Reply All - #11 Did Errol Morris' Brother Invent Email?

Episode Date: January 24, 2015

There was a lot that Errol Morris never knew about his brilliant, distant older brother Noel. Decades after Noel's death, Errol read an internet comment that said his brother had invented email. So he launched an investigation to find out if it was true. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All, a show about the internet. And I'm PJ Vote. Errol Morris makes movies. But before he made movies, he was a private eye. And he still got the obsessiveness of a good detective. Which means that when he writes something online, he breaks one of the most bedrock rules of using the internet. Do you always read all of the comments on your pieces?

I try to read a lot of them. I can't guarantee I read all of them. Sometimes there's a lot of comments. But usually I read the comments. them for negative stuff. Who wants to read positive stuff? A few years ago, Errol published an essay about a professor he'd once had who threw an ashtray at his head. It was 21,981 words. Again, Errol's an obsessive. And as an obsessive, once the piece was written, he decided to weigh deep into the comments section, where he found

something new to obsess over. Comment 82. I can read it to you if you like. Yes, please. I had email today from another middle school student asking about Noel Morris's place in history as a creator of electronic mail. That was the whole comment. But it caught his eye because of that name, Noel Morris. Noel was Errol Morris's older brother. He died 28 years earlier. While he was alive, he never said anything to Arrow about inventing email, which seems like the kind of thing you'd mention.

It's such a large claim. It's like saying, well, my brother was the first man on the moon. Yeah, sure. Sure he was the first man on the moon. Sure he invented email. This wasn't actually the first time Errol had heard that your brother invented email, but he never told you about it, rumor. There had been whispers about it after Noel's death.

But there were a lot of things about his brother that Errol hadn't known or hadn't been aware of. Since they were kids, Errol had admired his brother, but from a distance. I looked up to him. What was he like? Now the convenient expression, I suppose, is Asperger's, an element of Asperger's, a little bit removed. He was always building things, mechanical contraptions, electronic gear of one kind or another. He created this device, which he called Marismanic Door, which was a system of ropes and pulleys, that he could open and close the door from his bed.

I often felt stupid around him. We had a telescope. I remember him being in the backyard with a friend of his, who later became an astrophysicist, looking at some celestial object. And he couldn't get a... had a good view of it and I suggested moving the telescope across to the other side of the yard

and they started laughing at me because clearly I did not understand the enormous distances involved and how that wasn't really going to help very much of anything. How old were you? I was probably five. That seems like a reasonable thing not to know. Okay, so maybe this isn't a huge surprise, but the precocious, kid who grew up in Massachusetts, built elaborate mechanical inventions, and loved telescopes, eventually left home and went to MIT. He studied there and later he worked there. He had a job

programming early computers. Arrow went to visit him one summer in Cambridge. Visiting Noel was strange. It was like visiting the future. People did not have computers in their houses or their apartments. That's unheard of. But my brother had a console. And his apartment, which was installed so that he could work essentially 24 hours a day and then some. I just remember so well him at the console working. I understood very, very little about it, other than that he was highly respected. People went to him if they couldn't debug a program. My brother was always there.

And with an older brother like that, it actually did seem possible that he would have invented email and never bothered to explain it to his family. Fortunately, Comment 82 had been signed by a guy named Tom Van Black. Hi, I'm trying to find Tom Von Black. It's Errol Morris. I dimly remember you from years and years and years ago. Tom had actually worked with Noel, back at MIT. No, I was just surprised to see that comment in the New York Times. Tom and Noel had been close friends, worked together for years.

The two of them often shared one terminal, which meant that one person would be sitting and typing while the other stood over them, yelling corrections. What Errol wanted to find out from his brother's old work partner wasn't just if the two of them had created email, but also who Noel had been. By Errol's account, growing up in the Morris household meant being surrounded by smarts and sadness.

The two brothers were raised by their mother, a brilliant musician with a doctorate in French literature, who supported their entire family after their father died of a heart attack. My father died in December of 1950. Although I have no memory of him, no memory of that day, close friends of the family remember me running up and down the stairs in the house screaming. My brother was nine years old. His relationship with my father, from what I understand, was a very, very difficult one.

I don't know. there's a lot of mysteries about my brother that probably I can never answer Because he was stuck with these mysteries Errol tried to come up with theories about who his brother really was One of the central ones was that Noel was a socially isolated person

Errol held that idea in his head up until Noel's death Like his father, Noel died from heart attack And also like his father, he died while he was still pretty young He was only 40. It was 1983 I knew my brother had friends But how many friends I wondered whether anyone would come to the funeral.

That day at that chapel, it was packed. There were hundreds and upon hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people, almost all from MIT. I remember then feeling that maybe I just didn't really understand who my brother was or the things that he was able to achieve. How many people had you expected would be there? I don't know, a handful. There could have been close to a thousand people.

How do you think they heard? Like, how do you think they wound up there? You know, computers. Really? Of course. What do you mean? These people were all connected. They were the first people to be connected.

After the break, Errol Morris, with help from Tom Van Vleck, goes back into the past. and tries to figure out who his brother was. Oh, and also, did he actually help create email? And now, back to the show. So after Errol called Tom about Tom's internet comment, the two of them got in a long conversation. And then, Errol did what he does best. He got obsessed.

He started investigating. He devoured Tom Van Vlex's comprehensive website on computing in the 1960s. He talked to everybody he could find who was working at Tom and Noel's Lab, and who was still alive. There were actually a lot of people. And he went to MIT, where he was allowed to see the actual paper archives from his brother's old lab. The librarian had me fill out various slips, and they come back with cardboard boxes. I opened them up, and there's a hodgepodge of stuff.

These documents do not look as though they were created to be preserved. They just happened to be preserved. Some of them are coffee stained. And so there are all of these outlines of various lectures that had been given formal and informal. Their programs, lots and lots of pieces of programs. So here's the story that emerged from Errol's research. In 1965, Tom and Noel worked for Project Mac, which was a computing project at MIT. They were helping to program a new operating system.

There was a memo from On High with a bunch of suggestions for features that the new operating system could have. and mail was one of those features. But Tom said that that idea just sat there in the memo. Nobody actually wanted to try to implement it. When Noel and I ran across the memo, we went to people and said, hey, this is great. How come it doesn't work? And they said, oh, we never wrote that. There's no time and nobody knows how to do it anyway because of long technical explanation.

Okay. And we said, well, gee, could we write it? Their bosses actually told them not to. They said it was a waste of time. But Tom and Noel did it anyway. Tom says their program was only around 100 lines of code. It was just a way for multiple people who were sharing one terminal to leave messages for each other on that terminal.

If Noel pulled an all-nighter and finished programming at 4 o'clock in the morning, he could use their mail program to tell Tom what he'd spent that time doing, so Tom could pick up the work. It was like leaving an electronic post-it note. People often ask what we would think. It's like Alexander Ray-Mell. Yeah, well, I truly can't remember. I used to send scraps.

There is a very robust online debate about when exactly email gets invented. After Nolan Tom did their thing, another MIT alum named Ray Tomlinson figured out how to actually send electronic mail between two separate computers. But what Nolan Tom would say is that what they did was still electronic mail.

And what I would add is that they figured out something that their bosses hadn't, which is that people were going to use computers to talk to other people rather than just to crunch numbers. Back in the MIT archives, Errol didn't find a smoking gun. There wasn't, say, a certificate that said, Hey, Noel Morris, nice job indisputably creating electronic email with your friend Tom Van Vleck today.

But what Errol did find were actual printouts that his brother had made of computer programs that he'd worked on. I mean, that's an odd kind of feeling. You're sitting there in a room with my brother's handwriting, which I know so very, very, very well. It's just strange. I don't know how best to describe it, but in any kind of investigation, there's a moment where you feel connected with the past, whether it's through a photograph or a document, somehow the past becomes alive. Did your brother invent email?

I believe that my brother and Tom Van Vleck, sent the first electronic messages through a computer. If that's email, well, yes. I didn't investigate the story of my brother

in email because I expected that I was going to find out he invented email or that he didn't invent email. I just wanted to go back into the past. Even the people were closest to or missed. to us when they're alive. You come up with your theories about who they are, and you base them off the things that they do.

But then they just spend their lives doing things that confound everything you think you know about them. And when they die, they get even murkier. Like those sneakers that she always wore. Were they really red? Or were they orange? What was that French movie she was always trying to make everybody watch?

What was the most surprising thing you discovered about him going back like this? Maybe it's a kind of relief. He really was there. Paul a dream. There's a world out there. People program things. My brother programmed things. He debug programs. And there they are. There they are sitting in a box. But there they are. You know, the feeling of, wow, way to go, Noel. Propyle is hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. We were produced this week by Chris Neri,

Lena Maseetis, and edited by Alex Bloomberg. Our theme song is by the mysterious breakmaster cylinder, and our show was mixed by Rick Kwan. Matt Lieber is a blizzard that actually shows up. Special thanks this week to Rachel Marcus, Moog Zady, and Lizzie Vote. If you love the show, think about reviewing it on iTunes. It makes a big difference for us. Thank you. We'll see you next Wednesday.