99% Invisible - 208- Vox Ex Machina

Episode Date: April 13, 2016

In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.” It looked sort of like a futuristic church organ. An operator — known as a “Voderette” — … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the World's Fair in New York City. It was called the Voter, short for voice, operating demonstrator. It looked sort of like a futuristic church organ. That's our own Delaney Hall. An operator, known as a voterette, would sit at a curved wooden console. Behind her, there was a huge wall with an art deco image of a man's face with these spirals of curly hair. His mouth was a giant speaker.

The voterette would place her hands on two keyboards in front of her, each with five or six wide keys. She'd use her feet to work two pedals down below, but instead of musical notes, the machine produced a voice. This is from a demo recording of the voter produced in 1939 around the same time as the world's fair. Each of the keys on the keyboard controlled a particular frequency band. One foot pedal controlled pitch and the other foot pedal controlled whether the sound would be muffled or crisp.

Operating this machine required incredible precision and skill. Voterats would train for up to a year to make the voter actually talk like a person. Or sing like a person. What about you sing a song for us? Will you? No, actually. Well, how about all-lengths? Oh, I'm so gay.

She's so gay. Her feet are all angry. And remember, this is all happening totally live. The voterette is not triggering pre-recorded words. Instead, the keys and petals of the voter imitate the effects of the human vocal tract, producing the most basic building blocks of speech. The voterette is playing them in an intricate sequence, and she's actually synthesizing speech, real-time.

The crowds at the world's fair went crazy for this talking machine. It created a sensation. This is John Paul. He's an engineer, inventor, and historian. It was the first time there had ever been working speech synthesis. Anywhere. People had no conception that you could even do it. Here's voter's imitation of a cow. The voter was invented by an engineer named Homer Dudley.

And Homer Dudley's area of expertise was speech science. Dudley worked at Bell Labs, a research facility that belonged to AT&T. And during the 1920s and 30s, Bell Labs was doing all kinds of research into the human voice. How to synthesize it electronically, how to compress it so it could be sent across enormous distances quickly and cheaply, how to encode and disguise it. In all this research helped AT&T's basic goal, which was to improve the phone system in the United States.

The voter was a novelty offshoot, related to this research into speech, but it was closely connected to a number of Dudley's inventions at Bell Labs that still shape our world today. A lot of that basic research turned out to be things which have impacted our modern technology and world enormously. Stuff that became critical to the development of digital media, for example. And on top of all of that, Dudley's inventions helped us win a war. The Sambas 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States will be in trouble. Just a couple years after the voters' debut at the World's Fair, Japan launched an early

morning attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It came as a profound shock to the U.S. And the next day, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced the country would be entering World War II. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God." World War II would be the most widespread war in history. The US would be fighting in Europe and the Pacific and parts of North Africa all at the

same time. And it was a huge challenge to coordinate troops across that much territory. It was obvious the only communication possible would be by radio. And that radio was, of course, insecure. The enemy is listening. In other words, there wasn't really anything besides radio that could stretch across the distances involved. But radio is easily intercepted. And so. The problem of encryption and secret messages of military importance became more and more serious. At the very start of the war, the US military still relied on an old-school piece of technology

for its sensitive conversations. It was called the A3 Scramble. It worked by scrambling voice frequencies, swapping high frequencies for low and low frequencies for high, garbling the sound. Here's an example of what it might have sounded like. But it was easy to decode these scrambled conversations. The A3 is being compromised and it was not a secure system. That's Dave Tomkins, who's researched the history of various speech synthesizers and their connections to music.

German intelligence was essentially descrambling some of these conversations between FDR and Churchill in real time. And the US military knew the German codebreakers were listening in. So the US government gave Bell Labs the mission of creating an unbreakable speech and crypto. And Bell Labs went to our old friend Homer Dudley, the guy who invented the talking machine of the world's fair. They said, Dudley, we need you to figure this out. Really fast. They were under tremendous

wartime pressure to produce this thing quickly. I think the whole design took about a year. Thankfully, Dudley had already been working on technology related to this problem for years. It all went back to the voter and to another related invention of Dudley's called the Vocoder. Music nerds might know that term Vocoder because the great grandfather of the machine you hear in all kinds of pop music today. Vocoder was short for voice encoder, and the machine could break down a human voice, separate it into its basic components, and then compress and transmit those components

via shortwave channel. It could transmit the minimal amount of signals required to reconstruct that message at the other end. This process was important, revolutionary actually, because it allowed the human voice to be digitized and compressed and sent across big distances. But the vocoder didn't fully disguise the voice. The transmission could still technically be pulled out of the air and decoded.

So Dudley and his team had to add a layer of unbreakable encryption. And that's how the vocoder became just one small part of a much larger and more intricate apparatus. A secure communications system that would allow allied military leaders in strategic locations around the world to talk in total secrecy. It was called Project X, aka the Green Hornet, aka Sig Sally. Which was short for nothing really. It was meant to be confusing. Each Sig Sally machine was enormous, weighing more than 50 tons.

It was a pretty complicated behemoth of a device. It wasn't even a device. It was a room in itself. It occupied about 2,000 square feet and was made up of 40 racks of equipment. It needed air conditioning because a lot of the electronics was so delicately balanced that if it got too hot or too cold it would not work properly. In fact the device was full of so many finely calibrated tubes and gadgets that the military created a whole division of engineers whose sole job was to maintain the machines. The 805th Signal Service Company.

We're pretty much in charge of the installation and operation of the system. That's Don Mel, before he enlisted, he was an amateur radio operator from Omaha, and he was one of the engineers assigned to work on SIG Sally. He reported for duty in Washington, DC and spent his first two weeks in an intensive class. Where we learned all the technical details and the operations

and that was pretty much on the job training. The first SIG Sally terminal was installed in the basement of the Pentagon and it was connected to several conference rooms upstairs. Alligantly furnished, there was wine colored, thick, thick carpeting on the floor. They were beautiful rooms. This is Lieutenant Colonel Dorothy El Madsen. But my nickname is Meg, M-E-G. I was in charge of the Global Encrypted Conference Center. The conference center is where DC-based military leaders would

meet to speak over the Sixth Sallie system. So while Don Mel was down in the basement, running the machine, Meg was upstairs, coordinating conference calls with the military brass. She hosted everyone from President Harry Truman to General George Marshall. She sat in on their meetings and transcribed the conversations they had. Any of the men who had the responsibility for the conduct of the war and had to make their phone calls came to my conference center to do Communications is the most important thing and you have to do it with safety and security that you know nobody else is tuned in on it. The SIG Sally Terminal in the Pentagon was connected to a network of close to a dozen other SIGSALY terminals around the world. These were located in the most strategically important places where politicians and military leaders would need to be talking with each other on a regular basis.

El Jazeer and London and Paris eventually and Hawaii and Guam and Australia. There was even a SIGSALY terminal based on a roving ship in the Pacific. And one in beautiful, strategically important, Oakland, California. This network allowed leaders in Washington, DC to talk securely with any location that had a terminal. All they needed was a shortwave radio connection, and one other key component. A pair of vinyl phonograph records of totally random noise. This is where the encryption part comes in, because for every conference that happened over Sixth Valley, both the sending and

receiving terminals had to have identical records, which played the sound of noise. The noise would combine with the voice components as they were transmitted via shortwave radio, making it impossible for eavesdroppers to decrypt. On the receiving end, the random noise would be extracted in the voice restored. In cryptography, these records are what's known as a one-time key. So here's how they worked. Random noise would be generated, and then pressed on a gold master. Normally a phonograph record you would reproduce thousands of them from a gold master. Normally a phonograph record, you would reproduce

thousands of them from a single master. In this case, they made exactly two records. The identical and now totally unique records would be assigned a matching code name. And these code names were awesome. Like red strawberry, or wild dog, or circus clown. So let's say President Harry Truman in Washington, D.C. wants to talk with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in London.

Truman keeps one of the two records in Washington, D.C. The second one would be sent to the station at the other side of the ocean. And then placed on this special precision turntable. That was a part of the Six-Sally Terminal. At the scheduled time for the conference, Six-Sally Engineers in DC and London would tune in to WWV. which is the International Time Control Station, so that we could synchronize our control clocks exactly. Then they get their identical records spinning on their respective turn tables

at exactly the same moment. Once the records were synced, Truman would speak into a handset in Meg's conference room at the Pentagon. This is the President, Mr. Prime Minister. This is a reenactment of Truman and Churchill greeting each other into a handset in Meg's conference room at the Pentagon. This is a reenactment of Truman and Churchill greeting each other when they talked to be a SIG Sally to discuss a German surrender proposal in 1945. The signal would go down into the basement where Don was running the SIG Sally terminal.

The terminal would digitize Truman's voice, mix it with random noise from the record, and then transmit that signal across the ocean via shortwave radio. On the other end, the Sixth Valley terminal in London would reverse the process. It would remove the noise, reconstruct the voice, and feed it through Churchill's handset. After so much processing and such a long distance, the voice didn't sound very good. Like gibberish orated from the bottom of a barrel. But it was intelligible. You had to kind of train your ear a bit.

Anyway, then Churchill would reply, How glad I am to hear your voice. And the whole process would be reversed. Oh, but I am to hear your voice. In this way, Truman and Churchill could have a completely secure real-time conversation, planning, plotting, and strategizing about the war. When the conversation ended, the two records, which, remember, contained the top secret random noise key, would be destroyed.

That's because if anyone was recording this communication as it traveled over the ocean, the random noise record would be the key to decrypting it. It would allow them to subtract the noise in the same way the Six Sally engineers did at each end of the transmission. So the records were the most classified and sensitive component of Six Sally. By the end of World War II, there had been a total of about 3,000 top secret strategic conferences. In other words, at least 6,000 vinyl records that were pressed, delivered, used, and then destroyed at the end of the call.

Compared to today, it was a bit of a rudimentary type of technology, but for that time, we're in a vast nobody even thought of voice communications in terms of being digitized. And because of SIGSALA, the US was able to communicate with the Allies in real time and by voice. So if people were listening in to that signal, if Germans were listening in, what would they hear? Nothing but random noise, just total white noise. Wow. I mean, it might have been so unintelligible that they didn't even realize they were listening

to anything at all. They never knew of the existence of the system, and they never had any inkling that it was an encrypted speech. In fact, that's why Sig Sally was nicknamed the Green Hornet, after the popular 1940s radio show. The Green Hornet. Because an intercepted Sig Sally transmission sounded like nothing more than a hornet's buzz. SIG Sally was involved in pretty much every major military operation after 1942. It was even critical in the planning of the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the atomic bombs over Japan. Don Mel was the engineer decrypting and listening in on those six Sally conversations, even though

he didn't know at the time the meaning of the code words they were using. And obviously the she's coming over and the title is Manhattan Project. Well, I of course didn't know what the Manhattan Project was. Don didn't reflect much on the grave implications of those meetings he overheard. He was an engineer, doing his best to keep the equipment running. You didn't pay that much attention to everything that was said to your Mark in concern with the transmission. But he knows it would have been hard for the allies to win the war without Sig Sally.

It's hard to say what we would do if we didn't have it. Even if that victory sometimes came at a brutal price. At the end of the war, the SIG Sally terminals were dumped in the ocean. Almost every encryption device was intentionally destroyed when the war was over for security purposes to the extent of destroying the plans. But not before the military developed successors that were smaller and simpler and easier to set up. These new devices still worked on the same principles of encryption as SIG Sally, and they were used for secure communications during the Cold War, the Korean War, and to negotiate the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A lot of the information related to SIG Sally wasn't declassified until the mid-1970s, when AT&T sued the US military under the Freedom of Information Act. Once it was public, technology that originated with SIGSALI went on to entirely new realms. The vocoder, for instance, went on to have a whole new life in music. In the 1970s, electronic musicians like Kraftwerk

began using a smaller version of the machine to create weird robotic vocal effects. We have a rock. From Germany, the vocoder spread to the Bronx in Brooklyn, where hip hop and electro-funk group started playing around with it. Now you hear it all over the place. But the vocoder's reach actually goes way beyond the robot voice.

You're also using vocoder every time you use your mobile phone. But of course in a much much reduced size. The giant clunky machine of the past now occupies the space of a tiny chip, which compresses speech and allows hundreds of conversations to pass through a single cell phone tower. And a lot of the technology used to transmit media on the internet can be traced back to Dudley too. That includes MP3 music, that includes video compression. So give thanks to Homer Dudley every time you watch something on the internet. All those millions of viral videos would take up too much space if they couldn't be compressed. Jolly bit me.

Oh my God, it's full of undouble rainbow all the way across the sky. Everything in our modern digital world of media can be traced back to Dudley's vocoder and to Sig Sali. In the end, the vocoder kind of came full circle. It started its public life as a silly novelty gag, making animal noises for crowds at the 1939 World's Fair. And here's a pig. Then, like Don Mal and Meg Matzen, the vocoder enlisted. It did its service. It held the allies when the biggest war the world had ever known.

And now, it's back to civilian life. Making silly noises once again. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Delaney Hall, with Katie Mingle, Sam Greenspan, Avery Trollfum and Kurt Col Stead, Sharif Yusef, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Dave Tompkins' author of How to Rec a Nice Beach, the Vocoder from World War II to Hip Hop. His book inspired this episode and gets into the history of how the Vocoder

jumped from the military into popular music. Thanks also to Ben and he vet Sennak of Nucleus, David Conn, author of the Codebreakers and Stephen Jackson. And finally thanks to Pat Masidio Miller, who played the voice of President Harry Truman, Winston Churchill was played by our new staffer, Man of a Thousand Voices, to refuse F. We are a project of 91.7 KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of Arxan, the East Bay's premiere architecture and interior firm firm in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and, like the show on Facebook, follow us all on Twitter and Instagram,

but the best way to explore the 99% invisible activity that shapes the design of our world is to become good friends with our website. It's 99pi.org What's the matter? That sounds great, T-Pan. Let's get a little less vocoder on. You want less vocoder? Yeah, far away too much like a robot. Okay, I'll ask. Hey, vocoder, T-Pain wants a little less effect on this.

I think it sounds great. Radio tapia. From PRX.