Radiolab - Bliss

Episode Date: February 10, 2023

In this deep cut from 2012, we are searching for platonic ideals longing for completion, engaged in epic quests for holy grails in science, linguistics, and world peace. And along the way, we’ll meet the dreamers and measure just how impossible their dreams are.  First: a perfect moment. On day 86 of a 3-month trek to and from the South Pole, adventurer Aleksander Gamme (https://zpr.io/ryaJzt5vaNTZ) discovered something he'd stashed under the ice at the start of his trip. He wasn't expecting such a rush of happiness in that cold, hungry instant, but he hit the bliss jackpot.Producer Tim Howard (https://zpr.io/bfxEEMYHf5vT) brings us the incredible and tragic story of Charles Bliss -- the man that inspired this show. As Charles's friend Richard Ure and writer Arika Okrent (https://zpr.io/3gjsdSePpQbG) explain, Bliss believed that war was often caused by the misuse of language. Having lived through the hell of Nazi concentration camps, he set about creating the perfect language, based on symbols and logic. Years later, Shirley McNaughton accidentally discovered it, and started using it to communicate with her students -- kids with cerebral palsy who quickly picked up the language and made it their own. At first, Charles was thrilled...until he started to feel his original dream of saving the world was slipping from his fingers.And finally, co-host Latif Nasser (https://zpr.io/pJsnQSYWJLTe) explains how, on a cold, snowy farm in Vermont in 1880, a kid named Wilson Bentley put a snowflake under a microscope and started a lifelong quest to capture perfection. EPISODE CREDITS:Reported by - Tim HowardProduced by - Tim Howard CITATIONS: Videos: Aleksander and his glorious gift to his future self. (https://zpr.io/STUpZqWqrBwy)Books:    Arika Okrent, In the Land of Invented Language (https://zpr.io/uqBLpYQr7xNT) Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (https://zpr.io/JpdC8rS7Uqjq) Duncan C. Blanchard, The Snowflake Man: A Biography of Wilson A Bentley (https://zpr.io/YaqeAw4XucRT) Ken Libbrecht, The Secret Life of a Snowflake: An Up-Close Look at the Art and Science of Snowflakes (https://zpr.io/DtZrbyFc3M75), Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes (https://zpr.io/wg79x4HPCFun) W.A. Bentley, Snowflakes in Photographs (https://zpr.io/ccQfy9ZGFDDh) Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail] Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

You Wait, wait, you're listening to radio lab radio from W and Y Okay, hello, hello Okay, hello, hello. Hello! Hello! Hey! How are you? We are super, super excited to talk with you.

Oh, same with me, I'm sorry about the delay and so on. Oh, that's fine. No, it's a... Life is crazy. Life is crazy. Yeah, no. But you were so enthusiastic, so I was just like... I need to talk to this, guys.

They really mean it. This is Alex. Alexander Gammah. Gammah. Are you Norwegian all the they really mean it. This is Alex. Alexander Gamma. Gamma. Are you Norwegian all the way back? Yeah, typical Norwegian. You know, if typical includes things like biking in Sahara and climbing Everest and things like that.

He's kind of a professional adventurer. And we got him into the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips. Get to tell you this video, it's maybe the most amazing internet video I have ever seen. I think so too. So let me just set the scene for you. Okay. What you see in the video is this guy, Alex, kind of moving along this piece of on skis,

this snowy, snow-scape. He's filming himself, he's got the camera on his right hand. Where is he exactly? Antarctica. He's on a three-month trek to the South Pole and back by himself. And what he's been doing is every couple of days on his trip, every 200 kilometers or so,

he would bury stuff in the snow. Some fuel and sometimes a little bit of gear that I didn't use. Was that just a light in your load? Yeah. You know, because every ounce of unneeded weight has to go. So in this video, it's day 86. Almost three months since I left.

That's three months of walking 10 hours a day. And I lost almost 25 kilos. 55 pounds, he's exhausted. Oh. Shira. He's come upon his last cache. So, on the last cache, where this widower is captured. What you see is Alex kneeling the snow, start to dig.

I'm telling that I'm quite hungry. Whatever's in this last cache in the snow, it's been three months since he buried it. So I didn't really recall what was there. Men, al tilo, vos hopa! He hopes it's something good. So he digs up this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it. I just dig it and I may have a sling, or a little bit of a shawty. Some Vaseline, some zinc ointment.

It's just a mess. Nothing. It's just a mess. Nothing. It's pretty much all trash. I'm going to skim here, so I'm going to take this bra. But then... YAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH What is that? He holds up. Double back of cheese doodles. Then he throws it up in the air. Yeah!

And then this is my favorite part. He just frees us. And he's staring off into the distance, almost like, did that happen? Unveiled killer. Is it real? So he starts to dig some more. And then...

What is it this time? Huge chocolate bar, it's milk chocolate. And then it's just like... He finds some mentos. Aramentos. I find more and more and more. Have you ever been that happy in your life? Well, I've been thinking about that. When did you shout last time you were so happy? I think that's why we've been watching this video over and over again,

because none of us can remember. It's like what stands between you and that feeling is a really interesting question. Yeah, it's three months with that. I think that's why we've been watching this video over and over again, because none of us can remember. It's like what stands between you and that feeling is a really interesting question. Yeah, it's a free month with hunger. Actually, I think the reason I like this video so much is not just because he's happy. It's that he somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection.

It's just like a perfect situation. By being so tired and so hungry and finding such a stash of candy that he had forgotten that he left, he created a moment of just absolute complete bliss. In this hour on Radio Lab, we're going to be searching for moments like Alex had a Pnanadarika. We're going to be searching for Bliss. Bliss of all different sorts. Perfect. Moments.

Perfect worlds. The kind of bliss slips right through your fingers. And the kind of bliss that just might last. And last. And last. And last. All right, we're gonna begin with a story that kind of inspired this show. We would have never done a show about the word bliss, where it's not for the following story,

which is about a bliss. A, what do you mean, a bliss? That'll make sense in just a second. Story comes from our producer Tim Howard and it begins with a box of tapes. All right, so check it out. This is my office and you've got a rectangular package here.

What is it? It is a very old looking box. It doesn't look like much. It's just about like 15 cassettes. Tape number six, singing and playing to friends in America. Do the y'all a fine, a nice, you fine, you fine, okay, so this is Charles. Charles Kaisio Bliss, an amazing character.

And that's Richard. Richard Jua, he's a fellow who gave me the cassettes. He was a friend of Charles. Yeah. So these are just like, sitting in his attic or something? Graservic. He looked like I suppose a little gnome, a little leprechaun almost. To life, to life, to life, to who I am.

He was short, bold, and laughter the whole time. Even a blusion. He was still a lovable character, as simple as that. This is my favorite one. I'm Mulder Keinik, Moshyeh. Wait a second. Just explain why we're talking about this guy. Sure.

Because these tapes tell an amazing story about a guy who really embodied his name. And he tried to save the world, but ultimately just tried too hard. The dirty point of my life came in 1998. We can start the story here. This is from a lecture that he gave decades later. So the story goes, it's 1908. And he's a little kid living in what's now the Ukraine. And his name is Carl Blitz.

Not Charles Blitz. Not Charles Blitz. Carl Blitz, B-L-I-T-Z. That's his original name. And a little Carl. Was fascinated by tales of discovery and adventure. My name is Erica Oakrent. Erica wrote about Charles Bliss in this great book called

In the Land of Invented Languages. Getting back to the story, one day she says when Carl was 11, a lecture came through town about some Austin Polar Expedition. Polar Expedition. To explorers, talking about their trek across the North Pole, came through town about some... ...colar expedition. To explore. There's no one to slide. Talking about their trek across the North Pole.

And he was so inspired by what he saw and heard at that lecture that even decades later he couldn't talk about it. And my father took me to this... excuse me. Without getting choked up. My mostly are, what they mean. My father took me to this lecture. And there I saw... choked up. For what? For what? For a search of knowledge? For an idea? As he tells it on those tapes, that was the beginning of his big idea that was going to change the world. Fast forward a few years.

I came to Vienna after the first World War. He did end up going to the Technical University of Vienna. I was suddenly discovered to be the best Mandolin player in Austria, and one time I played with a full opera orchestra under the action of the composer front check. Ah, those were the days. And then everything changed. In 1938, I was killed by one kind for the last time.

German troops swam across the Austrian border at a historic island. The Nazis came to town. The Nazis came to town. He was sent to the Chau and then Buchenwald. You know, the concentration camps. One feeling, one vision, desire to end my life. All around him, people were being worked to death or outright exterminated. But his wife Claire was a German Catholic with connections. And Claire, my good wife, swagged my mandolin in my guitar and into the concentration camp.

I became so famous among the Nazis that, for instance, our block fear would come into our barracks and say, let's spivas of the mandolin, our twice-demique. And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Carl started to develop his ideas about language, but the ways that you can manipulate words. For instance, there was this one song that all the prisoners sang. The book about Glee, one of the saddest songs I can ever make.

Had the saddest lyrics in the world. At a certain point, Carl started to play around with the song. He'd swap out some of the sad lyrics for some jokes, sing it for his fellow prisoners. And then laughed and laughed and laughed, and forgot for a few minutes that they are as a darkest and the most terrible homes on earth. And on the flip side, every evening, the guards would march all the prisoners outside, force them to stand there in the cold in front of these loud speakers. Make them listen to these speeches.

Speeches of Hitler and Gervals screaming Nazi slogans. Like, which means Germany you make. But after about a year, his wife somehow wrangled a British visa for him and he gets out. I think heaven's those dreadful times are gone. And now I can play here for you

and improvisation as it comes into my mind. In 1939, he went to Britain. And got a job as a manager of a factory. But he arrived in England just as the blitz begins. The Germans start to bomb every major city in England. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren. And every time he'd introduce himself to somebody new, they'd shudder.

That can't be your name, because of Blitzkrieg, that association. You can't go around here at Great Britain. It was named Blitz, and so I changed from the war like Blitz to the peaceful Blitz. That was how he became Charles Blitz. Blitz has all the right associations, so he went forward with the feeling of that he was now Bliss and would bring happiness to the world.

And a year later, he and his wife end up in China in Shanghai, where there was a big population of ex-out Jews. Shanghai was the only place that would take them at that time. And they're in China. And they're in China, I got the opportunity of my lifetime. And now we come to his big idea. I realized, but I did not know that the Chinese have a different way of writing. He became enraptured by the Chinese writing that he saw.

The Chinese use symbols. In each symbol is a word. And he writes about having this epiphany when he saw the Chinese symbol for man. He saw that the Chinese written form of man sort of looks like a man. It looks like a sick-freaker man. And it means man. He doesn't even know what the Chinese word for man is. He doesn't know how to say man, but that doesn't matter He is skipping the word and going directly into the meaning. So here was a way of getting beyond language

You could think the word in any language if you see it in the symbol. And that was a revelation. Why? Well I mean think back to the concentration camps when they were outside in front of those loudspeakers listening to Hitler's saying stuff like Deutschland Uberalus, you know Germany above all that phrase Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis a hundred years earlier in 1948. And originally it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all of these separate principalities. That spoke German, but these were not one country.

So when they said Deutschland overallist, it meant unification. The nation above the states. Oh, so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive thing. No. But Hitler turned this around. Hitler changed the meaning. The nation above the states, oh so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive thing, no. But... Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation... ...the only countries of the world...

...the above all other nations. So you see what happened this phrase that started meaning one thing, unification. Yeah, it came with the opposite. Yeah. This is what the Nazis did. False words, lies. They would bend words to obscure the truth of what they were doing. Extermination, they'd call it solution.

By doing that, as he saw it, they were able to convince good, sane people, his neighbors, to go along with the genocide. And I realize that something must be done to make language more to a nature. Words were the problem. Words made people do cruel things to each other. They dared our society apart. Words were dangerous instruments. They caused violence, they caused wars. So when he saw the Chinese symbol for man, he thought, this might be the answer. And that year came up to me that I would should invent symbols

like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer. Which are so simple and pictorial that even children can read them. If he could sit down and work it out, he would look at the symbol and know what it meant instantly regardless of what language you spoke. You wouldn't even need words which he felt could be manipulated. You could just have the symbol and get straight to the truth of the matter. And the way he saw it right off the bat you'd have all of these benefits. Frenchman and Finns, Englishman and Estonians.

Language barriers would be at the window. Everything from traffic accidents to health problems could be avoided he thought. If his symbol system would just be adopted. He had this vision that high-level political and commercial negotiations would be done in symbols. Did he say anything as grand as like, or wouldn't happen? Constantly. And even of course, Here I can hitler wouldn't have that happened basically that if the German people

had understood the symbols, they wouldn't have copped Google's propaganda. Now, that's a pretty tall order, but it did seem to be what he thought. Everything could be cured by this system. He's the biggest dreamer ever. Yeah. How did he go about doing this?

He started working out what the basic lines and shapes would be. He also wanted to make sure you could produce it with a typewriter, so it had to be a limited set of shapes out of which everything could be created. Okay, so he works on it for seven years, seven years. And he comes up with that. Wow, that is a big one. This massive book called List Symbolics. Samantha Liggy. illogical writing for an illogical world. That says it all. Where he explains the logic of his system. For example, here, he's a symbol for sword,

which looks exactly like a sword, and then the sword plus a forward arrow means attack, I buy it. And then if you see a symbol for sword, and another symbol for sword in their cross, that means war. So that's the idea that you take these basic elemental symbols and combine them? Exactly. All right, here's another one. This symbol here is like the top half of a circle. Like a little rainbow, but just one line. That means mind, mind. It looks like the top of a skull.

Ah, now if I were to take that symbol for mind and I were to go like this, I were to put inside it the question mark, that means I don't know or I doubt. And there are also ways to indicate verbs and adjectives and first person, second person, the past, the future. But kind of the one thing that it did that no other language or symbol system or anything is attempted to do, at least as far as I know, is that it would make clear when something was what he called a human evaluation, basically an opinion.

And what you would do is you put this little this little V symbol and you put it above this symbol. And why V? Well, because you know how V is balanced on a point Does it all V symbol and you put it above the symbol? And why V? Well, because you know how V is balanced on a point and it's unstable at wobbles to him that represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of the mind. Or take metaphors. If you say something which is a metaphor.

The top four, as he says. You must put up the metaphor sign. To alert the reader, do not take this literally. Stop the towel ahead. Not exactly bulletproof, but I can see the thinking there. I actually think it's pretty impressive. Okay, so what happens next? Well, after he finishes this, and he and his wife are living in Australia at the time. They spent all their savings on producing this book and sent it out to professors, government officials, heads of state, something like 6,000 people. And they waited for the orders to

start rolling in. And no response for anybody. And then they had nothing. I can't say I didn't see that coming. And with great disappointment, Charles went to work as a welder and a factory. A gentleman as Holden's. He was working on the production line almost as a robot. And a year later, his wife died. He had fought in World War I. He had been in a concentration camp. He had lived in exile.

But he says this was the lowest point of his life. Until one day, 1971, this, as he said, this letter floated onto his desk. A letter that would change everything when Radio Lab continues. Hi, I'm Jason from Inter calling from Brooklyn, New York. I just wanted to tell you that Radio Lab is coming to life at the podcast experience. It's a brand new kind of immersive exhibition by the producers of OnAirFest. Travel across the history of the universe with Radio Lab.

Host Lulu Miller and Lottip Nasser will be your guide as you lie down, look up at the stars, and watch the journey through time unfold all around you. From the Big Bang to the farthest imaginable edges of the future, The experience will also include rooms designed by the creators behind other hit podcasts, including My Favorite Murder, On Being, The Heart, and Object of Sound. It's happening on February 23rd to 26th at Wyze Hotel in Brooklyn. Check it out now at ExperiansPodcast.com. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod.

I'm Robert Krolwich. This is Radio Lab. And we're talking about Bliss. We've got the story of Charles Bliss, whose name inspired the show, who had the dream of inventing a universal symbolic language. Now, before the break he'd reached a real low point in his quest. When all of a sudden, as he said this letter floated onto his desk, with this picture of this beautiful, dimpled child,

proudly using his symbols. Yeah, it was a poster. A poster. A poster. This is Shirley. Shirley MacNaughton. And at the time, she was a nurse at a place called the OCCC. The Ontario-Crippled Children's Center, a name that we were very happy to leave behind us.

They've since changed the name. I started there in 1968. And Shirley was part of this group of teachers and nurses who worked with these kids who suffered from cerebral palsy. If you have cerebral palsy it's the motor control from the brain that's been affected. Which meant that they had trouble moving their arms or legs and even in some cases they couldn't speak. They couldn't form words. And then a film that was made of this class. You see these young kids. Children from 5 to 7. I'll sit in wheelchairs. And they're watching the teacher. She talks to them and you hear them try to talk to her, but they can't. These kids had no way to communicate.

Couldn't they learn how to read? They could if you knew what they were understanding and they have no way to communicate that to you. The only thing all these kids had were pictures that they could point at. They had a picture of a toilet, a picture of food, a picture of a drink, a picture of a bed. They were limited to that kind of communication, but I knew they were bright. But if they couldn't move and they couldn't speak, how would you know? My insight on that was the twinkle in their eyes.

But she says a lot of doctors and nurses at the time thought I was crazy. Thought there really wasn't much going on inside these kids' heads. You know, they thought I was projecting into the children. What she needed, she said, was a way to get through to them. And so one day, she was at the library with a colleague. And they come across this dusty old volume that had never been checked out, called, you guessed it. With Symbolics.

And what did you first think when you saw it? Oh boy, can I get back to the group? How fast can I get back to the group with this? Really? This is exactly what we need. So do you remember what the first symbols were? I think it was I and you. I looked kind of like a standing person.

An upright line. Small horizontal line at the base. Yep. Next to it, the number one. Which means first person. You is the same symbol a line at the base. Next to it, the number one, which means first person. You is the same symbol, but with the number two for a second person. And then they had to have a verb, and it was love. Heart with an air thread.

So now they've got a sentence, I love you. One of our mothers is the happiest moment she's ever had with her child was when her child came home and said, I love you, you know, so Shirley and her staff started to add more symbols they caught on and pretty soon they'd created this giant laminated chart It had I and you and he she we and they then it it had Mother Father Gramma grandpa, Dr. Nurse Teacher, Therapist, Postman, Fireman, Library, and Dentist. Eventually they added adjectives. Happy, sad, and frustrated.

All the verbs you had loved and liked, and hate, want, need, understand. Pretty soon? The kids started to do amazing things with simple combinations. They started to improvise. Surely, remember, it's asking one kid. Terry Martin, what did he want to be for Halloween? Terry pointed first at the symbol for creature.

A creature, not a person. Then he pointed at the symbol for... Drinks. Then... Blood. Then? Knight. A creature who drinks blood at night.

Right. He wanted to be a vampire. He spelt a new word. It sounds like an explosion with these kids. It was. It was. For the first time, she says she could actually talk to them like, no who they were. Yeah, you got to know who the leaders were in the classroom, those who wanted to help

others, those who copied others. And it was around then that she and the other teachers decided to send Charles Bliss that letter. We were sharing our excitement for this gift he'd given to the children. You know, he was in Australia, he was an elderly man. We had no thought that he would come and visit us, you know, didn't enter our mind.

But Charles Bliss, he was delighted. Redish, you're good, that's what I'm doing. He had battled for so long for recognition, and now he had it. Beard, beard, beard, beard. He mortgages his house and flies over. And I was so happy there, and I just devlazed my under lean and told them jokes and all.

He dances around and kisses everybody effusively. And they laugh and laugh and laugh, they're hit all. He had long conversations with the kids. In symbols. Green. Green. He was very happy about the children. Joy.

Joy. That's it. Joy. BANG. But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Surely, surely in the teachers had begun to augment the system. They'd begun to add their own symbols, such as... The opposite meaning symbol.

This allowed the kids to take one of Bliss' standard symbols and just invert the meaning. Opposite of happy, sad, opposite of up, down, opposite of in, out. Even to her, this would effectively double the number of adjectives. Which would be great for the kids. And we developed rules. For how to combine symbols, for how to be more precise with the symbols, she threw in some new pronouns that were missing. The difference between he and him and his.

In short, I would make the adaptations I needed to make. From the very beginning, we were using it to meet the children's needs. Their specific needs. And of course that is not what he had in his mind. He wanted a system that was universal. Every change that she made created like a separate dialect. He would get very emotional about it. So when he got back to Australia, he started writing all these letters, basically taking issue with her changes and her failure to understand how his system works. Meanwhile, thanks to Shirley, word about Bliss's symbols

had spread way beyond Canada to Hungary, France, Sweden, Israel, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe. Yeah. And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia, it's spread to all these places. Yeah. And in each place, the symbols would inevitably get tweaked to suit that country, for example, in Israel, because the writing goes from right to left. Yeah. The bliss symbols went from right to left.

But what really pained him the most, what really got him, was that these teachers were using his symbols as a step toward English, or French, or German, or or Hebrew or whatever. It was just a way to get the kids to their native languages. The teachers always saw it. The way they saw it, you start the kids on bliss. And then you introduce reading and letters and eventually they're fully literate.

At which point you don't need the bliss symbols. This was the ultimate insult to him. They were using his system to bring these kids back to the very thing that he was trying to get everyone away from. Evil words. If I try to explain it to them, they don't want to listen to me, they look to me. What should I do? I don't know. And it's right about this point in the story that you start to hear a different Charles

place. Is he saying perverted? Yeah. She smiles, she beguys, and she lies. He kept sending Shirley and the other teacher's letters and the letters got angrier and angrier. This was not what the language was for. This was a universal language that had nothing to do with spoken language. You are ruining my system, you are abusing it. And eventually, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and he traveled back to

Canada. And he started going to the various centers where the kids were using his symbols. And saying horrible things about me and getting them very upset. That's when I got upset. I got upset when he got them upset. Not long after, Shirley receives a summons. I have taken to court the OCC in the B-Sia. Wait, he sued them? Yeah.

I added two more defendants. Mrs. Shellumic not? On the tape C, even suggests that he's gonna have Shirley put away. For a whole life. For life. Wow, why was he so upset with her in particular? Well, because by this time, she'd started... The International Organization,

B-C-I, Bliss symbol communications international. And she felt like this was a total unique and powerful tool which could and should transform lives around the world and more teachers needed to adopt it. Definitely. What was he asking for? Did he wanted us to use the symbols in his way?

So in 1975, the B.C.I. won a license agreement to use the symbols in the workbooks for the kids, but Charles Bliss didn't give up. He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who had listened. All in all, this went on for over a decade. in helping to eradicate all the specifications of the Blist Symbalsist. All in all, this went on for over a decade. And the administration of the program, or surely was working, was desperate to make him go away. He had basically destroyed the program. And so, in 1982, he and the BCI finally come to an agreement.

It was a financial settlement that satisfied him. What was the financial settlement? $160,000. Wow. You know, we were a little program in the basement of the Ontario crippled children's center. We were, you know, just a classroom. Wow, then.

So a guy who wanted to save the world ends up robbing a bunch of disabled kids. I mean, that's kind of putting it crudely, but that's how it feels. And basically, that's the, yeah. The dissembles ever going anywhere? Well, there was a lot of excitement about it in the beginning, but it never spread very far.

It's used now at a few schools in Canada and Sweden, a couple other places, but it never went very far because he was constantly taking it down at every turn. But here's what I find most surprising. When I talk to Shirley, she didn't have any bitterness toward him, not even in the worst moments. When we were having the final legal action, we'd go through that in the morning, and as the lawyers were packing up their papers, Charles Bliss would reach across the table and he'd say, surely will you help me? So she'd go to lunch with him, sit with him.

And then he asked me if I would come to his hotel that night and put the eardrops in his ears and I did that every night he was involved with this thing. That's just the way it was. And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. She felt and still feels that Charles Bliss had created something really new in the world. She even told me that when she uses Bliss symbols, she actually thinks differently.

Yes, definitely. Really? Definitely. What's different? Oh, I just think so much more about what a word means. And it's like poetry in its purest form. I've been playing with stained glass down here in my retirement. And you can just take the symbols and put them into one composite and they say things

that only art can say. It's beautiful. They transmit a meaning that is beyond any words. Thanks to producer Tim Howard, an Erica O'Krent author of The Land of Invented Languages, we'll be right back. Bliss is having friends and family you can rely on. My name is Libby Graham and I am calling from the side of the road in Dallas, Texas awaiting rescue. This is Ginger, a socially awkward introvert from Kabadar Khansal. Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being.

Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being. Bliss is political ignorance. This is Mahmoud from Moya. Bliss is your baby sleeping in your arms. Wait, wait, we don't... Shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, shh, sh, sh, shh, shh Where words could never muck things up got a little carried away. Yeah, so let's forget about dreams forget about now We're gonna look for perfection right here in the physical world. Okay, so so so this story and we're gonna do it with a perfect person Lots of NASA it begins with a with a birthday present. Hmm. It's February 9th 1880 six miles outside the tiny town of Jericho Vermont and we're on a farm a family farm the tiny town of Jericho, Vermont, and we're on a farm, a family farm, the Bentley family farm, and this scrawny 15-year-old kid named Wilson gets a microscope from his mother. So it's February

and it's Vermont, and so naturally the first thing this kid does is he grabs a handful of snow, picks out a single flake, and he puts it under the microscope. And what he sees is the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It is ethereal and perfect. He calls them masterpieces as if they're these, you know, great works of art. He calls them that in his 15 year old diary. Well, looking back, he talked about that moment and what he was thinking when he, when he sort of first saw it. But obviously, you know, within minutes or maybe even seconds, these masterpieces just

disappeared without leaving any evidence that they ever existed. They just sort of evaporate. And as he remembers it, he sort of decides then and there that he's going to dedicate his whole life to Documenting these masterpieces otherwise no one will ever know they even existed He's gonna spend his whole life documenting snowflakes. Yeah, it's a good life, Chad and it pays well Right, that's exactly what his father said his father thought he was you know He was just was lazy and didn't want to do the farming chores His father says milk the goats and he goes now. Yeah, the beauty, the beauty. Right, right. And apparently he was really good at digging potatoes, but he just sort of was so busy

fudzing around with his microscope that he you know, I don't like this kid. I don't like him. It depends your work ethic. It does. So what happens next? So he takes his microscope and he moves it to this unheated wood shed behind the house. And he starts sketching these snowflakes, right? And while he's sketching, he can't even breathe, because he was worried that his breath would melt his specimen. So he's sort of holding his breath and drawing these,

these extremely complex crystals that can take you, maybe an hour to draw, but depending on the temperature, the humidity, the size of the crystal, he had at most, he had five minutes, right? At the end of that, he looks at them all and he's not satisfied. He just felt like he wasn't doing it justice, you know?

What he calls these like miracles of beauty. So Bentley persuades his mother, who persuades his father to buy him a camera. Way is eggway, way, way, way. 1880, we're in February 1880. Have we entered into the era of picture taking? Just barely. And for a farming family, this was like a lot of money, but they buy it for him

And he gets it and he sort of Jerry rigs it to the microscope and at age 19 Wilson Bentley is the first person ever in history to photograph a snowflake Okay, I'm gonna cue the snowflake celebration as a character I'm going to cue the snowflake celebration as it came. Right. From then on, basically, for the next 46 winters until he died, every snowfall, every blizzard, this guy Bentley would stand in the doorway of his little shack, holding out a wooden tray with thick mittens, because he would wear these, they're almost like oven mitts to make sure that his, none of his body heat would kind of leak out and inadvertently melt any of the snow.

So he'd sort of stand there and sort of give it a once over with his eye. If nothing was promising, he basically had a turkey feather and he would sort of just wipe it clean with this turkey feather until he did find something he liked and then he would take this tiny little wooden rod, and he would just really delicately tap the center of the crystal and really, really, really, gently lift it off, and then transfer it onto a glass slide, so that he could put it under the microscope, and he could photograph it. Over the course of his life, he basically photographed about 5,000 snow crystals. For his whole life, he was just a farmer doing this kind of as a hobby, but he sold copies

of these photos for 5 cents a pop to places like Harvard and the British Museum and the US weather bureau, research journals, magazines like Nature and National Geographic. I mean, you've already seen the photos. You've gotten them on a Christmas card. They're on your, like, ugly Christmas sweater in your closet somewhere. Robert's throwing a shirt with them on right now. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, they're everywhere. They're beautiful, symmetrical, really clean and complex. A lot of the great scientists who ever lived, like, Descartes and Kepler and Hook, they all tried to sketch and draw and kind of capture the essence of snowflakes, but none of them could do it as well as this one obsessive loner from Jericho Vermont whose photos were perceived to be kind of more faithful to nature than anybody else's. But that was until this other guy came on the scene. This German guy. Q. The other guy, Germanic theme music. Yes. Yes.

He was a German meteorologist named Gustav Helmann. Gustav Helmann. Not of the mayonnaise fame, I don't believe. I had a new one with even thought of that, actually. So Hellman, is he a contemporary of Bentley? Yeah, he is. And he's working on his own book about weather. And so he hires a kind of a micro photographer

who's another German guy named Richard Newhouse. A very teeny photographer who he kept on his death? Yeah, he's a microscopic himself. And he just takes normal sized photographs. Hey, yeah. He hires this guy. And they take a bunch of photos using basically similar technology,

camera and a microscope, essentially. But what they find is totally different. They do not find the the the elegant symmetrical ideal snow crystals that Bentley found that the crystals they found were like flawed Lopsided usually like broken and the way I think of it It was like a Martian who would only ever seen like glossy fashion magazines had just been given some like random family photo album and it was like oh wow this is they're not so pretty like these are kind of ugly you know these humans these humans are not all symmetrical. These Germans they basically called them out they basically thought Bentley was a fraud.

There was a particular way that Bentley prepared his photographs. What he would do is he would use a pen knife to scrape the negative around the snow crystal, which is what gave it that kind of nice black background, because he thought it would kind of put it in maybe soccer relief. And the German guys said, it's misleading that it kind of mutilates the snowflakes. Wait, so he's photographing these snowflakes and then significantly messing with the photograph? Exactly right, exactly right. So here's a quote from the photographer who said, quote, in many images, Bentley did not limit himself to improving the outlines. He let his knife play deep inside the heart of the crystals so that fully

arbitrary figures emerged. Oh, so easy. Well, I don't know that doesn't seem so no longer a candidate, is it? Well, that's the question. So they basically lob this and this is kind of going in these journals. But Bentley basically launches a counterattack. And what he says is that in fact, those guys are wrong, that not correcting your photographs was, and he used this word like perverse.

To him, why wouldn't you remove specs of dust or other imperfections? Why photograph a broken snowflake when you could photograph a complete one? So this is a quote from Bentley. He said, a true scientist, which scientist wishes above all to have his photographs as true to nature as possible. And if retouching will help in this respect,

then it is fully justified. So he thought his retouch snowflakes were truer than the normal ones? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The scientist is supposed to be kind of this very experienced, almost like a sage, who has seen every different variation on a snowflake, but can bring that all together in one drawing, one sketch, one photograph, and that's the true snowflake.

So if I brought him a slightly gloppy snowflake and said, look, this is what fell on my nose. And this is a true snowflake because it actually fell from the sky and it was unenhanced. He would say that- He would say, Robert, you're an amateur. Like this is not good work. You know, this is an aberration.

This is an abnormality. Why would you choose to kind of highlight an abnormality as opposed to kind of this true ideal snowflake, you know? And does that one exist? I mean, that's the key question for me. Like, does the ideal snowflake exist in nature? You think there are such things? I think squizzily beautiful. I would like to think that there are. No, so I think if my facts are right, the world snowflake expert is actually in Pasadena, California. All right, check, check, check, check, check.

In sunny Southern California? Yeah, I'm wearing a t-shirt. I have sunscreen lathered and I am going to talk to the world authority on snow. How are you? His name is Ken Leebrecht. He's a professor of physics at Caltech. He's in a way he's like the modern day Wilson Bentley

because he takes a ton of snowflake pictures. I've taken about 10,000 now. And he actually makes snowflakes. Oh yeah, artificially. Okay, wow. So this is a giant tank. This is a nitrogen beer. Never mind that.

And to get to your question about the ideal snowflake, a few things. So number one, there are bajillion different kinds. Dendritic, crystal stellar dendrites, needles and columns and hollow columns and and de sectored plates. That's one thing. The second thing is that snowflakes are never static. They're never one thing. So at every single moment as it falls to the earth. It's either growing or shrinking. Depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down.

So there is no real depending on the kind of trajectory through the different pockets of weather as it's moving down. So there is no real platonic ideal form of a snowflake because it's so... in flux. I mean, there's no such thing as a perfect snowflake. But... that doesn't stop Ken Lee-Brag from looking. You know, I tried up in Tahoe and Japan, Vermont, Michigan. He travels all over the world.

Looking for Bentley's perfect flakes. Alaska, into Alaska, Sweden. But my favorite spot is Northern Ontario. A little town called Cochran. Population 5,487. So where do you go in Cochran? Do you just, just anywhere? They're just falling all over the place?

Mostly it's the, it's the parking lot of my, my hotel. He says there's a lot of waiting involved. It only really snow as well, but once a week. Even then things have to be goal deluxe, perfect. If the clouds are too high, then they evaporate a little on the way down. They look very pretty. Or if the clouds are too light or too heavy.

That's bad too. And a lot of times the temperature's wrong. If you want those Christmas card supermodel snowflakes, you need to have exactly minus 15. That's five degrees Fahrenheit. You need to have high humidity, not so much wind, so that they'll put it down slowly and have more time to grow. But every once in a while, I mean, when conditions are right,

you go outside all, you know, hopeful and anticipating, and it's like, oh crap, there's nothing garbage out here. So you have to go back inside and read some more email and you come back a half an hour later, nope, still lousy, and you have our later, nope, still lousy. And you do this for hours and then all of a sudden they'll get really good. And then I just out there frantically trying to collect as many as I can. Well, one of the things I like to think about is, you know, here I am with my little piece of cardboard in the middle of a continent.

We're just snowing all the time. And so I am catching some incredibly small number of these things for a brief period and getting some really cool pictures. And so you kind of wonder what else is out there? What are you missing? I mean, imagine just all the beautiful little works of art that are just falling down, totally unnoticed,

and then they just disappear. I mean, stuff that's far prettier than the pictures I have. Because they're out there, you know, they're out there, statistically, they're out there. And so, you know, there's just an awful lot of really gorgeous things, like you say, they're just totally ephemeral and you'll never see them, and they're falling constantly. So, you sort of want to just stop the world

and go look at them. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks to a lot of NASA and Ken Liebrick who wrote the book The Secret Life of a Snowflake. This is Matt Nile Dawson from Asheville, North Carolina and Bliss is this sound. This is the sound of my 7-month-year-old daughter reacting to my puppy dog looking her feet. Hi, my name is Igor and I'm calling from Novi Sad Serbia. Bliss is Indiana Jones, all three parts. I radio lab, this is Steve Strogat. Bliss is the taste of octopus drummy at Katz's Deli

in the lower east side of New York City. We live four or five hours away from New York and don't get there very often. So I spend a lot of time in between visits thinking about that first taste of the hot pastrami. So for me that's bliss. I get to think about some kind of almost unattainable perfection. Except then it is attainable. I just show up and there it is. This is Mary Roach and I'm in Oakland, California and I have a list of lists. My bliss list.

Number one, laughing uncontrollably. Number two, zero gravity. Number four, the first ten seconds in a hot hot pack. Number nine, a raw oyster. Very fresh, but no larger than an infant's ear. in the entrance here. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrock and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasir are our co-hosts. Dylan Keave is our director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, backup wrestler,

Rachel Q. Singh, a caddy foster keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Basco, Dierres, Sindu Nhanasambangdown, Matt Q.T., Anima Q. and Alex Niesen, Saurkari, and a Rasquit bus, Sarah Sandbag, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Andrew Vinyales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Angel Vinyales. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Erica and Yonkers. Leadership Support for Radio Lab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Science Sandbox, a Science Foundation initiative, and

the John Templeton Foundation. Foundation of Support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.