that the corporate hierarchy allows to be built. But they will go like a scalded dog in a straight line, making a lot of great noises as well.
[01:19:07] Speaker 1: Pontiac was no stranger to the muscle car phenomenon. In 1964, it had ushered in the era with the GTO. But by 1972, a hike in insurance rates, combined with stringent government emission standards, pressured Detroit to swap horsepower for improved gas mileage. Pontiac, however, bucked the trend, releasing the Trans Am 455 Super Duty in 1973, the most powerful muscle car of the decade.
[01:19:40] Speaker 40: And everybody pretty much said, "Where in the heck did this thing come from?" It was a muscle car and more. They were faster, stronger than they had a need to be. They were far and away from 1973 through the rest of the 1970s. They were the muscle car. Nothing else came close.
[01:20:04] Speaker 1: The 1973 model was the first to feature the Firebird emblem on the hood. Although it was an eye-catcher, it's what was under the hood of the Super Duty that blew away the competition.
[01:20:17] Speaker 40: The Super Duty engine was hand assembled, a high nickel block for strength. The cylinder heads were high flow, big carburetor. May as well have been a funnel on the hood saying, "Gas here." Pontiac rated the Super Duty engine at 290 horsepower. Well, you know, it might have made 290 horsepower at about 1500 RPM. But when you get in the power band, you were looking at well over 400 horsepower. These were serious drag strip monsters.
[01:20:46] Speaker 1: Sure, this guzzler only got 10 miles to the gallon. But its sticker price of $3,000 didn't break the bank. When commandeered by a driver with a lead foot, the Super Duty could rocket from 0 to 100 in just 10 seconds. Driving a Trans Am was definitely a gas. But it was a shortage of that valuable resource that essentially killed the Super Duty. In 1973, a national energy crisis forced gas prices to double. Gas-thirsty muscle cars like the Super Duty were headed for the chopping block. Muscle cars were supplanted by fuel-efficient subcompact cars like the Gremlin, the Pacer, the Pacer, and the Pinto. Its unprotected fuel tank made it a hot car for a different reason. In 1975, Trans Am horsepower dropped to 200. But its reputation for performance and unique style continued to generate Mondo sales. Then, in 1977, the popularity of the Screamin' Chicken would reach movie star status.
[01:22:03] Speaker 40: When Smokey and the Bandit hit, Trans Am production, almost overnight, had to double. The public was enamored with the car. They wanted the car. They wanted to be seen in the car.
[01:22:13] Speaker 39: I think the term could just be described as "explosive."
[01:22:17] Speaker 1: Sales went through the roof. In '77 and '78, Pontiac sold over 150,000 Trans Ams. Nearly twice the number sold in the previous six years. Including thousands of the black and gold version made famous in the movie. Today, the Trans Am bandit is a collector's item. Worth as much as $40,000.
[01:22:42] Speaker 39: I think a lot of people saw that movie and they fell in love with the car. Maybe for the first time. I was a little kid when it came out and it had a strong impact for me. I mean, this was the car I've always wanted to own.
[01:22:56] Speaker 1: Although the Trans Am is closely identified with the style and attitude of the '70s, the model continued to sell up until 2002. Today, rumors rumble that Pontiac may be planning a Trans Am sequel. But perhaps minus the car's foul figurehead.
[01:23:13] Speaker 40: If the Trans Am is reborn, I don't know if they're going to put a screaming chicken on the hood. Firebird emblem that we know and love was born in the '70s. It was embraced by the '70s. It made a statement about the '70s. Maybe it just belongs in the '70s.
[01:23:32] Speaker 1: In the 1970s, Trans Am owners weren't the only motorists screaming, "I can't drive 55." Truckers were also pushing the needle above the double nickel. And a gadget in the cab kept them one step ahead of the law.
[01:23:46] Speaker 13: Southbound, there's a Smokey sitting in that northbound scale house watching you as you go by.
[01:23:51] Speaker 1: That's a 10-4, good buddy. According to Smokey and the Bandit director Hal Needham, one of two 1977 Trans Ams provided by Pontiac was destroyed during a stunt as it jumped a river. '70s Tech will return on "Modern Marvels."
[01:24:11] Speaker 23: X-T-R-A, that is right.
[01:24:15] Speaker 1: Some technologies from the 1970s have stood the test of time. Evolving into gadgets we now can't live without. Make a U-turn, if possible. Others had a shelf life as brief as the streaking craze. Remember the leisure suit? The pet rock? And mood rings? Rare is the gadget that transcends its medium and becomes a national obsession. But that's what happened in the 1970s with the Citizens Band Radio.
[01:24:47] Speaker ?: 909, leading gate.
[01:24:49] Speaker 1: In a decade in which few had car phones, the CB became the official mouthpiece for the American motorist. Grabbing a CB radio was the equivalent to shooting the breeze in an internet chat room.
[01:25:03] Speaker 41: Drivers had their own nicknames or handles. Well, mine was Big Bob and then there was Nasty, Smelly, you know, there was even Stinky. And spoke their own unique slang-wage.
[01:25:17] Speaker 10: How about over our southbound? What's going on at the chicken house up there in Kentucky?
[01:25:24] Speaker 1: Copy that, good buddy. Today's truckers mimic the slang used by their 70s brethren. But the CB airwaves aren't quite as clogged. In the 1970s, Americans snapped up an average of 7 million CB radios a year.
[01:25:41] Speaker 41: In those days, everybody went down the highway with one of those flagships flying around. They were talking to everybody. They were talking to grandma. I had my grandmother on a CB, you know?
[01:25:52] Speaker 1: A CB radio operates like any other radio transmitter. It has 40 channels and broadcasts over a narrow bandwidth, between 24 and 27 megahertz. But unlike the transmitter of a radio station, which broadcasts from a tall antenna tower, a CB radio has a short antenna, typically measuring only 10 feet tall. This limits its broadcast range to about 5 miles. In 1974, when the interstate speed limit was lowered from 70 to 55 miles per hour, the CB radio became the secret weapon for clock-conscious truckers.
[01:26:32] Speaker 42: The truckers were interested in going more than 55 miles an hour, so they were looking for the CB to spot radar traps. And they were communicating between each other where the radar speed traps were.
[01:26:47] Speaker 1: By 1975, pop culture had embraced CB radios, inspiring the four-wheeling motorists to jump on board the CB bandwagon. CB radio companies like Midland in Kansas City, Missouri, started churning out sets faster than a trucker could lay the hammer down.
[01:27:11] Speaker 42: This particular CB model was one of our early 23-channel CB radios and was targeted to the four-wheel driver. It would be common to find it in Panto, Chevette, Gremlin, a car like that. Early '70s retail price on this was around $100.
[01:27:31] Speaker 1: As with most fads, the CB phenomenon gradually bugged out. By the 1980s, four-wheelers swapped their CB radios for cell phones. And the CB radio returned to its rightful owner, the trucker. That's a big 10-4. The far-out technology of the '70s reached far enough out to leave an enduring legacy. Yesterday's '70s toy is today's talking computer.
[01:28:00] Speaker 27: In a quarter mile, make a left turn.
[01:28:04] Speaker 1: The technology in that '70s handheld game now lights up your big screen TV. The iconic gadgets of the '70s may seem simple, but they've spawned a complex assortment of technologies that continue to enrich our lives. Right on. It was the dot-com decade when big and clunky paved the way for small and smart. Virtual pets sought electric sustenance.
[01:28:34] Speaker 2: People didn't really know how much power was inside this thing.
[01:28:38] Speaker 1: A military mover invaded suburbia. George Foreman plugged a little item to knock out the fat. I was a happy man. And a guy named Tim wove a web of information that changed the world. Now, 90s tech on Modern Marvels. The founder and CEO of the company that owns this warehouse, and another 26 like it, was working out of his garage in 1995. Today, he's one of the richest men in the world.
[01:29:21] Speaker 43: The wake-up call was finding out that worldwide web usage was growing 2300% a year. That was in 1994, and that really started me thinking what kind of business could you build on the web.
[01:29:37] Speaker 1: Realizing cyberspace would be a great platform for commerce, Jeff Bezos researched top-selling mail order products and decided to create an online bookstore. Amazon.com opened its site to the world with this webpage on July 16, 1995. Offering more than one million titles, the virtual shop sold books in all 50 states and 45 other countries within the first month.
[01:30:06] Speaker 43: We programmed a bell to ring every time there was an order, and it only took a few days before the bell became annoying. So it did grow fairly quickly.
[01:30:18] Speaker 1: First year sales surpassed 15 million dollars. By the end of the 90s, Time Magazine named Bezos Person of the Year.
[01:30:27] Speaker 44: In early 1999, Jeff Bezos set a mission to grow his company from a books company to an internet retailer that could sell anything in the world. I'm standing here in Fernley, Nevada, an 800,000 square foot facility that ships hundreds of thousands of units a day that was part of that vision.
[01:30:45] Speaker 1: The facility was completed in January 1999. With a few exceptions, the system put in place then is the system Amazon uses today. Thousands of workers and more than six miles of conveyor belts keep the cyber goods rolling off the shelves.
[01:31:01] Speaker 44: In the beginning, pickers walked around with a little list of paper with the items that they needed for each of the customers. Today, we use wireless RF scanner guns. While we do use library shelving, it's not Dewey Decimal System. Basically, a person stowing the books can stow that book anywhere they like. The picker is simply directed to that location.
[01:31:19] Speaker 1: Once picked, items head to sorting and packaging.
[01:31:23] Speaker 44: This part of our facility is where all the orders come together. Each one of these chutes is a customer order. So all the items are coming from all over this facility, sorted into a particular chute.
[01:31:35] Speaker 1: The key to this automated system is the tilt trays. Each item slips onto a tilt tray that carries it to the order's assigned chute. Since the tilt trays move at a uniform speed, the system calculates the exact travel time to the designated chute. At just the right moment, the tray releases the product. When an order is complete, a light alerts the workers to box it up.
[01:31:59] Speaker 44: I have to admit, when we opened this building in 1999, we didn't exactly know how to run all this equipment very effectively.
[01:32:08] Speaker 1: But today, Amazon has the process down to a precise science. And shipping from 27 individual warehouses, it's come a long way from its mid-90s garage roots.
[01:32:19] Speaker 43: So, raising the initial startup money for Amazon.com was very difficult. The first question I had to answer for almost all of these investors, maybe all of them, is what's the internet? Which was very normal at that time. Most people didn't really know what was going on with the internet or what the World Wide Web was.
[01:32:43] Speaker 1: While many people use the terms internet and World Wide Web interchangeably, the two are not synonymous. The internet connects small computer networks to larger networks. And finally, to a global system of computer networks around the world. The World Wide Web, better known as the Web, is a system of interlinked computer documents that are accessed via the internet. While the Web is a large portion of the internet, the internet is also used for email, instant messaging, and file transfer. The development of the internet began in 1969 when the U.S. government's Advanced Research Projects Agency connected four of its research computers together through a 56K line. 21 years later, in the fall of 1990, there were 313,000 computers connected on the internet. But the U.S. government restricted the use of this primitive internet to research purposes only. And unlike the graphics-laden environment we take for granted today, the screen interface was a blank slate that required expert knowledge of text command. The World Wide Web changed all that. While working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee saw the need for a user-friendly system for sharing information across the internet. By combining hypertext, computer documents that link together with the internet, Berners-Lee created the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, and coined the term World Wide Web. And in the winter of 1990, he built the three tools necessary for a working web. The first web server, or internet computer, a web browser or software application used to surf the web, and web pages, which described the project. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee decided to give the World Wide Web free to the public, so that it would continue to grow, revolutionizing the way we use computers and communicate. So how is it that you can access billions of web pages online with just the click of a mouse? When you enter a URL or address on your web browser, it points to a specific web page on a web server. Routers direct the request from your computer across the network, to the web server, and then send the information back to display the web page. And some advanced routers today can run at a capacity of up to 92 terabits per second. That's two billion times faster than the original 56k line of 1969. Although seven out of every ten Americans use the internet, North America ranks third behind Asia and Europe in web traffic. By June 2007, more than one billion people, or about 17% of the world population, had used the internet.
[01:35:57] Speaker 45: Imagine when that number grows to 50% or 80% or 90% of the global population sharing their lives, sharing experience, sharing knowledge, sharing information. And it fundamentally changes how we are as a society.
[01:36:09] Speaker 1: While the web browser was the gateway to a world of information, you still needed to know the web address to access it. So what if you didn't know the address? Enter Google. Google is a so-called crawler-based search engine that can direct you to pertinent websites by crawling the web and sorting through its increasingly massive amounts of information.
[01:36:35] Speaker 45: Information on the internet is growing at such an amazing rate that in about three years, it's anticipated that it will double every 11 hours.
[01:36:43] Speaker 1: So what happens when you use Google to search 90s pop star Britney Spears? The Google search engine uses spiders that crawl the web, scanning each web page on a regular basis. This data is entered into an index, much like the index of a book. When you enter a search query, Google software sips through the index and ranks the matches, returning results in order of relevance. And in this case, you get more than 49 million results in just .04 seconds. That's because Google has countless computers clustered around the world, working in tandem to scour their index. But this popular site wasn't always so expansive.
[01:37:31] Speaker 46: As you can see, it says the index contains about 25 million pages, and that was big for that time. And now we have billions and billions of pages. And now we have billions of pages. Founded by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin,
[01:37:48] Speaker 1: Google launched in September 1998.
[01:37:51] Speaker 46: Google, G-O-O-G-O-L, is a very large number. It is the digit one followed by 100 zeros. And Google is a play on the word Google to depict our mission of capturing and organizing large and vast amounts of information.
[01:38:11] Speaker 1: Though Google won't release the amount of servers it has today, some industry experts estimate there may be as many as 450,000. But back in 1998, Google had just 30 server racks like this one. Each rack held 80 computers running on Intel Pentium 2 chips. Since their data center charged by the square foot, they crammed the computers in four to a shelf. By the end of 1998, Google was answering 10,000 search queries each day. Just two years later, that number had grown to 100 million. But the '90s brought many more Internet innovations. In 1996, email became the main source of communication in the United States, eclipsing both the telephone and standard mail. The '90s also ushered in AOL, instant messenger, chat rooms. The options were endless.
[01:39:13] Speaker 45: And the notion of web surfing literally came up where people would surf for hours from site to site to site.
[01:39:23] Speaker 1: And the portable computers of the '90s let us surf the web from anywhere. But this innovation traces its roots to the '80s.
[01:39:31] Speaker 2: As preposterous as this looks to us today, this is the beginning of the portable computer. And this is the Osborne 1. This is a CRT screen. It's five inches diagonal. It can display about 50 by 24 characters. No graphics whatsoever. You would fold the keyboard up into the case like this. Snap it down. And it became a 25-pound boat anchor kind of thing. But you could take your computer with you for the first time.
[01:40:05] Speaker 1: But by the beginning of the '90s.
[01:40:08] Speaker 2: This is 1991 technology, the PowerBook 170, which had everything you'd want in a modern notebook computer. It has a nice screen. It has the trackball. And notice how the keyboard has actually moved back to give you these palm rests here. It's really the defining embodiment of everything notebook that follows it in the 1990s.
[01:40:33] Speaker 1: The '90s even miniaturized the cell phone.
[01:40:37] Speaker 2: We're shrinking the processor, the memory, the display, the battery especially. Adding new features like this flip phone feature to channel the Star Trek communicator. Finally, by the end of the 1990s, you have phones that are so small and so inexpensive that they're everywhere. Just about everybody owns one.
[01:40:59] Speaker 1: The '90s also saw the marriage of the cell phone with the laptop computer, creating the smartphone.
[01:41:06] Speaker 2: This is the Simon from IBM in Bell South. It is the world's first smartphone. It's really the precursor to what we think of today as the Blackberry. It had a calendar and all the other little things that we think of as standard features. But at the time, the idea of carrying this much power in your hand really was revolutionary.
[01:41:28] Speaker 1: While the creation of the World Wide Web transformed the computer into a new entertainment and information medium in the '90s, the use of computers and virtual pet toys created a national security threat. In 2007, over 170 billion email messages were sent per day. That's almost two million emails every second. 70% of them were spam and viruses. 90s tech will return on "Modern Marvels." RoboCup 2007. With no remote controls or human intervention, eight AIBO robotic dogs compete in four-on-four soccer competition. Thanks to the technology of the '90s.
[01:42:27] Speaker 47: So this is the first AIBO introduced in 1999. This is the 110 and 111 series. AIBO is actually an acronym for artificial intelligent bot. But AIBO in Japanese also means PAL. In 1999, when they came out, they were $2,500.
[01:42:41] Speaker 1: In June 1999, the first batch of 3,000 AIBOs sold out in just 20 minutes. And by the end of the year, Sony had produced and sold an additional 60,000. AIBOs are called autonomous robots because they're able to learn and mature based on external stimuli from their owner and surroundings.
[01:43:02] Speaker 47: So if you wanted it to play with the pink ball a lot and you kept telling it was a good dog when it played with the pink ball, it would learn that that's a good thing.
[01:43:11] Speaker 1: As AIBOs mature, they save all of their new memories, just like a computer. And all that junk is stored in his trunk.
[01:43:19] Speaker 47: All of the brains of the AIBOs look essentially the same. They're just memory sticks, just like you have in a modern digital camera. And actually, the original AIBOs only had up to an 8 megabyte of storage.
[01:43:31] Speaker 1: The Robo-Dog's joints allowed for 20 different movements. Housed in his head was a sensor to react to touch, a microphone for hearing, a video camera for vision, and a distance detector. The AIBO was the culmination of the virtual pet boom of the 90s. What got it started was the Tamagotchi.
[01:43:55] Speaker 48: A Tamagotchi is a virtual pet housed in an egg-shaped casing. It means egg, and in Japanese, it's a cute, lovable egg.
[01:44:07] Speaker 1: Tamagotchi exploded into popularity in the United States in 1997.
[01:44:13] Speaker 48: It was just amazing. People were lined up in the streets to see this. In its peak year, Tamagotchi sold over 40 million units worldwide. And I think what's so amazing is that if you translate that, that's 15 units every minute.
[01:44:28] Speaker 1: Three buttons allowed the owner of the pet to feed it, play games with it, check its hunger and happiness levels, and even perform a pet owner's least favorite task, cleaning up after it. And if not taken care of properly, your Tamagotchi would actually kick the bucket, just like a real pet. Two button-sized 1.5-volt batteries kept the virtual creature running, and all the commands ran through a computer chip. And it had nearly double the power of the Osborne 1 portable computer of 1981.
[01:45:06] Speaker 48: We created the virtual pet. It was something that was never done before.
[01:45:14] Speaker 1: But just one year later, the little digital critters had a tangible furry competitor.
[01:45:21] Speaker 2: No discussion of the 1990s would be complete without talking about Furby. Introduced in 1998, it was the world's first autonomous robotic pet. So as a robot, it's able to move things like its ears and its mouth and its eyes. It also speaks, and it speaks a language called Furbish.
[01:45:44] Speaker 1: The more you played with your furry Furby friend, it would speak less Furbish and seem to learn English. What it really did was gradually reveal up to 100 pre-programmed English words. Because of this, there was a common misconception that Furbies repeated the words set around them. And some government officials thought the toy could threaten national security. Doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. In fact, the National Security Agency in Maryland banned its employees from bringing the little guy into its buildings on January 13, 1999.
[01:46:27] Speaker 2: People didn't really know what was going on here. They didn't know how much power was inside this thing. So it scared some people. Be scared.
[01:46:36] Speaker 1: Despite its treasonous reputation, Furby sold more than 15 million units by the end of the '90s.
[01:46:45] Speaker 2: The Furby cost about $35 in 1998, which is pretty expensive for a toy. But when you take apart a Furby and look inside, you realize why it cost so much. It really was a miracle of modern technology.
[01:46:59] Speaker 1: The Furby came fully equipped with touch sensors on the front and back. A microphone to pick up sound. A sensor to detect light. An infrared port to communicate with other Furbies. And even a sensor that could detect upside down movement.
[01:47:18] Speaker 2: One of the things that let them keep the cost down was a design feature that used just one electric motor that drove a cam system. So this single motor with the cams can drive the ears, the eyelids, the mouth, and the ability of the Furby to tip up and kind of move forward. The microprocessor has about four times the power of the Apollo moon lander. It's an amazing amount of processing power to fit into such a small and inexpensive package.
[01:47:53] Speaker 1: Furbies, Tamagotchis, and Ibo's may have had a leg up in the world of toys. But in the mid-90s, it was the George Foreman lean, mean, fat-reducing grilling machine that really delivered a knockout punch.
[01:48:07] Speaker 49: I'd fallen in love originally with the grill because I could get up early in the morning and have actually salmon and bagels. And I could actually put the bagel on the grill, turn one this way and the other the opposite. I would grill on both sides and then have the salmon ready, put a little cream cheese. I was a happy man.
[01:48:25] Speaker 1: While similar hamburger grills were available at the time, the George Foreman grill introduced and patented a sloped design that allowed the fat to drip away from the meat. That was just what two-time world heavyweight boxing champion George Foreman was looking for.
[01:48:41] Speaker 49: Everybody was calling me the man Mr. Cheeseburger and I'd made a joke because everybody laughed about my weight that I could go and eat a dozen cheeseburgers and then become heavyweight champ of the world. So now how could I get high protein food and with little fat the George Foreman grill?
[01:49:00] Speaker 50: In 1995, we introduced our GR-10, which was a two hamburger size and retailed at $39.99.
[01:49:07] Speaker 1: By the end of the 90s, more than 14 million grills had flown off the shelves. Though the size had grown to hold up to eight burgers, the technology remained the same.
[01:49:17] Speaker 51: This is the original construction that was used for these grills. We have a heating element that's pressed into the die cast and the thermostat here maintains the temperature on the cooking surface at approximately 350 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's a great temperature for cooking hamburgers.
[01:49:36] Speaker 1: A floating hinge ensures the meat, no matter how thick, stays in close contact with both sides of the grill. For Salton, this simple yet revolutionary grill was almost the one that got away.
[01:49:50] Speaker 52: No one was interested in the grill. But a gentleman came to me and he said, "I think I have a customer for it." And I said, "You know, I can't sell it, so if you want it, it's yours." The potential buyer was none other than George Foreman.
[01:50:04] Speaker 49: I sat there and looked at it for days and months. So finally, my wife ached some food on it, the grease went away. I was afraid of that because too much, you lose so many juices. It's not going to be juice anymore to me. But the company found out it was just great. Oh, that looks good.
[01:50:20] Speaker 52: George didn't want to be marketing it himself. And as it turned out, the advice came to him that Salton would be the best company to do it. So it came right back to me. And after that, it was like a Japanese bullet train.
[01:50:35] Speaker 1: Salton has sold more than 90 million George Foreman grills in just 12 years, over $5 billion worth. The George Foreman grill may have revolutionized the act of grilling, but some other sizzling technologies of the '90s forever changed the way we see and when we see TV. Not all toys had to be robotic to be popular in the '90s. The low-tech Beanie Babies introduced in 1993 sold more than 100 million units in just three years. '90s Tech will return on Modern Marvels. Step into any electronics store and you'll be surrounded by indispensable digital gadgetry, spawned in the '90s. The digital revolution of the 1990s not only brought us information overload, but also gave us countless ways to extend our inner couch potato. Case in point: the DVD. Introduced in December 1995. At first glance, DVDs seem very similar to CDs. They're the same diameter and thickness. And their digital data is encoded in a long spiral of microscopic pits and bumps. But at 4.7 gigabytes of capacity, a DVD can hold almost seven times more data than a CD. That's because the pits and bumps are four times smaller on a DVD, making the spiral tighter and longer. And unlike a CD, a DVD can have up to four layers of data, increasing its capacity to almost 26 times more than a CD. And though DVDs are three times smaller than the analog laser discs pioneered in the '80s, they can hold more than double the data. The payoff for consumers? For the first time, it was possible to fit an entire movie and then some onto a digital disc. But that was only because of another '90s advancement: digital compression.
[01:52:44] Speaker 2: A movie would need about 40 times more space. The disc would be, you know, three feet in diameter or something if it held a movie in its native format. So what they do is compress the movie by a factor of about 40 to 1 using something called MPEG-2 compression.
[01:53:02] Speaker 1: MPEG-2 compression reduces the size of a video file by reusing any identical video information. Rather than storing all the data from each frame of video, digital compression lets one frame of video borrow from the previous frame any information that didn't change. That means that each new frame contains only the data that relates to how the picture is changed from the previous frame. By 1995, the MPEG-2 had become the standard format for video compression. And DVD players came fully equipped with an MPEG-2 decoder.
[01:53:43] Speaker 2: Underneath the DVD, there is a laser. It's reading the data that's on the DVD, pulling it off to this board, which contains the computer technology that's necessary to decompress that MPEG-2 stream of data and make it possible for it to drive a television.
[01:54:04] Speaker 1: DVDs ushered in an era of feature-packed special edition home videos. Could it possibly get any better? How about the ability to pause and rewind live TV? In March 1999, the TiVo Digital Video Recorder, or DVR, did just that.
[01:54:22] Speaker 53: People in the late '90s couldn't imagine having the ability to pause, control live TV, and have all of their favorite shows waiting for them when they got home.
[01:54:34] Speaker 1: By the end of 2000, more than 150,000 TiVos had invaded households nationwide. Today, that number has surpassed one million.
[01:54:45] Speaker 53: So this is Modern Marvels, and it is recording right now. And I can watch it. I can fast-forward it. The green bar shows me exactly how much of this show has been saved. And I see a part that interests me. I can stop. I can watch that.
[01:55:04] Speaker 54: At the time, one of the things that enabled TiVo to be the product that it was, is that we were able to find a real-time MPEG encoder chip that could take regular analog television and turn it into digital television in real time. From there, the video is sent through this chip, which is a custom chip that we here at TiVo developed that we called the Media Switch. And the Media Switch writes the video to the disk drive.
[01:55:30] Speaker 1: With a 14-gigabyte capacity, the first TiVo could record one show at a time and store up to 14 hours of programming. Today, TiVos can record two shows at once and store up to 300 hours. You can even transfer recorded programs to your computer, listen to your music library, and create photo slideshows on the device. Of course, digital photo slideshows on TiVo wouldn't be possible without the digital camera. And the very first completely digital consumer camera can be traced back to the DICAM Model 1, made in 1990.
[01:56:11] Speaker 2: Now, this is pathetic by today's standards. That's really the only word possible. For one thing, it's black and white. For another thing, it only has 376 by 240 pixels, or .09 megapixels of resolution. And it's almost completely tethered to your computer because flash memory hasn't really become possible yet. Smile, Furby!
[01:56:36] Speaker 1: The DICAM could store 32 black and white compressed images. It wasn't until four years later that the Apple QuickTake 100 became the first affordable color
[01:56:46] Speaker 2: camera. Now, you can see that people hadn't yet standardized the shape yet. And this looks more like a set of binoculars than it does a digital camera. It's 640 by 480, or .3 megapixels, and it has flash memory, but it only has enough memory to store eight full resolution images.
[01:57:07] Speaker 1: Then, just one year later, the Casio QV-10 set the standard with its liquid crystal display.
[01:57:14] Speaker 2: By 1995, the digital camera has evolved into the form factor that we're used to today. So it's got a lens, it's got the camera, and it's got an LCD on the back that lets us see the pictures as we're taking them,
[01:57:29] Speaker 1: and review the pictures that are in memory. Modern 8-megapixel cameras are a far cry from the original digital cameras of the '90s. Just watch what happens when we compare today's image to the 0.09-megapixel "We have liftoff of the direct-tv satellite. Before DBS, consumer satellite dishes were as large as a hot tub, and no programming existed. Now TV lovers had dishes the size of a pizza and a set package of programming. There were a lot of people that didn't
[01:58:28] Speaker 55: believe this was going to work. In fact, they thought DBS stood for "Don't be stupid." But the digital part is the key element. It allows us to do the compression, which allows us to have many more channels in a transponder. We launched with 70 channels and quickly grew to 200 within a few years.
[01:58:45] Speaker 1: In addition to digital compression, the advent of higher-powered satellites in the early '90s made the smaller dishes possible. The direct-tv Los Angeles Broadcast Center monitors up to 1,600
[01:58:59] Speaker 55: channels. We're now in the direct-tv operations center at our Los Angeles broadcast facility. This is pretty much the way we built it in 1999. The signals that we receive from the outside are brought into this room and displayed on the monitors you see behind me. So this would look like a really cool job, but fundamentally the people aren't really watching television. They're watching for television to make sure that everything is going properly. Once the signals have been compressed and encrypted,
[01:59:28] Speaker 1: the broadcast center beams them to direct-tv satellites 22,300 miles above Earth. The satellites pick up the signal with an onboard dish, amplify it, and use another dish to beam it back to Earth, where the viewer satellite dish captures the signal. The dish passes the signal along to the receiver that transmits it onto your TV. When direct-tv launched in 1994, some TV lovers couldn't wait.
[01:59:58] Speaker 55: Within the first year, we had a million subscribers. By the end of the 90s, we had 8 million. And today, we're at over 16 million subscribers. From the DVD, to the DVR, to the dish,
[02:00:11] Speaker 1: our digital devotion holds strong. But another gotta-have gizmo from the 90s really took us by storm. Today, we'd be lost without it. Literally. Since TiVo is a subscription service, the company is able to anonymously gather its users' viewing habits. The most rewound TiVo moment in history was Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004. 90s tech will return on Modern Marvels. January 17, 1991. Operation Desert Storm. Some of our favorite 90s technologies got their start as national defense projects. And during the Gulf War crisis, U.S. troops were fully equipped with one defense tool that allowed them to navigate the vast, seemingly endless desert of Iraq with precision and ease. The 90s technology that made it all possible was the United States government's GPS, or Global Positioning System.
[02:01:23] Speaker 56: The Global Positioning System really proved its operational and military utility during the Desert Storm War and enabled our soldiers to navigate the desert for the first time.
[02:01:34] Speaker 1: The United States Department of Defense began developing GPS in 1972 to track the location of its military units and to provide precision weapon delivery. And a boost in funding was granted to provide the addition of sensors on the satellites that could detect and locate nuclear detonations by foreign governments. On July 17, 1995, the $14 billion Global Positioning System reached full operational capability. It's the world's largest constellation of military satellites. At any given time, there are at least 24 operational satellites in semi-synchronized orbit, 12,600 miles above the Earth. That means each satellite revolves around the Earth twice a day. They're distributed equally among six orbital planes, so that at least six satellites are within line of sight from almost anywhere on Earth's surface. What can it do for you?
[02:02:36] Speaker 2: This is from the mid-90s. It was '96-ish when this receiver came out, so it knows that we are at a certain location, and it'll actually map it as we walk around. Now I'm standing in a completely new spot, so at this point I've moved several hundred feet from the starting point. The receiver receives from the satellites, recalculates my location, but it also did that across the entire path, so it knows the exact steps I took to get here.
[02:03:06] Speaker 1: So how can GPS tell us where we are? By determining the distance to at least three satellites, the GPS receiver can calculate your location. It's called trilateration. Once the GPS receiver calculates how far it is from a satellite, it knows that it must be located somewhere on the surface of a sphere surrounding that satellite. If you draw a sphere around a second satellite, the surfaces of the two spheres intersect at a perfect circle. The surface of a sphere around a third satellite will intersect with the circle at two points. One of those two points is located on the Earth. And voila, you have your location. But during the 1990s, the GPS wasn't always so precise and reliable for civilians.
[02:03:57] Speaker 56: There was a selective availability feature, which is an intentional error, so that non-authorized users did not receive as accurate a navigation signal. In fact, throughout the 90s, this slowly changing random error
[02:04:12] Speaker 1: would only place you within 100 meters of your location.
[02:04:17] Speaker 56: President Clinton decided in May of 2000, we are going to turn selective availability off.
[02:04:25] Speaker 1: Suddenly, GPS could identify your position to within 10 feet. At the Schriever Air Force GPS Operations Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the 2nd Space Operations Squadron ensures the satellites are working properly 24/7.
[02:04:43] Speaker 56: We have satellite system operators do a state of health on a satellite. We're going to check the pressures, the temperatures, the roll, the pitch, the yaw of that particular satellite to make sure it's transmitting the best navigation accuracy.
[02:04:59] Speaker 1: Though originally a military project, the market for civilian GPS receivers has become three times bigger than its military counterpart. Just as the GPS found its way out of the desert and into your rental car, another piece of military equipment used in Operation Desert Storm found its way off the battlefield and into suburbia. Following Desert Storm, the AM General Corporation took the Military High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee, and turned it into the Hummer. The original Hummer, or H1, had the same powertrain, chassis, body, and suspension as its military counterpart. In 1992, none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger became the first Hummer owner. But it was in 2003, when a slimmer, less expensive second model Hummer, or H2, hit the market, that this SUV became more commonplace. At the Bergstrom Hummer dealership in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Hummers are ready to fulfill every soccer mom's commando fantasies.
[02:06:10] Speaker 57: All right, to start off with, we're going to be in four high. So 60% of my power is going to be on the rear wheels, 40% is going to be in the front. When I come up to our first obstacle, which is a bunch of rocks like we're going to go off-road, I'm going to go into four high lock. That's going to give me equal traction in both wheels, in all four of them. And it's going to be really bumpy, but we can make it real easily.
[02:06:34] Speaker 1: With 365 foot-pounds of torque, or rotational force, the hefty Hummer can ascend a 60% incline and climb a 13-inch step. The H1 can even ford 30 inches of water, because all of the gears are tightly sealed. But the 8,500-pound off-road vehicle averages only about 10 miles per gallon. And the new millennium isn't the guilt-free, gas-guzzling joyride of the '90s. So there's a smaller Hummer, the H3. While the H3 maintains the capabilities of the H1 and H2, it weighs 2,000 pounds less and is nearly a foot and a half shorter in length. And it gets 18 miles per gallon, nearly double that of the H1. The Hummer may have brought excitement to some, but another innovation of the '90s started a type of gaming that would morph into one of the most lucrative entertainment products of all time. Geocaching is a worldwide internet-based outdoor treasure hunting game that uses the global positioning system to hide and seek containers called caches. Today, there are more than 400,000 caches hidden worldwide. '90s Tech will return on Modern Marvels. It's the 26th century. Alien races have invaded the Earth. Led by the barrel of a gun, it's up to you to save humanity. Released on September 25, 2007, Halo 3 is Microsoft's third of the series for the game system, Xbox. First-day sales in the U.S. alone reached $170 million, making it the single-day highest-grossing entertainment product ever. Halo 3 is a so-called first-person shooter game and can trace its roots right back to the 1990s. It was on May 5, 1992, the computer game developer id Software released Wolfenstein 3D and shocked gamers across the United States.
[02:08:53] Speaker 58: When people first saw Wolfenstein 3D, this world just blew them away. Wolfenstein 3D was a world that you could interact with. You, as the player, take the role of the main character. But the 3D world in Wolfenstein was actually anything but.
[02:09:12] Speaker 59: We call it 2.5D, but all the things that you saw were flat. They were objects drawn. It's what we call sprites. And so it would be just like sort of a stand-up cardboard cutout of all the monsters.
[02:09:26] Speaker 60: They were just stretched and scaled in the screen so they could get bigger or smaller, depending on how far away you were from them.
[02:09:34] Speaker 1: Wolfenstein 3D may have been one of the original first-person shooters. But it was id Software's release of Doom in 1993 that really established the genre. And fighting the evil demons and zombies took a little bit of the sting out of killing.
[02:09:52] Speaker 59: In every way that Wolfenstein 3D was innovative and irreverent, Doom literally just took that and said, you know, I'll see yours and I'll raise you twice as much.
[02:10:03] Speaker 58: Unlike Wolfenstein, Doom was much more three-dimensional. You had different heights and floors. We even had, you know, this kind of large outdoor landscapes. One of the things that made Doom so successful was that it was a fair where, you know, everybody could download the first episode.
[02:10:23] Speaker 1: An estimated 10 million people worldwide downloaded Doom within two years. And playing the game wasn't the only thing you could do. Id's John Carmack even designed Doom to allow players to modify and extend the game themselves.
[02:10:41] Speaker 60: Modifying the game can mean anything from replacing one of the enemies with your boss's picture or something up through creating custom levels. So with Doom, I made the conscious decision that all of the media that we needed to create it could be overridden by anything that somebody adds on top of it.
[02:11:00] Speaker 1: Since then, users have created thousands of modifications or mods for Doom. Most can be downloaded for free on the internet.
[02:11:09] Speaker 58: Doom really opened up the doors and it really legitimized PC gaming and our industry and launched what we see today.
[02:11:21] Speaker 1: Of course, video game players wanted a piece of the PC game pie, but they needed better systems to play them on. So video game consoles underwent a major makeover, replacing cartridges with discs. On December 3rd, 1994, Sony launched the PlayStation, the first video game console that could play disc video games.
[02:11:44] Speaker 2: A game console like the PlayStation is a creative device. You put your CD into the drive and from there it goes into an entire computer system that runs code that's on that CD. So the code comes off, loads into memory. There's a powerful computer on here and a powerful graphics processor that's able to invent the scenes that will appear on the television screen based on the input
[02:12:14] Speaker 1: that the user provides to the controller. It was a 90s technology that has given grown men countless thumb blisters. Like many technologies of the 90s, you can add it to the list of electronics that have become a staple in our everyday life. But at the end of the 90s, as the new millennium approached, panic spread about our dependence on computers. Of course, when the ball dropped, our digital world just kept on turning.