99% Invisible - 563- Empire of the Sum

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and then we gave that tool a name. We called it: a calculator. But depending on what era you were born in, and maybe even what country, what constituted a 'calculator' varied widely.Keith Houston wrote about the evolution of the calculator in his latest book, Empire of the Sum The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. It is exactly the kind of nerdery we like to get up to here at 99% Invisible -- history explained through the lens of an everyday designed object.Empire of the Sum

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Whether or not you're a fan of math, it's undeniable that as a society, we've always had a need to count things. Maybe it's to figure out the maximum weight an airplane can safely hold, or the appropriate amount to tip after a meal, or the exact number of minutes and a year so that you can accurately write the soundtrack to the hit Broadway musical Rent. Either way, keeping track of numbers has always been a part of what makes us human.

So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and then we gave that tool a name. We called it a calculator. But depending on what era you were born in and maybe even what country, what constituted a calculator varied widely. In elementary school, I had a calculator watch, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. When I visited my dad's house, I would marvel at the slide rolls that he had in his junk

drawer. His father, a bookkeeper, had a monstrous metal-add-y machine in his office that I used to love to play with. And if you go back far enough to a time before written numbers even existed, a calculator was also an abacus, a tally stick, and our very own fingers and toes. Regardless of the format took, though, what's clear is this. Without the calculator, our built world, as we know it, just would not exist. You trace it all the way back and it's like, oh, the entire recorded history of humanity

is kind of driven by the fact that we have to count things. This is author Keith Houston. He writes all about the evolution of the calculator in his new book. My name is Keith Houston and I am the author of Empire of the Sum, the Rise and Rain of the Pocket Calculator. Well, let's talk about this need for calculation and for counting. It seems like we, you know, as organisms seem to recognize that we always need to count more than we have the tools to count. Let's talk about, like, you know, the historical origin of counting and that drive. I think the funny thing is, in a sense, there's not a historical origin of it. There's actually a biological origin of it. It turns out that lots of animals count.

There were a series of experiments, I think, most prominently with a parrot in, I think, it was the 20th century who was taught to count up to six. Ravens or crows apparently had previously been found to be able to count up to seven, so the parrot wasn't that impressive. But the parrot also had a concept of zero, which is incredible. The parrot understood that there was a thing which was there is nothing here to be counted. And so animals can count, insects can count, spiders are not very good, I think some spiders can manage two, and they're surprised if they see more than two things.

And humans can count. Even human babies have some innate ability to count. I think there's a sort of canonical example, which is if you show a baby some number of objects, and then you hide those objects and you take one away and you add one, or you add one, and then you reveal it again, they are surprised, they displace or prize because the number of things that they're looking at has changed. So, humans can count even before we're old enough to be able to articulate what that means. Yeah, yeah. And then, so, you know, in an effort to count, I don't know how the parrot does it, but we tend to use our fingers and toes and, you know, different parts of our bodies. You talk about that and then the process of weaning ourselves off of that limitation. There's been a bunch of different ethnographic research that shows that we almost certainly

learn to count using our fingers. A lot of different groups of humans at different times and in different places have had number systems kind of with linguistic bases of five or ten because of course you have you know five digits in each hand or maybe twenty because you maybe think of your fingers and your toes as being a kind of a complete set. So we've always had this ability to count with our bodies. We got really really good at finger counting. There are a bunch of clues in Sumerian writing. The Sumerians were the people who lived in Mesopotamia, a land between

the Tigris and Euphrates River in the ancient Nereast. Then what seemed to happen was the Egyptians got in on this finger counting lark as well. There are some paintings that show in on this finger counting lark as well. And there are some paintings that show Egyptian merchants making interesting shapes with their hands. They won't really show what this was. And then the same thing recurs in ancient Rome. There's a statue somewhere in Rome of the god Janus. And he was said to be making signs with his hands that represented the number of days in the year. And of course, this is even more than 10. It's more than 60. Someone is counting to more than 300 using their fingers, but again, no one quite knew how. So we went a really long way with our hands. But of course, at the same time, we realized that this is not very practical. Your hands are good for recording

numbers. They're not necessarily good for manipulating them, for actually doing maths with them. And that's where we start to think about calculating devices. The first such calculating device to enter the picture was the abacus. You've probably seen some version of an abacus before. You know, wouldn't frame with rows of wires cutting through it. Those wires have beads strong onto them. Typically, 10 beads per wire, and you can think of it as, OK, this bead or this wire represents the units,

this represents the tens, and the hundreds, and the thousands, and so on. It's unclear from where exactly the Abukus originated, but there are versions of this device in ancient civilizations all around the world as early as 300 BC. There's a really elliptical reference

to what could be an Abukus in a book written in China. And Roman China were talking merchants were moving back and forth and communicating between these two sort of superpowers. So it's entirely possible that the idea for the abacus went in one direction or the other. I don't think anyone really knows. But certainly by this point, you have the concept of the abacus. You have the word abacus as well, in fact, in Latin. China and Japan and Korea seem to really love the concept of the abacus, you have the word abacus as well in fact in Latin China and Japan and Korea Seem to really love the concept of the abacus almost down to the present day, whereas it seems to kind of go away in the West

The tool the really I think that succeeded the abacus for us was writing We got used to what we call Hindu Arabic numerals because they came out of a tradition in India and in the Arab countries to use decimal numbers and a place value notation. So you know if I write down the number 9 it means something different if I just write 1 9 and if I put another 9 beside it that something means 99 that's the place value part of it. One of those nine's means 90, one of them means nine. And it turns out this is a really flexible way to write numbers. It's really good for maths. It's certainly far better than abacus. So that's where pen and paper is better.

So people use pen and paper. It were called algorithms. And the people who use abacuses were called abacus. And there was a bit of a sort of a rivalry between the two of them for quite a long time. And eventually, of course, in the West, the Algorithtes came out on top. If we're doing maths by hand, we're not using an abacus, we're dealing with a pen or a pencil on a piece of paper. It sounds like one of the key advantages of being an algorithm, using a pen and paper and a place value system is that you could keep track of your calculations outside of your own head.

Yes, yes, definitely. You can show your working. You mentioned, you know, the abacus has a long and storied evolution, but when it comes to these counting devices and calculators that you talk about in your book, there's also this kind of like a complete obliteration of form sometimes and to get to the new one. You know, like in a way that's kind of unlike a lot of other sort of, you know, physical object evolution. Yes. There's definitely a real step change between each sort of class of calculating devices. And I think that is probably the reason why there's so different to one another. You start off with counting boards and abacuses. And in the West we move towards pen and paper. and why they're so different to one another. You start off with counting boards and abacuses,

and in the west we move towards pen and paper. And then really the next big innovation is a thing called the slide rule. The slide rule was a major innovation that came along in the 1600s. It looks a bit like how it sounds. It's like your average ruler, often no longer than 12 inches, marked with lots of numbers and a quick,

with a sliding mechanism. The slide rule was created because a new discovery had come along, something called the log rhythm. Log rhythms are basically this fancy metric that makes multiplying big numbers together a lot easier, but not so much easier that you can do it in your head. So prior to the slide rule, we had to calculate logs using these long charts known as log tables. So that basis behind the slide rule were these very, very long books of incredibly accurate logarithmic tables. And you'd look one number up, look another one up, add the two numbers together, look up the third one, and you've multiplied them.

And the slide rule was just a kind of physical incarnation of that. So that's why it had a different physical form. The slide rule made calculations a lot faster and less error-prone than using the log charts and pen and paper. It feels like magic. It is this incredible thing because multiplication can be such a pain in the neck with pen and paper. I have a fondness for the slide rule as an object. My father graduated with a degree in mathematics, and I remember seeing slide rules around his house. And this very cool looking, but tiny and humble tool,

was the basis of mid-century engineering. I mean, it was used to get the Apollo 11 to the moon. It was used to design airplanes. It was used to build rockets. And I have to admit, it does look a little complicated and daunting if you don't know how to use it. So I'll have a crack at describing how to use a slide drill. It's not a tool for radio.

So because it's like a ruler and because it has these two movable sections or these two sections that move relative to one another, you have to align them. You have to look at a couple of numbers, make sure they're aligned as precisely as you can and then you need to look up a result. And so imagine peering at a normal 12-inch or 30-centimeter ruler as closely as you can to figure out exactly where how long something is. And eventually get to the point where the thing that you're measuring lies between two lines.

And so you just have to guess, okay, is it 12 guess okay is it you know is it 12.252 centimeters or is it 12.253 centimeters or whatever number it is you have to you have to start estimating it they're not super accurate. And this is what fascinates and confounds me. It's that when you use a slide rule at a a certain point, you're essentially needing to estimate your result. It's this tool that we've used to help shape so much of our built environment, and yet it's inherently kind of imprecise by design, like you make a measurement, and you just have to eyeball it at a certain point, and I'm curious how that might have shaped our built environment.

Fundamentally, if you're going to be doing a lot of calculations with a slide rule, everything has to be linear, by which, I mean, most equations need to just be multiplications or divisions or just adding some constant number. And so this meant there was a real drive towards simplifying a lot of the equations that governed how, for example, buildings were built or planes were designed. I seem to remember that university where I studied physics wasn't a very good physicist, unfortunately. One of my teachers was an aerodynamicist, that was his thing. And I remember being absolutely flummoxed because aerodynamics was so hard.

There are lots of cubes and square roots and much more complicated, it's of higher order equations. And this means that if all you have is a slide drill, you have to simplify it, you have to come up with some approximation to the much more complicated thing you're doing, such that you have the ability to do enough calculations with it for it to matter. And so we ended up with a kind of world where bridges were stronger than they had to be, and buildings were squatter and stronger than they had to be. Cars were less efficient, planes were less efficient,

all because the slide rule just simplified and reduced the set of complexity we could address. It forced us to look at problems in a simpler way, because it was the only practical way to do huge amounts of calculation. And when you know that you're not as precise as you should be, you err on the side of making planes heavier, making walls wider. Yeah, that's sort of an exact thing. Yes. That's amazing to me. And then there's a certain point. As a society, our math was getting more and more complicated. We also had this desire to be more efficient and calculate faster. So what changes start to take shape here? So the calculator, the thing that we might recognize as a calculator,

kind of has to have a different form because the slide rules form isn't cutting it, pen and paper isn't cutting it. What are you doing? You're manipulating the wrong numbers. You're entering some numbers. You're carrying out some operation. And then you are entering some more numbers and carrying out another operation and so on. After that. So I think the form of a calculator kind of had to change to accommodate that. And of course, this is where mathematical,

this is where mechanical calculators come along and you start to see things that they don't look like modern calculators, but they do in some way function like them. Those early mechanical calculators were large and clunky. Some of them sounded a lot like a typewriter. This is the sound of an Olavetti simply CCMA, MC3, made in 1941. Its name is a bit of a mouthful, and its size is a bit of a handful. Many large handfuls, in fact. One of the earliest and maybe wackiest mechanical calculators developed along the way was called the curta. It was designed in 1945 by a guy named Kurt Herzark.

It was the shape and size of a pepper grinder. The curta, William Gibson called it a math grenade in one of his novels. It's a plot device, it's, you know, a... a McGuffin. And it looks like... it looks like a coat can with a bunch of sliders on the side. The curta was the first digital pocket calculator. It could fit in the palm of your hand and it was known for its unusual cylindrical shape. And it was the shape because it was driven by a very particular mechanical construct

called a stepped drum. And it's an incredibly clever piece of packaging. And it meant there was possible to have a genuinely pocket-sized calculator that could add and subtract really reliably. I mean, the story, how it came to be, I think, is interesting as anything else. It was developed by an Austrian called Kurt Herzstark, who ended up being interned in

bookenwald in this horrific concentration camp in the Second World War. And he was offered a chance by his captors, if he designed, they somehow knew that he had been a calculator designer or maker before he'd been arrested. And they said, if you can design this and you can make this, we will give this to the future. And perhaps he will see fit to pardon you or to grant you freedom. So as this horrible backstory to it,

that makes the fact that it exists and is such a gem of mechanical design, it's really weird. I find it quite hard to hold those two ideas in my head at the same time. We have more calculators after this, but first we need to add up some ad money. So why don't I talk about one particular event that you described taking place in 1946 in Tokyo? What happened there?

This is an incredible event. The US Army newspaper, which is called Stars and Stripes, set up this contest in Japan, post-war in Japan, between a private in the US Army, I think it was, and an employee of the Japanese post office effectively. His name was, if I remember rightly, Kuyoshi, the hands, Matsuzaki. I imagine his nickname was, that's part of the reason he was in the contest.

The contest was between the Japanese abacus and a newly developed state of the art mechanical calculator from the US to basically see which one was better. Both competitors were considered masters of their respective tools. Matsuzaki used his Advocates every day in his job at the Postal Service, and Tom would work in the finance department of the US Army. They had to do a set of additions, a set of multiplications, a set of divisions, and a set of subtractions. And the contest was whoever could finish them most quickly.

Tom Woods calculator was a luxury item. It was large and was powered by motors, turning internal gears. It probably rivaled the price of a car. And the technology behind Matsuzaki's handheld abacus was about 2,000 years old. Old versus the new. The ancient abacus doing about 2,000 years old. Matt Suzuki won 3 out of 4. I think the one that he didn't win was the multiplication. And the reason that he won was because he kind of internalized

all of these shortcuts that you could do with the abacus. It was, you know, there was a special skill. And so there was great, great excitement at this contest. Ever the competition newspapers reacted with melodramatic statements like, the machine age took a step backward, and civilization has tottered as the 2000 year old Abacus beat the electric calculating machine. But the competition also served as inspiration for new calculator manufacturers to push forward the evolution of what would eventually become the pocket calculator. And in fact, one of the knock-on effects come, the pocket calculator. And in fact, one of the knock on effects

was that Casio, the Japanese calculator manufacturer, got started off the back of this. This was, Casio was started by a group of brothers, one of them who's called Toshio Casio. Toshio had read about this particular contest, and rather than being a patriotic Japanese person and sort of cheering Matt Tazaki for winning, he was more interested in this mechanical or this electrical,

electro-mechanical calculator which had lost the contest and he thought I want to make these. And the funny thing was at the time, the Casio company, the biggest selling product was a finger ring with a cigarette holder on it so that you could smoke a cigarette at work or, you know, in the bath. And he thought, okay, we're going to build a calculator. But Japan didn't have the industrial base to make these electro-mechanical calculators. They didn't have enough machinery to build them with sufficient precision. That limitation gave way to a new technological development in calculators. The Cascio Brothers decided to build their Cascio calculators off a device called a solenoid. So solenoid is basically a metal sort of plunger inside an electromagnet,

so just a coil of wire that runs around it. And if you energize that coil of wire, the plunger shoots along inside it. And so you can use them to lock doors and I think car starter motors have got solenoids in them and so on. And he built a calculator out of solenoids and the actor switches. So every time you typed in a digit, some solenoid would move and that caused another switch to close and there would be a cascade throughout the calculator to set the number. And this all relates back to early computing. And this is where I find it starts to get really interesting because what calculators are doing is what computers are doing on a small scale, on a scale where the average person would have the chance to buy a computing

device, a digital binary computing device in a sense that we understand it for the first time in human history. Everything up to that point had been decimal, it had been gears, it had been rotating gears and cams and so on. And the very first Casio calculator, the 14A, was about the size of a desk and it chattered away as you type to numbers and for it to compute the result. But this was the first kind of attainable digital calculating device that the world had ever seen. That's when the modern calculator comes into existence, I think. The world's newest and fastest and most amazing electronic calculator gets a workout in New York.

It can multiply and divide more than 2,000 times a second and add and subtract 16,000 times a second. Supervised by a single operator, problems like this that might take a person working with a desk computer seven years, now are solved in seven minutes. And so how do you take this electro-mechanical calculator that's, you know, desk sized and make it smaller? What happens when you do that? It turns out that Thomas Edison had actually discovered a thing that would make this possible

at a much larger scale. You could build larger or you could build faster, smaller computers. He had discovered this thing called the Edison effect, where electrons would cross the empty space inside a bulb with no air inside it. And he kind of discovered this, he discovered this effect, and he didn't really do anything with it. But others, Koukeh, after him, figured out how they could turn these bulbs into amplifiers. So I've got one strong current, and I've got a weaker current that's changing, and I can modulate the strong current, so it matches the weaker current, which is just an amplifier.

So, you know, I can amplify an audio signal, for example, or I can amplify a telephone call. People built on this development and discovered that you could use vacuum tubes as the basis for building computers. And of course, calculators. These tiny little tubes meant that calculators could be built smaller than ever before. They set out to build an electronic calculator, one that would be much faster and more flexible than these mechanical ones he'd been making previously. And so they hired a guy who'd worked on some of Britain's earliest computing efforts, and he said we are going to use vacuum tubes inside our calculator. It was called the Anita. It's about the size of a cash register, and inside it had hundreds of these little tubes. There's a fantastic video somewhere on YouTube

of an Anita with the case taken off. And as someone types the numbers, you see these little vacuum tubes light up and flicker. It's like little fireflies darting around on the inside of the machine. The Anita was just a huge set of electrical switches wired together. And this is what drives the evolution of the calculator.

The next thing to come along is the transistor. So in Bell Labs in the States, they develop basically a tiny amplifier that can be made out of a single spec of silicon or germanium, so you can make these things very small. And people start making calculators out of transistors because they're just more switches. Vacuum tubes were switches, transistors are switches. And so now they make these completely solid state calculators, which are just fist tuned with wires. It's just circuit board after circuit board on the inside.

All of these components manually wired up. And the next step is the integrated circuit. Someone at Texas Instruments, a guy called Jack Kilby, figured out that while we're making all of these transistors on separate bits of silicon or germanium, where we could just make them all in a single bit and then wire them up on this tiny little bit of silicon? And so that was where arguably the first ever honest to god pocket calculator came from. By 1972 there were hundreds of calculator companies developing thousands of different models of

pocket calculators, all divine for that top spot in the market. Five million calculators sold that year, averaging about $300 a pop. One of the most successful companies that came out of this period was Texas Instruments. TI and their line of calculators had a massive rain, even though they weren't the first, or the cheapest, or the smallest weren't the first or the cheapest or the smallest or the most efficient. And the rise of the TI calculator is an interesting sort of deviation from the previous evolutionary steps of the calculator, whereas most of these developments were driven by a company's

need to develop their own system to count their proceeds or a mathematical progression that necessitated a new tool, a more powerful tool. In this case, TI had invented the microchip and they came up with the idea to make and sell calculators really just as a way to sell their microchips. Absolutely. They came up with a solution and we're looking for a problem to solve with it. So Texas Instruments had made a lot of money by selling microchips to the US military, and in particular to the nuclear missile program. So all of those silos dotted across the Midwest with the missiles in them. They would have lots of TI chips sitting inside them in order to run the show.

But once you've built your fleet of doomsday missiles, you don't need any more microchips, or at least you don't need as many of them. And TI found that it just wasn't getting as many contracts from the military. So they wanted to branch out. They had a problem of, we have the ability to make microchips, but we need a market for it. And so, heggarty, the president and Jack Kilby, the guy who'd invented the microchip in the first place, were on a plane.

And by the time they landed, they decided that we are going to build a pocket calculator. And that is how we're going to sell more microchips. Any American school child will know that T.I. calculators are just everywhere in the classroom. But the funny thing was, they didn't want to make the calculators at first. So they designed the chips for them.

They figured out that it's going to have a printer, rather than a display, because at that point, LED displays were too power-hungry. They drained the chips for them. They figured out that it's going to have a printer rather than a display because at that point, LED displays were too power-hungry. They drained the batteries too quickly. So it had a tiny little solid state printer, quite clever piece of kit. And they said to Canon, we've designed what is effectively a pocket calculator.

It wasn't really. It was like, I think it was a couple of pounds in weight. Maybe a pocket on a heavy overcoat or something. And they gave Canon the design, Canon brought it to, you know, because a couple of pounds in weight, maybe a pocket on a heavy overcoat or something. And they gave Canon the design, Canon brought it to, they designed a production version of it. T.I. couldn't actually produce the chips fast enough. They still weren't quite there with their production techniques.

And by the time the Canon Pochotronic, as it was called, came out, other very small calculators that are already caught up. In fact, another Japanese company called Buzzycom had released a calculator which was basically the size of packet of cigarettes, which was the absolute first pocket calculator, incontrovertibly. Of course, Texas Instruments eventually developed

the TI-83 graving calculator, which is still in classrooms everywhere. How did that happen? How did they go from a place where they're just trying to come up with a new way to sell their microchips to a couple of decades later, where having a TI calculator is often a requirement where a teacher tells you you have to buy one.

Yeah. As I understand it, TI started to make more and more components of calculators. And they become quite good at it. They also seem to be quite good at lobbying. So TI had a relatively large lobbying budget and they like to make sure that their calculators were required. Partly, they would lobby actual lawmakers. There was an attempt to have it written into law partly they would lobby actual law makers. There was an attempt to have it written into law in Texas that all students had to take one particular advanced math course, the kind of advanced math course that you might need a TI graphing calculator to complete. They didn't manage to get that passed,

but they did partner with textbook manufacturers so that when you got your maths textbook, there would be a picture of a TI calculator in it. And the steps of the solution to the problem would be using a TI calculator. They also started teaching teachers, which is a very clever thing to do if you want to get pupils doing something. So a couple of teachers at Ohio State University had been quite early to realize that calculators

could help students who otherwise found maths quite hard. If you put a calculator in front of a kid who's been discouraged for so long, then it takes away some of the pressure. It becomes almost something to focus on. And it makes it easier for them. You don't need to worry so much about addition and subtraction and multiplication and division. They can focus on more complex concepts. And so T.I. eventually started employing these two guys to run a teacher training program that, of course, used Texas product, Texas Instruments products

to say this is how you teach this particular course. That's how you teach that particular course. And so you had this perfect storm where textbooks showed you TI calculators. Your teacher had been taught by TI how to teach the course. And I think this is why TI ended up with such a dominant position in the states to be fair. In the rest of the world, I think it's different. In the UK, for example, it was pretty much Casio Calculators. It was all Casio Calculators. But my wife was American very clearly remembers

the TI 83 that she had to use at high school. Yeah. And so during this time, I mean, was there any kind of pushback or resistance to the infiltration of electronic calculators in the classroom? Yes, there was this panic. In the same way that the Egyptians had panicked that they were going to forget about things when they were given writing, you know, 5,000 years ago,

there was a whole swath of people in the US, in particular, who were worried that kids were not going to learn the right sort of maths. Because all of their parents had learned laboriously how to add and subtract and multiply and divide, I think they thought their kids had to learn the same things. Even if that meant holding them back from more abstract or interesting concepts. It seems like there's always the sentiment, you know, the kids today kind of sentiment. That should learn how to do things the way we did things. They did this about new math when my kids were little.

And I felt that my kids had a better innate sense of how numbers worked than I did in the way that I wrote memorized, how to manipulate numbers. But could you talk about the sunset of the pocket calculator, like where it's persisting and stubbornly hanging on, but also what it means as a symbol today? I think in some ways, TI's hold on calculators in the States, or at least the classroom market, is sort of, it's almost the last gas, but it's a bit of an outlier because calculators almost everywhere else have disappeared. My opinion is that when the home computer came along and when VisiCalc, which is the very

first computer I spreadsheet came along, it suddenly became possible not just to do simple calculations on your computer, which was something that had been possible since the very earliest computers, but it was possible to do really complicated calculations over and over again and to play around with, well, what if we take this mortgage and go for this interest rate, what does that cost us, what if we charge this amount for this particular product and we sell this much? It became possible to answer all these what if questions that previously had been just a pain in the neck. And so the spreadsheet, I think, becomes the tool of choice for people who are really serious about these large complex ongoing calculations. And so the calculator gets pushed out that way. And then it just kind of

goes from everywhere else. I mean, you know, if your cash register adds up the total, do you need a calculator there? If your phone has got a calculator on it, do you need a calculator? Well, no, you don't. But I think our phones and these apps that still persist on desktop computers, they are the afterlife of the calculator. They are the calculator ascended to electronic heaven. The no longer exist in physical form is just their software. Their spirit lives on, but their actual body of the calculator has died off. Well, the calculator isn't existed, maybe obsolete, but I'm glad that the image that I am familiar with still lives on on my phone and my laptop.

So thank you Keith so much. This is marvelous. It was so much fun to look back at this sort of nerdy history. Thanks. Not so. Thank you again for having me. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Lashma Dawn, mixed in tech production by Martin Gonzalez.

Original music by our director of Sound Swan Real. Cady II is our executive producer, Kurt Colstad is the digital director, the rest of the team includes Delaney Hall, Chris Barube, Jason Dillion, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Jotson, Vivian Le, Jacob Moltenaro Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Gabriella Gladney, Sarah Baker,

and me Roman Mars. The 99% of his well- will logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks to Keith Houston, go read his book, Empire of the Sum, The Rise and Rain of the Pocket Calculator. Also while you're on it, go read his other books too, shady characters, and the book, they're all so good any 99 PI fan will love them. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful Uptown

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