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Episode 14 - Marconi Sucks
41 Plays1 month ago
Sending messages via radio is only a century and a quarter old now, but wirelessly it has existed in many civilizations going back many millennia. In this episode, we explore the challenges of sending messages globally especially across oceans and how proud Italian fascist, Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi sent messages from the east coast of Ireland to the east coast of Newfoundland, but never really displaced the cables going underneath the ocean.
Heritage Moment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YohYd9iTfy8
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Shawinigan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Stó:lō (Stolo), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) first nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.
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Transcript
Podcasting Mishaps and Launch
00:00:00
Speaker
Like, you think by now you'd think I would know to hit the record button in Audacity every time I do, um... Oh shit! You'd think by now I'd remember to start Audacity and actually do a local recording. So I'm glad you and I are on the same page here. Are you? I don't know, like... We're we're not professional podcasters.
00:00:22
Speaker
Like I still like I see myself clip because I put my mouth right on the fucking microphone every once in a while. I go from very quiet to extremely loud. I know the thing that i you think after like years of streaming on Twitch that I would have learned by now that I need to keep a regular distance from the microphone because I get to hear what I'm doing wrong later. Like if I go up right here, I start clipping really easily. Okay, even the waveform looks fine. But still, like, then Zencaster fucks it all up too. Zencaster's a piece of shit, but hey, guess what? Nothing else is better than it. Yeah, like, it's kind of something being the ah ah kind of, like, least bad option in a sea of just terrible tragically terrible options. Yeah. Which brings us to our news item, actually. Well, we haven't even started the show yet, so how can we get to our news item?
00:01:14
Speaker
Uh, well, okay. it Fine. Let's start the show. Sure. All right. Oh, you know what? I realize I forgot about the news drop inside of this because another reason why Zen Caster sucks is because you lose all your fucking drops. Just keep reusing the same room like we used to. No, because I need to be able to find it for every episode. It sucks.
00:01:39
Speaker
There's, there's, there's, there's, there's a madness to your method. Yeah. Anyway, I got the clip. I got the thing in there. I think. Okay. All right. We're starting the show.
00:01:55
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Schwinnigan moments. My name is Heather and I use she they pronouns. My name is Tamarack and I use they them or it it's pronouns. We were complaining about Zencaster and... Yeah, and you reminded me of of things that are the least the least bad of a bunch of terrible options. Alright, well let's start the bloody news,
Canadian Political Landscape
00:02:17
Speaker
I guess. Yeah.
00:02:24
Speaker
All right, Tamara, what is it? It's debate night. Oh, are you recording this on a? No, here's the thing. I do not want to hear from John Rustad or David E.B. or um what's her face? um I keep forgetting her. Yes, yes, what's her Yeah, anyway, the Green Party leader.
00:02:45
Speaker
Yes, we're going to we're know Kevin Falcon because ah because ratchets are a function of turning in Kevin Falcon. Burning the way he did is absolutely fucking wild to see. He's also a former neighbor of mine, but I ain't saying much else than that.
00:03:03
Speaker
Yeah, so debate night is between three candidates. ah We have man who both wants to reopen ah involuntary care facilities and kind of is the best argument for actually doing so John Rustad, an actual crazy person conspiracy theorist.
00:03:21
Speaker
Who believes that COVID vaccines give autism and? Who believes that COVID vaccines give autism? It makes up stories about how ah surgeries are being held up because our two surgeons at the at the ah gender surgery program in Vancouver apparently are taking up all the spinal cord surgery spots. They're not, we do like a few hundred kind of since the program's opened.
00:03:49
Speaker
not a lot of throughput there. A lot of revision surgeries, but that's neither here nor there. We have David Evey, the Zencaster of this whole arrangement, leading leading out the BC NDP. Someone who I used to be on a first name bit basis like a long time ago, because I did work for the BCCLA at one point, like for the BCCLA, I didn't work for them.
00:04:12
Speaker
Yeah, and the best way I can describe him is he- The BC Slow Liberties Association, I should make clear. He really does put the class in class traitor.
00:04:25
Speaker
And our final option- He's calling me and just, you know, according to Chip Wilson. Yeah, according to Chip Wilson... Lulu Lemon's Chip Wilson. Yes, Lulu Lemon's Chip Wilson ah has... He used to he used to have a an incredibly large sign out front of his property. It's still there. he is No, he has since taken it down. Oh, there's a new one, sorry. Yes, he has since taken it down and and replaced it with a larger, even somehow more unhinged sign. ah He's throwing in with ah with actual crazy person, ah John Rustad. The final option that we have is... Sonya First. Sonya First now. That's her name, yes. See, that's how matt much she matters.
00:05:09
Speaker
who is overall a great candidate. Her main flaw is the fact that she's the leader of the BC Green Party, rather than a relevant one. And she has some weird takes from here and there. She's she's a granola crunchy hippie sort of background. She's like the Salt Spring Island type. Yeah, she's very much like Columbia, you'll get it.
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah. it's it's yeah i I don't want to dwell much on provincial politics because it's not not really a focus for us because our audience is interesting. I i recently looked at who actually listens to the show and you know it's amazing that we have that many listeners and quite a few of you or have are not in Canada and I'm very impressed. I don't look at the stats because I do not respect analytics.
00:05:56
Speaker
Well I rarely look at them and I only looked at them today because I was cleaning up Zencaster because Zencaster's a piece of shit. Uh, yeah, the ah funny, you should say that, that you don't want to dwell on it because of its lack of relevance. I was looking for when the debate is and I was going to look at links. We're recording on debate night, so I'm going to watch it afterwards. But yeah, I was mildly surprised to find out it's today. Maybe this makes me an uninformed voter considering I've phone banked in previous elections. I would say no, but I've worked in election as an official. I never worked as an official. I've always been a party hack.
00:06:32
Speaker
Now, technically, ah the government has paid me in the past. So if any of you have any conspiracy theories about me, yes, I am a government agent for the DC provincial government, but I was let go in 2001. I suppose if you want evidence that the, that the not the BC, I've never actually been affiliated with them, but the at the least that the federal NDP has is is infiltrated by communists, I am in fact an anarchist and I am a member of the of the federal and NDP.
00:07:02
Speaker
Well, that was a very short news segment by the sounds of it. Yeah, it's mostly just fucking depressing. Like, the race is really close between, um, between David even split between those two parties and then greens would get one seat. It would be, they would be the King maker.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, and that's that's a scary position because again, we have like a kind of a ah left a center left like drifting towards neoliberal ah ah ah sock den politician as we see all over all over the Western world, we have the Green Party that can't quite divorce themselves from capitalism enough to actually be effective at delivering a green agenda. And then we have literal far-right insane people, and the fact that it's an even tie between the sensible, if a little too centrist, sock-dems, and the absolutely batshit insane far-right is depressing as all heck. Yeah, so any of you are thinking of running away to Canada after November, whatever the hell it is, just remember over the fence it's not necessarily better.
00:08:12
Speaker
No, however, I will say one thing that we have of about our debates that are quite a bit different from in the States, whereas in the States, the last presidential and vice presidential debates were basically like copyrighted property of CNN, I believe, who is hosting the vice presidential ones and people covering it weren't able to really adequately cover it due to the fact that they would get copyright strikes if they tried to do so on an online platform with automated moderation. So any online platform.
00:08:45
Speaker
The debates here can be found on CBC Radio 1, live on TV, obviously, on the CBC YouTube channel, on TikTok, CBC Gem, for the three people who use it. I use CBC Gem, so that must be one of the three people. Yeah, I'm also one of the other ones. They're at least broadly accessible.
00:09:06
Speaker
So like one thing that's very annoying about, uh, American presidential debates is trying to track them down afterwards. If you didn't see them, uh, to watch them on four time speed. These, at the very least, I know I can go and watch the, watch the video on CBC and like actually go through it and suffer. Let's talk. Let's, let's, I say we move on and we start talking about another fascist. Uh, right. Yes. Yeah. I'm going to roll a clip.
Introduction to Guglielmo Marconi
00:09:33
Speaker
This is going to make your world a lot different than the one I grew up in. You know where England is? Sure, it's over there. And over there is where that sound is coming from. Right, Mr. Marconi? Throw the air across the ocean. The first time in ever.
00:09:58
Speaker
So that is a clip from the historical Canada episode of Heritage Minutes, Marconi. That's right, we have a Heritage Minute about an actual bonafide fascist.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yes, as in he not as if he was a bad person, or he was a racist, or he was far right, or he disagreed with your takes on the internet. No, ah he was a card-carrying member of the National Fascist Party of Italy from 1923 until Mussolini ah ah found himself ah hanging out at a gas station.
00:10:38
Speaker
So before we talk about that, let's talk about what the episode was about. The episode is about sending telegraphic messages or just telegraph messages across the the Atlantic. The concept of a telegraph kind of goes way back.
00:10:54
Speaker
There's a lot of examples in various societies. ah You would see drum telegraphs, which would just rely on really hard-hitting drums that you could hear from kilometers away. um There would be semaphores, which was the most common ah method. What you would do is you'd have towers. You typically set apart about 30 to 40 kilometers at set heights.
00:11:14
Speaker
And messages could be quickly relayed using, say, mirrors or smoke or fire or, you know, all sorts of flags are one option, too. Absolutely. some Like just semaphores in general. Right. And we don' I don't want to talk too much about it, but like there's a lot of problems with this, namely that they're very easy to intercept and they're very easy to break. There's no real redundancy in these systems.
00:11:39
Speaker
But you know what, for the you know for the majority of civilization starts until you know say the of the industrial age, they did their job. They worked. right They got messages quickly. The all the alternative was to sent a message through a letter stamped with, you know, wax seal and sent by horseback.
Telegraphy: Cables and Challenges
00:12:02
Speaker
There were other ways to send messages. But if you quickly needed to make aware that an invasion was coming, this is how you would do it. And you'd have some sort of this. It was this at the Pony Express. Yes. So since we are going to talk about the Industrial Revolution, that means we're going to go to Victorian England. And that means I get to play this.
00:12:40
Speaker
That's God Save the King. Technically, it's still one of our anthems, but anyway, we'll be talking about our anthem at one point. I mean, if it's Victorian England, isn't it God Save the Queen? Because it's Queen Victoria. Yeah, well, it changes depending on who's in power. Which is a thing you have done twice now.
00:12:59
Speaker
I know. Well, the thing is is, I have gotten so... This is the problem, because the name changes depending on who the fucking monarch is right now. And of course, it's King Charles III, who you know is basically a granola eater as well. he you know Is this Charlie in England now currently? i know i No idea. In any event, in 1816, English inventor Francis Reynolds built the first electrical telegraph, which relied on static electricity. It was originally built as a 160-meter line in a trench, and it was eventually set up to go along a 13-kilometer wire.
00:13:36
Speaker
Instead of what would become Morse code, it used a rotating disk with letters and numbers imprinted on it. I believe it rotated to sync with both sides. You would rotate it to the letter A and it would rotate it to the letter A on the other side. However, it was largely impractical because it relied on static electricity to operate. So I'm going to play another clip and have some fun with this one.
00:14:12
Speaker
That's Morse code. yeah If you decode it, congrats. Somebody will. Yeah, somebody will. there were another ah ah There were a number of other attempts to get a working and effective electrical telegraph to work, but it was an American, Samuel Morse, a man noted for being pro-slavery and anti-Catholic. Ooh, that's a combination. That is quite the combination. Wow, I double hate you. Incredible. Well, it's interesting to be anti-Catholic and pro-slavery, but anyway.
00:14:41
Speaker
Okay, yeah to to be fair like Actually, no, I'm not I'm not gonna carry water for Catholics of that era. Fuck them. I'm gonna keep my mouth shut about Catholics um You know what I could get behind this being anti 1837 Catholics who in 1837 developed and patented a system to send messages, who also alongside his assistant, Alfred Vail, developed a device to record the messages. So, Samuel and Morris made the machine to send the messages, and Alfred Vail made a machine to record the messages, like it recorded on tape of some sort. The messages being like that they have slaves, but Father Hansey is messing with the altar boys. Stop.
00:15:24
Speaker
year. If anyone wants to know what madeia made me lead the Catholic Church, Tamara kind of hit the nail on that one. This was done in the same year that William, Father Gil Cook, and Charles Wheatstone invented their system, which pointed needles at a board. So very similar to the system that Francis Reynolds came up with. However, what set Morse's system apart from any other was the invention of Morse code,
00:15:49
Speaker
Whereas simple dashes and dots were all that were sent, meaning that you could pretty much encode anything with it since it was a binary system. I'm just imagining sending Unicode over Morse code, like from a telegraph. You could. You could. It'd be painful. There was a Morse translation for most of the ASCII table, if I remember correctly.
00:16:11
Speaker
Well, okay, so this is a side note, and I won't be linking to this, but there's a YouTuber who recently made a video where he transmitted an entire um video frame by frame using a microphone and a speaker over um ah fishing line. and Nice. Yeah, he was like, he's like, yeah, this entire video was transferred just using fishing line. And I was like, that is the stupidest thing I've ever seen, but I love it. Anyway, in 1838, along three kilometers of wire in New Jersey, he successfully sent a message. And by 1841, with a US $30,000 grant, about a million dollars today, Morris sent a message along a 71 kilometer line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, simply stating, what hath God wrought?
00:16:57
Speaker
And passage from the Book of Numbers in the King James Bible. Honestly, solid choice.
00:17:06
Speaker
He could have said something anti-Catholic instead, but he chose not to. By 1852, most wealthy countries had extensive telegraph systems. The United States had a system that had 37,000 km of wire, the UK 3500, and Canada was at 1400.
00:17:21
Speaker
However, while it was quick to send messages across countries and even to neighboring countries on the same continent, the same could not be said for messages being sent globally. If I were to send a letter via the post from London in that year, the time for letter mail to reach New York would take almost two weeks. if yeah It turns out you can't ah you can't pony express across the fucking Atlantic. No, because it would take two weeks for the ship to get there. If you or Queen Victoria tried to write to Sir Charles Augustus Fitzroy, then Governor of New South Wales in Australia, you were looking at two months. That's a long time to tell somebody. Keep up with the genocide.
00:17:55
Speaker
Obviously, the solution had been invented, but could we run copper wires across oceans? One of the problems that came up within a commercial system invented by the aforementioned Cook and Wheatstone was that the insulation was insufficient when buried underground. Undoubtedly, it would prove to be a bigger problem when dealing with the rough seas of the salty oceans.
00:18:15
Speaker
Yeah, salt water basically hates everything and water gets into everything also. And it brings its best buddies salt along for the ride. Well, this is what this is what this is what it became so that sorry, this is what the cables remain of. So installation on these copper wires were varied. But the Baltimore line in particular used cotton thread shellac and a mixture of what was referred to as beeswax resin linseed oil and asphalt.
00:18:40
Speaker
It was wrapped around a 16 gauge wire, which is about one one and a quarter millimeter thick. And gauge is about to become very important here around is where I need to explain to people how gauge works. Gauge is important when it comes to electricity. And I will explain this in a moment. okay the The bigger the number, the smaller the diameter.
00:19:00
Speaker
ah Around 1842 or so, Wheatstone and Michael Faraday, yes, that Faraday, discovered the use of gutta percha, a juice derived from a tree found in places like Singapore, Malaysia, and other Oceania places. That would make a perfect... I think it was largely from Southeast Asia. But anyway, it would make a perfect insulation due to its adhesive properties. It was a natural rubber.
00:19:23
Speaker
By 1848, a line was laid across the Rhine and by 1850, a line successfully crossed the English Channel from Dover to Calais, about 60 kilometers, a year after a failed attempt. So by this point, you know, 1848, we are running cables across the some semblance of the ocean.
00:19:41
Speaker
The closest point between what would be considered mainland or mainland-ish North America and Europe would be Newfoundland and Ireland, about 3,000 kilometers give or take, or 50 times the distance of the aforementioned channel. At the time of this recording, copper alone costs about $2 a kilogram.
00:20:00
Speaker
you'd be looking at like $65,000 just for the raw material and then you have to turn into wire and then you have to put like all the shellac it and that's just for one cape like one strand of cable you need like a lot of voltage to go over it And also, shellac is ah is a resin derived from a, I believe it's a type of beetle. It is beetle, yeah. That shit is, there's no synthetic product for it yet, so that shit is hard to come by in quantity.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah, so you'd be thinking that that's cheap. But then like, as I said, like 1.25 millimeters will never be able to hold a signal worth a damn at 3000 kilometers, like to push a signal 1200 kilometers telegraphs often had to do 300 volts DC. And but this ran all sorts of risks, including to operators, but also to equipment. Like you can only shove so much power through a copper wire before it glows red hot and breaks and possibly burn everything around it.
00:20:55
Speaker
if you take a look at your power strip like to your computer or tv or whatever if you look at the cable itself it'll read something like 120 v into 12 a that means the strip is designed only to handle 120 volts at 12 amps that's just pretty normal what comes through there meaning that if you try and shove more than 12 amps through that cable it's going to get it awfully warm and if you want to know what it looks like um Just watch a bunch of videos from electro boom. He's ah local Vancouver, right? He has a habit of making his cables get turned red hot from shoving too much power through it and having them burn his hand or in one case his ass.
00:21:31
Speaker
Yeah, the thing additionally to this in terms of cost is also like this is early industrialization, particularly in North America. So you're talking about this project potentially like these are the costs of the commodities, but they're needed in such quantity that the cost is going to escalate as you basically drain the supply that exists. If you've ever played the strategy game Victoria 3, you'll be very so aware of this happening.
00:22:00
Speaker
So this this is all important because in 1854, Cyrus Westfield, an American businessman, invited Nova Scotian telegraph engineer Frederick Newton Gisborne to his home to discuss a proposal by Gisborne to build a line from Newfoundland to Europe. Three years prior, Gisborne had received a grant from the Newfoundland legislature to build a telegraph a landline to interconnect with the line built across Cabot Strait to Nova Scotia, which had yet to be built.
00:22:25
Speaker
Now, one thing I'll add is just a side note. Field British Columbia is named after Cyrus Westfield, ah thanks in part to the Canadian Pacific Railway. And of course, railways are going to be involved with the installation of telegraph lines because many of them just follow the right of ways that we're already in use.
00:22:44
Speaker
feel that only that year became interested in telegraphy. By this point, he had retired from his previous business ventures already of the individual, but he saw the potential and finance and built the line across the street. See, this is what this is what Elon Musk wishes he was somebody who actually built practical things.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah, like, uh, I'm wealthy. I'm going to like buy into this industry and just like do amazing at it. So that's why he bought Twitter. He's really amazing at running Twitter. yeah See, the thing is field very critically, uh, went into business himself rather than just buying other people's works and slapping his name on it. No, that's fair. Yeah, what business have, and actually no, it's not talking about any lemmas, fuck that. Um, I'm just saying, Field probably never bribed any of his coworkers with a horse for sexual favors. Oh God. After many failed attempts in 1858, Field and a consortium had laid the first cable from Valencia Island in County Kerry, Ireland to around St. John's, Newfoundland.
00:23:46
Speaker
The first message was sent from Queen Victoria to American President James Buchanan. i can't I didn't make note of what the message was, but it doesn't matter because whatever. ah However, this cable was a beast. It required two cables, the HMS Agimenon, I think I see you say it. it's It's a Greek word. Agamemnon. Agamemnon, okay.
00:24:06
Speaker
Um, and also the USS Niagara to carry the cable, which itself weighed 550 kilograms per kilometer. The tire cable itself weighed 1.65 million kilograms and the ships could barely keep it all in their holds. Like they were loading into the ships and they barely were. There's like a maximum height for like the ship can be in the water, right? Like there's like yeah a certain amount of running board. So basically, like, they they went from a regular ass ship to, like, sailing like a fucking ironclad just right down in the water. Yeah. And the other problem they ran into is that since the ah the cables had to be stored in the hold, because if they put it on the top deck, it was actually going to capsize the ships.
00:24:50
Speaker
Yeah, one one bad wave to this. Yeah, that makes sense. ah There were seven individual wires within the insulation. The copper itself only weighs 26 kilograms every 60, 26 kilograms for every kilometer. So like, it's 550 kilograms for every kilometer, but only 26 of it is actually copper. Makes sense. Because again, what like, and water gets into everything. Yeah, you have to like, You have to do this right. I mean, because guess what? You're not going to be going to the bottom of the ocean and fixing it that easily. You can, but not that easily. Yeah.
00:25:24
Speaker
However, the cable would eventually fail because William Thompson, who'd eventually become Lord Kelvin, for which the temperature scale is named after, after the message was sent from Queen Victoria to, uh, Buchanan, would force 2,000 volts down the wire, compromising the precariously made insulation. The line was not weathering the ocean as much as hoped, so basically he'd cook the wire. What ass.
00:25:46
Speaker
Yeah, he was told not to. He was fired. Or like, let go from the consortium. Like, he was just told to fuck off. Because, again, you can only put so much electricity through a wire before you just, like, basically nuke it. And like... Yeah, and like, TikTok wasn't even around for him to like, make bank off of. So like... Why do this? So the line barely lasted a month before it was destroyed but fortunately the British government saw the value thanks in part to saving 50,000 quid or about five million ah thanks to an order revocation from Canada England over a shipping incident. um So you know again like 50,000
00:26:25
Speaker
pounds, or 50,000 pounds, was saved by just having this cable. Another cable would be laid in 1865, but just 500 kilometers from Newfoundland, starting from Ireland no less, it was lost. ah That's brutal. um It wouldn't be until 1868, which would involve the SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by the decades since deceased, Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
00:26:46
Speaker
the man responsible for many Victorian era and British industrial projects, including the Great Western Railway. Again, I'm always going to end up mentioning railways I've been talking about this goddamn period. Choo choo, colonialism.
00:26:59
Speaker
Another cable would be laid in 1873, 1874, 1880, and 1894 along this path. So this path being what was known as the telegraph plateau, and it was not a plateau because they didn't know about, or rather they weren't entirely aware of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. What was really cool about the last one in 1894 is it remained in use until 1964. And all these cables are like still there.
00:27:27
Speaker
Yeah, like they're, they're obviously probably eaten through, but they survived better than a certain submarine did. Yes, that's true. By the turn of the century, it was possible to send messages from nearly all corners of the world in a matter of hours. The limitations placed were merely just due to bandwidth on the lines and the speed of operators and all operators in between.
Marconi's Wireless Revolution
00:27:47
Speaker
ah Messages often would be sent from like point to point and, you know, they go however far they reach another station, find out that this message is meant to go to Say it goes from ah Toronto, then goes up to Newfoundland, and then goes um to London, and then it goes to Paris, for example. Something like that could happen. Messages sent between New York and London no longer took two weeks, but instead took mere minutes. This, of course, opened up opportunities for businesses and challenges for government, with the latter struggling with what to do over diplomatic rows involving matters updating by the minute as opposed to to weeks without knowing what was going on.
00:28:25
Speaker
I guess this is akin to a Twitter dispute over something taken out of context. I mean, they were actually limited to basically tweet sized messages, right? Like the thing is, is like a lot of people go like yeah humans were never meant to have Twitter while we were having Twitter problems since the 19 the 1860s.
00:28:44
Speaker
Yeah, and like, like, if anything we learned that 140 characters is is not enough to communicate nuanced information, we should have learned our lesson with the telegraphs and gone all the way back to writing really poetic flowery letters. So fuck wires, because Let's talk about other alternatives to using wires instead of, you know, semaphores and all this. Britain had a monopoly on transatlantic telegraph services, but due to paranoia over foreign interests interfering, um they introduced the All-Red Line, which connected telegraph lines across the British Empire.
00:29:21
Speaker
Banfield, British Columbia for example could send a message to Brisbane ah Australia by way of British holdings in the South Pacific and then relay messages to Ottawa should the cable be cut across the Atlantic. So basically if messages could not be sent across the Atlantic they could just reverse course and send messages you know, um by way of Africa and then to Australia and then up the other way. This of course was a real fear for the British who themselves would later cut telegraph cables linking Germany with France and Spain upon entering the First World War. This is still a problem to this very day. There's lots of suspicious cable cuttings going on ah in the Mediterranean whenever things start to get a little bit hostile. And then sometimes it's actually just some like Macedonian grandmother. Oh my god, I forgot about that story.
00:30:06
Speaker
Oh, it's so adorable. What was this? How long ago was that? I think it might have actually been a Georgian woman. It was on the Black Sea. um No, it was it was Armenia. Oh, yeah, Armenia. Yeah, it was Armenian grandmother just like taking a hatchet to fucking. Yeah, this was from 2011. It was like, I'm going to pull it up because I think think it's funny. What did she do again? daddahh ah um This woman had been digging for the metal. Oh, she was trying to look dig for metal scrap.
00:30:34
Speaker
ah And she cut off, it was so it was a Georgian woman, but she cut off internet to all of the neighbor in Armenia. and to Georgia and Armenia have great relations. I mean better than Azerbaijan in Armenia, yeah or Turkey in Armenia. People actively genociding them. yeah So with the fear of cable cutting and having to compete against established interests in overseas cables, what is one to do? Well, how about not bothering with wires altogether?
00:31:03
Speaker
Well, it's like flags and very romantic steamy letters. Let's instead. Benjamin Franklin. Let's instead talk about that anti so-fascist anti-Semite. Uh, googly. Oh, sorry. Hey, say googly me. Oh, I can't speak. It cares. Yeah. I'm going to say, let me googly eyes. Geo Maria Marconi, who has a fucking lady's name for a middle name. which Hey, don't do that. to Make some gay. No, don't do that.
00:31:33
Speaker
All right, and also, old Kuglino. Kuglino Giovanni, mar Maria Marconi. Fuck it. I'm just calling him Marconi for now, one because I don't speak Italian. I speak some French. I don't speak Italian. I to make i don't mean to make fun of, like, the Italian language. I don't don't respect him because he's a fascist. Yeah, no, exactly. He's a fascist anti-Semite. Let's make that clear. He's a fascist anti-Semite. He's proud of being both.
00:31:55
Speaker
Born in 1874 in Bologna, Italy, by the 1890s he had become fascinated of electricity and science but in particular electromagnetism and the theoretical applications for radio. After many experiments at his father's estate in northern Italy, again he's fucking rich, by 1895 he had successfully broadcasted a telegraph signal 3.2 kilometers over hills after realizing grounding his transmitter and receiver and raising the height of his antenna as high as a telegraph pole would improve the broadcast.
00:32:25
Speaker
He was in encouraged by a family friend, Carlo Guardini, on their consul at the United States Consulate in Bologna to go to Britain. Carlo, having written to Ambassador of Italy in London, Annabelle Ferrero, favorably about Marconi's intentions, God, I don't know what I'm saying here, to move to Britain, was instructed in a return letter to not have Marconi reveal any details about his invention until after he had patented. Good call.
00:32:51
Speaker
Also, I want to say it it seems really obvious that like increasing the height of the antenna would but like improve the radio broadcast signal. But you also have to keep in mind, nobody at this time knew how radio waves functioned. Yeah, they thought it went to the ether. Yeah, exactly.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah. Actually, if you want a little cool little tip, if you are trying to unlock your car and you're too far away and you don't want your to, you can't be asked to go over there. Um, take your little fob and, uh, stick it against your head and your body will act as an antenna. That's again, you, you ask me why I'm interested in purchasing old cars. I don't want a fucking like radio activated car.
00:33:37
Speaker
Why? What? I don't know. By 1896, Marconi successfully. There's this thing here I have. It's called it's called a car. You don't own a car. I still have I still have a key for the sticky esteem in case I want to steal it.
00:33:54
Speaker
You know the person who owns it. Why would you take their car? I i know who owns it. and We're not friends. do You know this person? I know of them. I know who has it currently and have spoken with them because you sold them the car and you didn't give them the other key because you might take it back. i Not saying no. Good lord. Anyway, by 1896, Marconi successfully patented it Patented or patented? I don't know. I think the British way is patented or patented. Patented. Patented. We're a Canadian podcast. Yeah, whatever. Improvements in transmitting electrical impulses and signals and apparatus, therefore, which became the first patent for any communication system which relied on radio waves. Patented is such a strange word. I think that's the reason why I was like, do I say is patented? Like i the thing is, I'm adding extra letters. Yeah, it's patent, patented, patent.
00:34:53
Speaker
God, I'm struggling to speak today. Um, this is what happens when you record late at night. A month after the patent was filed, Mark falls a month after the patent was filed. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up the system to the British dishwasher.
00:35:11
Speaker
If you're following, he broadcast signals over six kilometers simultaneously in the Salisbury State Plain. I'm reading this off, you suck. A month after the patent was filed, Marconi would begin demonstrations of the system to the British government. In the following year, he'd broadcast signals over six kilometers in the Salisbury Plains, about 150 kilometers to the southwest of London. It's actually where Stonehenge and Bath are.
00:35:37
Speaker
Which is important because you know Stonehenge was actually what was receiving the signals. Yes, exactly. that's but's ah giant It's an alien receiving station. ah yeah While many demonstrations were made all over Europe in the year that followed, there were two in particular were reported from Marconi and this story. One of the first over-the-water demonstrations was on May 3, 1897, between Flatholm Island, located in the Bristol Channel, to just outside of Cardiff, Wales, at Lavernock Point, about a distance of 6 kilometers.
00:36:09
Speaker
Its success led to the immediate repositioning of the transmitter to break down fort in Somerset and from flat home to the stretching the distance to 16 km. This would eventually lead to a test across the English Channel. After these tests, he met the owner of the steam yacht Eletra.
00:36:25
Speaker
He purchased it and built a laboratory so he could do tests out at sea. This then, in 1898, led to the British Lighthouse Service authorizing the establishment of the wireless communication between a lighthouse in Dover and the East Goodwin Lightship, basically a mobile lighthouse. Four months later, in 1899, or March 1899, it sent its first distress signal, learning that a merchant ship had ran aground, which allowed officials in Dover to send out lifeboats from Ramsgate and Kent.
00:36:52
Speaker
From Ram Ranch, you can't. From Ram Ranch. Within four years, Marconi had established the effectiveness of wireless communication. This led him to being invited to the United States to be in attendance of the America's Cup. Yes, that one, Tam. Hell yeah. In that year and began demonstrations there.
00:37:13
Speaker
I think I actually knew that, but, but omitted it because I didn't want to talk about a fat because I just wanted to pretend he wasn't there as a fascist and irrelevant. Still in 1899, the second and boar war broke out and those aboard the SS St. Paul were able to learn about updates from said, well, thanks in part to Marconi, having left the equipment still on board before it departed without them. So he just left them on the ship. but So.
00:37:50
Speaker
I really wanted an opportunity to play the Irish anthem. I just want to say that the Irish really traded up like Northern Ireland. you have You're so close, tantalizingly close to a better national anthem. Oh, let's not start let's not start Irish discourse with me.
00:38:10
Speaker
So let's take a trip to Ireland, shall we? We haven't had the chance to talk about my other country on this podcast much yet. And we find ourselves in Wexford or more accurately, Rosslayer. Rosslayer is an interesting ah part of Ireland in that pretty much you just go there to take a ferry, like you're just going to go to France, Spain, or England. Or Wales, I think. So this is prime communication hub territory. Pretty much. it's and eighteen oh Sorry, in 1901, he built a transmitter on the shores of Rosslayer to connect with a transmitter in Poldood, Cornwall.
00:38:44
Speaker
Uh, these two points are not the closest between Britain and Ireland, but it didn't matter because he also used the same Rosler transmitter to broadcast to a point just outside of Galway on the Western side of Ireland. We, um, it doesn't matter because you're not constrained by like literal physical cable connecting them. No, you just had to make certain you have some sort of not necessarily line of sight, because it depends on the frequency or running of that, but like, you know, like a reasonable height and so forth radio is complicated and we're going to be talking about this in a moment.
00:39:14
Speaker
Um, but we had our first point to point connection. So you can go from Galway to Ross layer, the poll to, and then, you know, I guess you can go all the way out to London at that point. And you didn't have to use any wires on December 12th of that year, using a 150 meter kite supported antenna. Tam, I know you love kites. So did need a lot. It didn't need a single wire to hold the kite.
00:39:38
Speaker
Yes. He made an announcement that he had wirelessly received a message in Signal Hill in St. John's, Newfoundland, a distance of 3,500 kilometers. Is it really wireless if it's if the kite is on a wire though? and You have to have an antenna somehow. Yeah, I know the antenna is just a wire.
00:39:58
Speaker
While his claim was lauded by many as a scientific achievement, there were many skeptics in his time and even to this day who cast doubt on this event actually happening in the way he says.
00:40:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if it's still contentious, but like at the time that we covered this in social studies, it wasn't active it was an actual active debate being taken fairly seriously about whether or not this was actually possible at the time. I'm going to explain why it's a problem because um some background, I'll give you some background on this, Tim.
00:40:29
Speaker
um The frequency it was broadcasted at was 850 kilohertz, or you would put this in um wavelength, so like 350 meters. And the problem is, is that it was done in daylight and at this frequency, because of the sun being a giant radio transmitter itself,
00:40:50
Speaker
Yeah, you're you would basically be indistinguishable from um noise if you were to attempt to hear any sort of Morse code. And it wasn't like it was sending sound because you sending sound over radio waves, especially at this time, was just not practical. It was if you watch the video itself for The Heritage Minute, you'll see that it's a mechanical little ting, ting, ting.
00:41:14
Speaker
And that's all it is. It's just sending a pulse to trigger the, um, um, which is like the background radiation from the sun could also produce a similar thing. It would just be transmitting nonsense. Well, that's, that's the problem. So, um, like I said, the sun is a huge radio transmitter and will fuck with your long distance radio temps.
00:41:33
Speaker
um This is why... Sometimes it'll even just decide to light them all on fire. Yes, actually that did happen in one case with telegraph operators. This is why amateur radios, like amateur radio operators tend to do their work at night. And it is also... No, that's not why. Why?
00:41:54
Speaker
Uh, cause we're all fucking dweebuses and that's why we do our work at night. Okay. Well, fair enough. You have the radio, you have the ham radio license. I keep forgetting. Um, so the, yeah this is gotta to have the, you have to do it after the wife's in bed.
00:42:11
Speaker
It's the typical story of the ham operator. The other problem, the other thing is like in winter, um, he was doing this in summertime. Oh no, wait, this was, to sort one of the things about winter, that's kind of cool about, um, radio is radio stations in Vancouver. You you're elsewhere in the province who typically can't pick up anything. Once you go like say a whistler, you're not going to pick up anything from Vancouver.
00:42:34
Speaker
However, if the transmitter is strong enough and the sun is not being busy with auroras such it is for these days, you can actually pick up radio stations from Vancouver all the way out in Newfoundland. It is entirely possible in the at the right time of year in the right conditions. There's a lot of stories about this.
00:42:54
Speaker
picking up like, it was like a local rock station here that has been successfully picked up over there. And it just depends on signals bouncing off of the ionosphere and making it all together. Yeah, because they'll, they'll bounce and scatter, but sometimes they won't scatter enough. That's the other problem Tamara. Because the ocean is a big goddamn fucking mirror. Like the signal will bounce all over the place.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah, like, if you want to look at the world like a like a like a like a radio wave, like the ocean is a giant mirror. ah the The ground is made out of sound dampening material, some of the time, most of the time, I would say. ah The sky is a sometimes mirror and sometimes massive speaker, that's just giving you interfering stuff, like interfering noise. So some like,
00:43:48
Speaker
There's there's a practical way to explain this kind of how this works is visible light is radio. is It's just at a different frequency and it runs between 400 and 700 terahertz. um So like technically speaking, everything you see around you in terms of what you think is color is just um the material absorbing um that frequency of radio or electromagnetic radiation or photons, however you want to refer to it.
00:44:15
Speaker
and then only bouncing back whatever it didn't absorb. And that's the reason why that you can kind of see like water will reflect light. So yeah, that's kind of the way to think of the ocean is that it's it's a mirror. Like if you you can see sunlight bounce off of a mirror, like even if you watch the sunset, you see it that way. And radio has the same problem. I ran into this problem about 14 years ago when I was doing a project for Maker Faire.
00:44:39
Speaker
And I demonstrated a way to send Wi-Fi across long distances using um old satellite dishes. And if you set the right focal points and all that sort of thing, you can use them that way. um The thing that we ran ran across is we wanted to shoot it across Boundary Bay. And the problem with Boundary Bay is that it's a giant mirror and it just fucked it all up. We were successfully able to do it across the lake, though, because it was much shorter.
00:45:05
Speaker
Marconi knew it wasn't a blind test, and he had set up like a specific time to tune in for three clicks, indicating an S in Morse code. But like despite that he claimed to hear these three clicks, there was no independent verification.
00:45:19
Speaker
Yeah, like that's that's what I find very suspicious about this because like, like it's one of those things that's so easy to lie about. Because it's technically possible, especially under favorable conditions, whether or not his his radio apparatus and the antennas were capable of doing it at night, we won't know because he'd fucking like Mormon gold plated this shit.
00:45:46
Speaker
The thing is, it's like he'd already proven that radio works this way. Yeah, it did work. and Whether or not his radio worked is the only thing that we're that's really in in debate. yeah Exactly. So, Mokroni was not unaware of these claims and would later go on to demonstrate to others his ability to send messages across the Atlantic.
00:46:06
Speaker
This would later develop into a business where ocean liners going across from Europe to the Americas would receive news updates to be delivered to passengers during their few weeks voyage. And staying on ocean liners, Marconi's work proved invaluable when on April 12th, 1912, British radio operators Jack Phillips and Harold bride signaled that the um RMS Titanic sent distress signals, which was then but picked up by a nearby ship about 93 kilometers away. I will say that a lot of people What's that? And saved a lot of people that way. That's exactly it. Because I will say that his work led to 750 people being saved instead of all 2,224
Marconi and Fascism
00:46:44
Speaker
perishing. Now imagine if they actually had enough lifeboats.
00:46:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's another story. Hey, Marconi himself was offered a free voyage on this very trip, but opted to take the um RMS Lusitania three days prior because he liked the stenographer on that ship more solid choice. Basically it wasn't like a nine 11 situation. Like I think it was like Seth MacFarlane, the guy who created family guy, he was supposed to go on um a flight from Boston Logan, but I think he missed his plane. Oh, and that was one of the planes. Yeah, apparently.
00:47:14
Speaker
So instead we got more family guy. Yeah. And we also got the Orville, which wasn't too bad. Yeah. Okay. Fair. In 1909, he alongside Karl Ferdinand Braun received the Nobel prize in physics. Braun was also responsible for his work, which would eventually lead to cathode array tubes and radar. Plus was credited as building the first semiconductor. Braun was German himself, but was ah actually captured during the first world war and was not able to leave. So to the best of my knowledge, he never did anything shitty.
00:47:44
Speaker
Yeah, he's he's not the Nazi brawn. Radio has since this time been everywhere, and I would say there's a good chance that your listening device used radio to download this very episode and is playing through a radio to get to your ears. But I want to close off the story by pointing out how much Marconi sucks ass. Yeah.
00:48:04
Speaker
ah In 1923, Marconi joined the partitto sorry the Partito Nationale Fascista, or the National Fascist Party of Italy, which of course was created by Benito Mussolini. i should And he joined like enthusiastically. He got in on the ground floor. Oh yes, he did.
00:48:22
Speaker
This isn't like those like industrialists in Nazi Germany who kind of like try to whitewash their own reputation that they're like, well, we joined after they were kind of the established power block, we had to play the political game. Nah, this man, this man was like, oh, those black shirts, sign me up.
00:48:41
Speaker
I should note that Italian fascism has didn't really die when Benito died, as grandchildren are involved in far-right politics to this very day and as well as media, including with the Empower Fratelli di Italia Party, which is led by Giordina Maloney. The Fratelli di Italia Party's flag is the Italian flag with a little fire in it. yeah That fire is in fact the funerary fire of Benito Mussolini.
00:49:08
Speaker
Yep. And it's used, it's been used in various different parties. It's just that this party is the most recent, rent like revision, I guess you have it. Yes. They never de-notified except in the North, which was extremely communist until ah one Operation Gladio later, this became heavily frustrated. Still a real like big union hub though. A lot of good lefties up there.
00:49:30
Speaker
By 1930, Mussolini appointed Marconi as president of the Royal Academy of Italy, which was only formed one year prior. It was intended to be akin to the Royal Society of Canada or Britain's own Royal Society. I like that you put the Canadian one first.
00:49:44
Speaker
yeah During his seven year reign, nobody who was Jewish was permitted membership and he outright banned them three years before Adolf Hitler was even in power in Germany and eight years before Mussolini implemented race laws across the country. Again, on the ground floor. Marconi was not afraid to claim that he was a fascist and made it clear in many of his speeches.
00:50:11
Speaker
nor an anti-Semite. Again, like we're we're not even saying this derogatorily, and this man deserves all the derision you could possibly muster. Self-described anti-Semite and fascist. like Sometimes like I'm very careful of labeling people as fascist, even though they are. It's just like I don't want to overuse this label, but like in this case, there's no absolute way that I would not say this.
00:50:35
Speaker
It would be bad if we danced around it too, which also kind of sickens me a little bit. Exactly. So anyway, Marconi died of a heart attack in 1937. His ninth, no less. He was given a state funeral. ah Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. ah he he Nine times they tried to ah his own heart tried to take him.
00:50:54
Speaker
If we learned anything from Henry Kissinger, it's that sometimes the grin the Grim Reaper takes his time.
Legacy of Marconi and Radio Communication
00:51:00
Speaker
Sometimes the Grim Reaper is really adamant, but kind of fumbles the bag. And honestly, I prefer the few hits with no misses than nine misses until a hit.
00:51:10
Speaker
Posthumously, some of his patent claims were then awarded to the United States courts to the likes of Oliver Lodge, Johnstone Stone, that's right, and Nikola Tesla. What a name, Johnstone Stone. Nobody has been able to refute Marconi's claims to having been the first to achieve radio transmission, I must make clear, but his technological work has at least been proven to belong to other people as well and not solely himself.
00:51:35
Speaker
Yeah, because a lot of the a lot of the stuff that he was working on was also kind of being independently discovered elsewhere. And so it wasn't until about 1920 audio transmissions via voice were achievable. The technology had finally matured enough to make voice audible and radio stations becoming commonplace started around then, including one of the earliest ones being on Montreal. Things like vacuum tubes and all that were just required in order to actually transmit audio over radio.
00:52:05
Speaker
However, while radio was useful, it was it never became a method to send across the Atlantic as it was never really entirely practical. It was, however, practical to send across land, of which we will talk about in the next mainline episode. Again, so sorry about the Iroquois Confederacy one. It's coming, I swear.
00:52:28
Speaker
It's going to happen. Cables remained popular even though today despite having the option to send traffic via satellite. Multiplexing and coaxial cable permitted multiple conversations through the same wire and by the 1980s fiber optics allowed the use of light instead of electricity to send messages across fast distances.
00:52:48
Speaker
Yeah, for the listeners who are unaware, like we're recording this in Canada and it's going to get uploaded to YouTube, which is going to go over. or It's not going to be uploaded using a fishing line. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it's, it's, if you live in Europe, you're getting this podcast or this, this YouTube video from some surfer in the United States through one of these undersea cables.
00:53:14
Speaker
like a fiber optic one, but so many that count like I would never be able to rattle them off. I would like to in the future to do an episode on, um, because he didn't really go too much in depth about the, um, weighing of cables across the Atlantic because there's a lot of more around the topic, I can think.
00:53:32
Speaker
I may actually consider it for our you know for season two down the road, so to speak, because I feel like it's actually very much worthy of history. But we'll we'll get to that bridge eventually. I do have two stories I want to talk about in reference to interception of messages, both wired and wireless, because I think they're funny. Not funny, but interesting. So the first one I was going to talk about, and I had I'm going to just kind of wing it here is because we got to talk about Ireland, I'm going to talk about Ireland once again. As we all know, um Ireland and in particular Northern Ireland wasn't exactly a peaceful place until the miracle that is the Good Friday Agreement in 2001. And the thing is, is that a lot of people in Ireland were involved
00:54:20
Speaker
in the shenanigans, in the troubles. I'm not going to give you my spiel on on that whole thing because um I have a very nuanced opinion about this despite being Irish myself. but And I do not. Yes. But the the thing is, is there was a lot of surveillance on the Irish during this time. And I imagine it's still to this very day.
00:54:44
Speaker
But one of the things that was done over the English channel or if excuse me, see the IRC was that there was a microwave link between I'm thinking it was probably I think this is considering where this happened. It was probably from Dublin to just outside of Liverpool. So that's because Liverpool and Dublin are pretty much straight across from each other. And what the GCHQ did, this is the um um the central intelligence for and the United Kingdom. The actual actual like James Bond stuff.
00:55:18
Speaker
Well, okay. James Bond is MI6. MI6 is actually a real thing. So like this is for signals intelligence. these This is GCHQ is basically kin to the and NSA or the CSE. Okay. Yeah. So that's the government communications headquarters. In fact, it's fairly old um because I am i think it it was under a different name at one point. I'm not going to get into this because it's, this is guessing it grew out of like the code breakers or whatever sort of stuff. and Yeah, I think it was like originally like something like, um, I think it's like government code in Cypher school. Anyway, the story goes is that the GCHQ put a tower in between the signal, like it was like 150 feet high. So, you know, like 40, 50 meter tower high tower, right?
00:56:04
Speaker
and And what they did is they just intercepted all the telephone calls that were going from Ireland to the UK and vice versa. And this only came out because how did it come out in the first place? The Irish Tayshia at the time, I think it was Albert Reynolds, he was pissed about this, obviously. And I don't know how he got a hold of this. Like this, how I'm trying to remember like how this came up. But anyway,
00:56:30
Speaker
oftentimes how these things come out is said tower or like line splicing equipment is torn down because it reaches end of life and then somebody asked what the fuck was this spoopy tower for Yeah. Like it was built, like this was built in the, I want to say in the eighties or like the eighties or nineties. And then they just ran for years. But the thing is, is like, it just, that's the thing about radio communications. You can intercept them. Now you're thinking like, Oh, then you just use wires. And then you don't have to worry about, well, the CIA.
00:57:03
Speaker
and the NSA um did this thing called Operation Ivy Bells. And you know about this story because this story is fucking wild. ah This is where they actually put in a put in a put in a tap like a white they wiretapped undersea cables. Yes. And what they did is they um had a recorder set up on the line. So we would just record all of the calls and then they would send divers like this was off of the Kamchatka Peninsula. I don't speak Russian. And umchatka Yeah, this was like, it would be it was like basically an undersea cable that like went from um this the sea of octusks.
00:57:42
Speaker
ahha I can never say that again. I don't speak I don't speak Russian and what they did is they just put a recorder right down on the line and they just kept picking up lines and this ran until um I want to say until 1980 when somebody who was like really broke at the and NSA sort of like a Edward Snowden type, but I don't think Edward Snowden was indebted. Oh, wow. That is That is paris perilously close to like off the Kamchatka Peninsula is ah is really, really accurate. Yeah. like they it it it's it's since It's incredible that this happened and they got away with this. The thing about this was that um the but Soviets never encrypted any of the communication going between the two points.
00:58:35
Speaker
It wasn't really like it was something that was known as a good thing to do, but this is not a thing that necessarily even global militaries were super did for everything, particularly domestic communications.
00:58:50
Speaker
Yeah, and this is one't like what the only situation where um the Americans were fucking around with things um underwater. There was like the other time they tried to pick up a submarine um that actually failed miserably because they only got half the submarine and then got spooked because the Soviets kind of caught on. But but like, yeah, like, so like setting stuff wirelessly. Yeah, that could be intercepted. But setting stuff through the wires? Well, yeah, you can tap in like even if with telegraph lines, what would happen with those is if you were to tap into those lines, if if you got a really astute operator, they might actually pick up on the fact that the the taps are coming off a little bit quieter. And like you could do all sorts of things to determine like, well, the resistance is like, like this, so it's this far away. And then you can find that somebody had put a vampire tap on the line to, you know,
00:59:40
Speaker
intercept those messages. So like, yeah, there's, there's all sorts of ways you can pick up on this. But like, I was like kind of surprised that it didn't happen in this case, because being that this was an analog ah system, you would have a degradation and signal and like would be audible in this case. Whereas if you have something digital, you can sort of fudge it because your system generally has like some tolerance levels to deal with this. Like you have redundancy and everything. Mm hmm.
01:00:06
Speaker
So, and like with a digital signal, it's a lot easier to just put an inline repeater that then it shows up as latency rather than loss of signal strength. Yeah. that And actually ah latency thing's kind of cool. because I used to work with somebody whose past work was dealing with latency with um cables under the ocean and financial firms in New York and London are so strict about things like Slack on network cable between switches.
01:00:32
Speaker
that you know they'll measure everything down to the millimeter in terms of cable length and then to add to that their switches will be measured not in milliseconds but in microseconds in terms of dealing with like dealing with latency between um sending packets around. You can pick up on like changes in um signal like if you can pick up that somebody's doing repeating and If you got like a financial firm, they will pick up on stuff. And I can tell you from personal experience, having worked in the cybersecurity industry, that, um, there are some really aware people of their systems and they will pick up on things. But that's a story for another time. Maybe, uh, maybe in the future, I'll tell the story about, uh, my near arrest.
01:01:19
Speaker
Okay. Yes. He has some spicy stories about my line of my line of work. Yeah, this is why I work in games. i don't need to do it Nothing is life or death.
Episode Reflection and Listener Engagement
01:01:30
Speaker
Well, Tamarack, we've reached the end of this podcast episode. What did we learn? ah We learned that you will never you will never accept a Toyota Celica as your real car.
01:01:42
Speaker
It's a real podcast car. and And that the Operation Ivy Bells was actually compromised because one of the divers who participated in it was in debt. I don't think it was the diver. I think it was just a random NSA employee who was aware of this.
01:02:04
Speaker
ah Okay, yeah, sorry, yes. ah what A veteran at the and NSA basically blazed the trail of Edward Snowden and ratted out to the KGB to pay off some of his debts. That sounds about right. But not all. And also the interception devices on display in the Great Patriotic War Museum in Moscow, ah which if Russia ever becomes a not horrifically homophobic and transphobic country, I really want to see that museum.
01:02:32
Speaker
Well, what I learned is that you should always have redundant senior systems and um if you have nine heart attacks, God really hates you.
01:02:44
Speaker
Yeah, i I choose to interpret that as the Grim Reaper took took a few practice swings. Yeah. Well, that was a podcast. That was a podcast. It was a podcast. the The next episode will be on, well, ah we're going to continue talking about radio. the The next episode is going to be on ways you can re-hit your hot pockets. Oh, that's going to be cursed. I know exactly what you're talking about.
01:03:15
Speaker
Thanks for listening. One of the things ah we wanted to mention on this episode is if you really do like this podcast, if you can just give a rating on like I know Apple podcasts and Spotify podcasts have a rating system and they have a dumb algorithm system that only pushes shows to the top if they matt like people listen to this one show and listen to this other like we would love it if you can just give us like you know a rating and you don't have to put anything in your review you can just say good show and just leave it at that you don't have to do it more than once and I promise you that we're not going to mention giving our podcast a rating for at least 10 to 12 episodes this is the only time I wish to do this
01:03:57
Speaker
on the youtubes however i will now be instituting a like and subscribe little gif fuck off every 30 seconds of the runtime it exists and this will exonerate me from feeling like there's too much dead like just static image for a youtube video but no but it youtube is our only like actually like somewhat reliable algorithmic outlet slightly frustrated by my inability to get the youtube videos out on time seriously hitting the like button it stupidly helps if you are like more than an episode deep hit subscribe
01:04:34
Speaker
we release these at a glacial pace. You you aren't going to get your subscriber fee bammed by anything we produce. I solemnly pledge we will never make YouTube shorts because fuck that. No, I'm too tired. i hadn't I had somebody email me about that a couple days ago. You saw the email. and I'm too old. I know. I don't care. like maybe you know maybe but Somebody we would have to hire to do it if we were to do that.
01:04:58
Speaker
it's you no we're we're not i'm solemnly pledging uh death before you death before youtube shorts i will we put stuff on if we put stuff on tiktok we'll put literally full episodes terrifying to watch on tiktok i'll take the youtube videos and i'll just rotate them 90 degrees and that'll be it Um, the other thing is, is that, um, also, uh, yeah, but the other thing is like we, we won't do ads. I don't fuck it. I don't want to do, um, ads for this. It's, it's a waste of time. Like it's just, uh, we rather just have a patron. Um, you know, I.
01:05:33
Speaker
we keep Another podcast I listen to does um does like fake ads where patrons submit like fake products to be sponsors of the episode. I i might be down for that. That might be cool. I have a better idea. I'd rather see somebody like make fake ads for CanCon, like fictional CanCon.
01:05:55
Speaker
Yeah, like we we make them Canadian theme like a like a basically a more broad version of like CBC pitch bot. Like give me your Danger Bay reboot idea as a as a as like a promo like come up with a CBC bumper for like a reboot of Danger Bay.
01:06:13
Speaker
or the your 15th attempt at rebooting the reboot franchise. Oh, God, that's a pressing talk about. If you also just, say again, we have a website, it's shawiniganmoments.ca. If you like to email us, it's mailbag at shawiniganmoments.ca. I will remember how to say our domain one day.
01:06:33
Speaker
And I know we're no longer on co-host. Well, sort of. We no longer post on co-host because co-host shut down at the end of last month. Pour one out for them. And no one can post anymore, but commiserate with us at swiniganmoments at mastodon.social. Oh yeah, that's right right. I actually, if you are interested, I actually post on mastodon. it's kind of crazy that I decided that I'll post on there and instead of co-host. But I only had to harass you about it for like two fucking years. I know, but I don't do social media very well. That's the thing. Yeah, we will be the next episode will come out at some point in the near future. um I just haven't worked out the schedule yet. We're just getting our bearings. Thanks for listening. And I guess that's it. Yeah, that's a podcast. All right. Goodbye, everybody. Bye.
01:07:36
Speaker
Schewinnegan Moments is written and recorded on the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, Stolo, and Tsawatuth First Nations in what is otherwise called Vancouver.