Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Night Vision Devices

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why night vision devices are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode. Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5 Visit http://sifpod.store/ to get shirts and posters celebrating the show. Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member at https://maximumfun.org/joinsifpod

Night vision devices. Known for being tech. Vimus for being special ops. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why night vision devices are secretly incredibly fascinating. Fair folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of night vision devices? I'm excited to learn about this because I'm in DeMarket for a baby monitor. I have not picked one out yet. My method right now is my baby is sleeping in the bass net right next to me at night. I hear every fart, every cough, every sneeze, every little as he readjusts.

So I'm up all night. It's fine. It's cool. I'll get through it. But at a certain point, he will need to be skedaddled into the nursery. And I do want to, this sounds like an ad, but I don't really know anything about baby monitors. I do know that they use night vision and you can, like, spy on your baby. And I like that idea.

because right now I'm also very like anxious mothers so like every so often at night I'm like baby and then I look over into the bass and it's like ah yes baby is there and then go back to sleep and then I wake up and it's like baby and I look in the bass and it's like ah yes baby is there go back to sleep so it'll be nice to actually have a 24-7 surveillance drone sort of following the baby everywhere with night vision, heat vision. They do like white noise. Maybe the propellers of the drone are good. Maybe that's a feature.

Yeah. Tricky, chika, chika, chika, chika, chika, yeah. But it's very interesting to me. I somewhat understand how like heat vision works because it visions heat. I don't know how night vision works and I want to learn. Yay. And yeah, me and Brenda are very aligned with you guys.

So the one difference is we just like, We received a baby monitor and went ahead and set it up because then we can just spy on the baby without looming our faces over them in the darkness and really just without getting up. So we are using it already. I think this is, I think this is very wise. And yeah, and this episode will touch on baby monitors and also, you know, if folks are not so interested in that topic, we'll talk all about heat vision and other night vision in this one. It's a whole thing. It's amazing. It runs the gamut from baby monitors to breaching like a compound at night.

Yes. That's my other association is all of pop culture and a little of the news about seal teams and so on. Yeah. It's just there's a green picture that they're looking at through goggles to hunt someone. Yeah. Seal teams one through seven. I'll bet the guys on seal team seven would be like really into James Bond. Right? Because it's 007.

CL Team 6 or 7. Oh, doing the thing. Doing the thing. Yeah. I actually, I hope that that's like out of fashion now because that's like the only time I want to acknowledge any kind of like new humor from the youths is once it's painful. Like painful to hear. Each time we mention it, we kill it more, you know? So that's great.

Yeah. Like we're, it's coming out of our mouths. it sounds so incredibly not cool that it's, yeah. I'm a decrepit old father, you know. They're not the person they want to hear it from. Yeah. I'm a billion years old and I have an air now. I'm like in, you know, downtown abbey.

I'm like Lady Maggie Smith. When you said a billion years old and have an air, I thought you're going to go Dune. right? Like these ancient patashai umpers with a weird Benad Jeseret groomed area. Yeah. I mean, my baby does have like mind witchery. Sure. Yeah. That's how it works. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is chilling to look over at night and see him like I'm peering over into the bassinet and he's just like

staring back at me. It's like, oh no. chilling. You're like, I also don't need a baby monitor because his bright blue eyes, look at me through the darkness. I am curious because I feel like a lot of sort of, like, night vision is a little bit odd looking because it does have that association for me with like, say, Seal Team 7 or even sort of like found footage horror movies, right? like end of Blair Witch kind of thing. Does sometimes a little Schmiddy Jr. Ever like stare directly into the baby monitor and like spooky guys? Yes, yes.

Like it's kind of like what I've seen of like raccoons on a security camera or something. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But he doesn't look at it a lot because right now he's really into tipping his head one direction or the other, like left or red. You know? Yeah. Because his neck's pretty strong and he likes to look. Nice.

far as he can each way. Yeah. So he stopped doing the raccoon eyes. It's good. And let's talk about all of the technology of it and how it gets weird. Because on every episode we lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called, He's a real statistics man, counting in statistics land, making all his numbers.

numbers plans for Golden Coma Katie. That's great. That's definitely a natural way to refer to me, Golden Comicati. Yeah. It's very government. Yeah. That name was submitted by Allie. Thank you, Allie.

We have a new name for this is on every week. Please make a miscellium like it as possible. Submit yours through Discord or just hip pot. Atgumel. dot com. And kind of a giant number for the whole topic is three. Because of course the technology gets more detailed, but there are really three main kinds of night vision technology. And they're all less than 100 years old. They're pretty new. The three kinds are thermal imaging, you know, like heat vision. And then there's low light

amplification and active infrared. Okay. If you want to shorthand for each one, low light amplification is usually the green looking image, maybe in Special Forces troops. Active infrared is usually a gray looking view, like a security camera, a baby monitor. And then thermal imaging is heat vision. Right. There's like that, maybe it was SNL. I don't know, but there was that ghost hunters parody where they're like, because they use the thermal imaging for ghost hunters.

And then someone breaks wind and it shows up on the thermal image. imaging and they're like, is that, what is that? What is that? Is that a ghost? That's a very good premise. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good bit. Because I feel like all of these feel so serious in our cultural view of them than their perfect comedy fodder. Like just anything funny happening on Night Vision is awesome. Great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And like, how do each of these work, right? They each have a different approach to the technology and the result. And starting with low light amplification, the one that's usually green looking, it's taking what you're looking at and making it look more intense. So it takes

the limited amount of light photons and then mechanically or digitally turns that into electricity and boosts the signal to be just as clear of an image as possible. So there needs to be some light in the room in order for that to work. Exactly, yeah. And especially at nighttime, that can be from, you know, like the little bit of ambient light in the world or even just starlight and moonlight can provide some of it. It's trying to take whatever limited photons there are and just make them as obvious as possible.

And photons are the fundamental physical particles of light. That you smack you right in the retinas. Yeah. And yeah, and in most cases, the most cases, the most. machines are built to use the color green to represent it. Another number here is about 555 nanometers. 550 nanometers is the approximate wavelength of that yellowish green light that you think of with night vision. And human eyes have a lot of cones for seeing green and a lot of cones for that color. So that's part of why they pick that color, like the limited amount of light you've got. You're just

trying to make it as visible to the eyes we've evolved to have as our species. are sort of a night vision since if you've wondered why colors are kind of harder to perceive at night most of our ability to see in the dark is it's sort of like with the cells that don't really perceive color as much so it's uh it helps us see at night but uh you're not going to get a ton of color information exactly yeah and then if we had different you know anatomy as humans maybe this would be a different color or perceived as a different color. But this is what makes sense for us. Right.

But it's not a trick that works on us. Like we don't see it in green at night with our natural eyes despite being able to pick up the green wavelength really well. Because most of our optimization for night vision is just the non color detecting. It's the rods, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like about rods and cones. And also all this came up a little bit on the SIF episode about glow in the dark stuff. And the other reason we use green for this kind of low light night vision is that we have a lot of cheap and easy compounds for making phosphors in that greenish or pale green color.

And then the phosphors just light up with electricity. So that's the other big reason that you associate this weird green with night vision and not some other color. And also like early computer screens often have just like green, not green screens, but monitors that would have like green. images and text on it. And I assume for a similar reason, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

And I guess like today people might know it from the Matrix franchise mostly. Yeah. It was technologically useful, especially before. Yeah. Yeah. So that's one way of doing night vision is you just take whatever tiny amount of light is available and make it as obvious as possible. And then also there's like a thing I've seen in pop culture where, you know,

know, the SEAL team is bursting into a room and then somebody shines a bright visible light at them and, like, blows out their night vision. That's somewhat true. Like, the devices can get washed out temporarily and damaged permanently because they're so built to take in as much of the tiny amount of light as possible that if you show it a bunch of light, it can break it. I see. So if you want to thwart Jason Bourne or vice versa, You just want to, like, get a disco ball going on. Yeah, he can't get into any discotheque. He can't get into Studio 54.

Yeah. If Osama bin Laden was into disco, maybe things would have turned out differently for him. He just, like, gets bottle service as a way to see the room, you know? Yeah, and so that's low-light amplification. The second tech here is called active infrared. And it solves a few of the issues that low light amplification can't solve. The biggest problem for low light amplification is if the situation is truly dark and lacking in any light whatsoever. Then there's nothing to amplify.

Active infrared is sort of the opposite approach. You have a device that does two steps. It shines infrared light across the entire area. And then it has a camera that just sees infrared light. So it's almost like a flashlight or something, but in a way that's not visible to human eyes. Okay. So if a little Schmidt Jr. and Katie Jr., not their names, are looking directly into the infrared beam, they're not going to see anything and it's not going to hurt their eyes. That's right.

And that's also why the low light amplification is usually used by soldiers and police and so on, because that device is not putting out an entire beam. beam of infrared light. So you're still secret as you creep around with your gun and so on. Right. But active infrared is great for stuff like security cameras or baby monitors or other things where the night vision device doesn't need to be totally hidden from like an enemy or something. Right, right. Because like you could potentially have like an infrared sensor and then you would just thwart any kind of a breaching team. Exactly. They would look incredibly obviously. Obviously. They look like miners with headlamps or something. Active infrared is also relatively

cheap and easy to build, especially because it's relatively simple. You just make a camera that sees the infrared wavelength of the spectrum. Infrared is the longer wavelengths beyond visible red. It's it is light that's always there and part of visible light. We just don't see it with our human eyes. It's like on one end of the really long wavelengths that we can't see are infrared. And then the really short wavelengths that we can't see our ultraviolet. Is that correct? Exactly. Okay.

Yeah. And of the two, the one that's been useful for night vision is infrared. Yeah. Why is it that way and not to, why don't we use ultraviolet? It would be like really bright and also maybe damage our skin. Oh. It's just like, it's kind of weird. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Ultraviolet, UV, the stuff that sunscreen protects against. Yes. Yes. I see. Uh-huh. So we went the other way. I'm reverse engineering sunscreen.

Like your security guy's bragging about, you can see them with the ultraviolet camera, but then the thief is getting like roasted and burst into flames and becomes a skeleton. It's just like a tiny sun. Yeah. And so that and also just the scientific direction, the invention of this stuff went. He said, hey, it's cheap and easy to build infrared. So, you know, the world's security footage is that. and a lot of other things too.

And a baby monitor is basically specialized security footage, maybe with an extra speaker, so you hear crime and so on. Yeah. I'm going to use it to, like, find out what crimes my baby is doing. I mean, you worried they would be a boss baby. Maybe they're committing financial crime, white car crime. Yeah. Crimes baby.

And that tech different. is also why the footage of active infrared or the camera view is more of a black and white and gray. It's not a bright green color. Because from this machine's perspective, it's looking at just one type of light, infrared light. And you don't really need phosphorus, especially in the modern day. You just see what is receiving more or less infrared light and make a gray scale image. And that's it. I see.

Right. It's just sort of the values that are being shot back, right? So the light, the infrared bounces off, you know, your baby's chubby cheeks slams back into the camera. And so like the things that are lighter in value and don't absorb as much of the infrared show up brighter on the camera. Exactly. Yeah. So that's it. That's kind of how light works in general.

I feel like the easiest metaphor for active infrared is if you as a person held a flashlight, and then used your eyes to receive what bounces back. It's sort of like that. We just build the camera to work differently than our eye. That's it. Right. Yep. And then the third and last way here, thermal imaging, heat vision.

Woo. In one way, it's sort of like active infrared because heat is also infrared light. And so the camera is basically capturing whatever is constantly producing heat or constantly producing infrared light. Like the joke about a fart on heat vision camera, it'll just be a puff and go away. But this heat vision is best for things like the bodies of humans and other animals because they're constantly generating heat and infrared radiation. So I almost want to call it like passive infrared because it's not putting out infrared light.

It's just seeing it. Apparently another super useful way people use this vision as for safety checks in industrial settings. Like is a gas leaking or something? is maybe hot and then you see it with the thermal imaging. Right. Because I'm looking at some pictures of thermal imaging of like, I believe these are donkeys. And they're like orange and yellow and then they're standing on some like purply blue. And the purply blue I assume is colder areas.

So like for that, like if you can see cold on thermal imaging, it would only be in contrast to something warm, right? Yeah, that's right. And that's why they kind of use a rainbow spectrum to do it. And yeah, depending on how advanced it is, it might be able to display cold things in some way. Yeah. Just kind of by doing an absence or an opposite. There's this video probably not too hard to find online of kangaroos. And kangaroos thermoregulate by licking their arms. And some nature documentary did some thermal imaging to demonstrate this. So you see this very warm kangaroo. He's like orange or yellow because he's warm.

And then he starts licking his little forearms. But because it's thermal imaging, normally you would not see anything as they're licking. It's to just clear saliva. But the thermal imaging makes their little forearms turn blue as they're licking it. So it kind of looks like they're like licking blue paint onto their forearms. But it's really just because the saliva is cool. There's rapid evaporative cooling.

And then it was just. It was just to demonstrate how much the kangaroos cool down rapidly when licking their forearms and how it cools down their whole body. But it's a fun video. I recommend. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah.

And this qualifies as a whole different kind of night vision and is super useful because it's the least dependent on what we think of as light, like visible light or even starlight or moonlight or something. One number there is more than 1.2 million. that is how many vehicles have a thermal imaging safety system called magna. And popular science says that works by using a thermal imaging camera for the driver assist. So if there's like fog or something that would prevent most vision of something ahead, the thermal imaging might see the heat of it sooner and stop before you hit the person or deer or whatever else. The other thing about thermal imaging is it might feel the most militaristic of all these, partly because of one movie.

The number there is 1987. That is when Hollywood released the movie Predator. Ooh, Predator. They really kind of blew the public's minds because thermal imaging cameras were relatively new. And so the filmmakers used pretty ordinary thermal imaging to be the point of view of the predator and make it so it like seized through thermal imaging.

And there's a twist where Arnold Schwarzenegger covers himself in mud and somehow that totally fools the predator, you know. It became an entire. science fiction franchising concept of more or less just heat vision. I mean, it's not, it's kind of an interesting concept, right? Because like if you could cool down your body completely with mud, sure, that might work. But in, like, yeah, realistically, probably he's still going to be a little different

from the ambient temperature. Otherwise, he would be like not alive. Yeah, I think, I really feel like the predator would be like, look at that hot mud. I'm going to examine this more. Like about hot mud. Oh, the largest human ever? Hmm. I'm going to check this out.

I think Arnold Schwarzenegger would be flattered to be called hot mud. Another number here is 2002. This is an alleged story, but allegedly in 2002, some airports, especially in East Asia, were concerned about the SARS disease outbreak. That's known they were concerned, but allegedly they used thermal imaging on everybody in airport terminals to try to look for fevers and say like, oh, maybe I can find a fever in the population and decrease the spread of the disease. And if that's true, it's pretty invasive, but also it's another way people found to use this stuff. That's wild. Yeah, it's like,

I mean, it's like a little dystopian, but I guess in a, in this specific case in a good way. Yeah, we all oppose disease. So, you know, there's something. But yes, also dystopian. Yeah. There are. are like, are you going to talk about like animals who can see in thermal vision? No. I see. Well, there's animals that see in thermal vision. I'll just say it.

You have, like, it's a little different because it's not necessarily like the eyes that are seeing it, but different sensory organs. And then they use that to kind of like build some kind of like visualization. But it's usually like vampire bats have sensory organs in their noses that they can use to like get a quote unquote visualization of their hosts based on their heat. And they can actually use that to like find veins. To find veins. Cool. I think also pit vipers use the little sensory organs, the pits on their face, which is why they're called pit vipers to detect.

I assume they live in pits and like jump out from a pit. Yeah, I know. Like it sounds like it's because they like live in pits, like a snake pit. No, it's because of the pits on their little faces. Oh, I'll bet snake pits are a false negative stereotype about snakes. Yeah. They never live in pits. Yeah.

It's like it's and it's just like it sounds really like a danner like it's the pits. But no, it's because of their cool sensory organs on their. face. That's awesome. That gets us into the one biological takeaway. Because takeaway number one, salmon might be the only animal that does a biological version of switching in an out of night vision. Oh, interesting. Because yeah, there are, as you're saying, and I'm sure you know more to like all these amazing animals that see differently at night than we do or see much more effectively at night than we do. It turns out salmon do a specific change between modes of seeing. that might be the closest equivalent of turning on night vision goggles.

Whoa. Okay. I don't know this, so I'm excited. I thought I knew all there was to know about salmon. Salmon are neat. I think last week's bonus show was fish ladders and salmon. So, yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, we talked about salmon.

Yeah, we're continuing to swim upstream with our friends. Yeah, the key source here is a study published in 2015 in the journal Current Biology. was researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Current biology. Stupid. Upstream findings and other salmon journals. And lots of species can see infrared light sort of all the time. They just have different receptors in their eyes.

They see it and we don't. And vampire bats, mosquitoes, many snake species. And as Katie said, they can also exploit the infrared light from heat sources in the bodies of their prey. I had no idea about vein finding with vampire vans. That's so cool. Yeah. The one that might be the most of a switching modes is salmon species. There are a few different species I couldn't find if it's all of them or just some of them. But salmon at a specific stage of their life cycle and their life cycle is very driven by migration patterns and when and where they spawn. At a certain point, they extend the amount of the light spectrum they

can see to see more of the infrared spectrum. Whoa, cool. They still see everything they saw before, but as the salmon migrate upstream, they go from clear oceans to murkier freshwater, and they've evolved to do this for a long, long time. And so in a way that I can't really describe in a way I understand, there are enzymes in their eyes that convert vitamin A1 into vitamin A2. Enzymes in the eyes of salmon convert to a different vitamin A. It's simple vitamin arithmetic.

How do you get from one to two? I don't understand. The result is different pigment and different vitamins and proteins in their eyes to let them receive a little more of the infrared section of the light spectrum. and it's as fundamental to their whole life cycle and journey as going upstream and spawning a specific place and stuff. So this isn't them sort of switching it on like by the hour, but it's like during a specific period in their life cycle. Yeah, and it seems like they never turn it off. So it's not quite like our goggles that way. But it might be nature's closest thing to our technology of some kind of shift in how your eyes receive light.

There's, do you know about a reindeer eyes? No. I'm going to blow your mind. So, reindeer's have a similar thing. They, uh, change their eyes. Update the takeaway. Yes. Their eyes, uh, change from sort of an amber color, brownish amber color to a blue, uh, sort of like,

actually speaking of Dune, it's kind of a Dune blue in the winter. And, uh, this is like a way for them to be able to, uh, see. more in the darkness of winter, not just at night, but just in the dark, because essentially just like the wavelengths can like pass through their eyes and sort of diffuse through their eyes more easily. And then they turn brownish amber in the summer so that they can don't, their eyes aren't too sensitive to like the glare. That's even better than the salmon thing. That's even more like this. Look, let's not, let's not judge these poor salmon. I mean, the fish are nothing to be. Now it's takeaway number one, reindeer and also kind of

salmon do this biological change, sort of like night vision goggles. I never kind of like thought about this, but the reindeer eyes, they're sort of like the fremen in, you know, in Dune. Lisa and Al-Rudolf or whatever. Yeah. And if folks haven't seen Dune, too bad. Fast forward. Yeah. This, yeah, this reindeer thing's amazing.

Because, yeah, it seems like that actually is switching back and forth. Seasonally, yeah. Yeah, but still like, I get the sense the salmon just switch once and then their lives kind of end up there in the stream. I don't really remember what, how the color changes. It might be some kind of like, some kind of structural change in the eye or protein change in the eye that have. happens. But yeah, it's wild. That's, man. So, like, it's cool that nature does some of this for itself, and then we have to build giant goggles. And that's fine. Yeah. I mean, our giant goggles look very cool.

They do look cool. And then also gets us into some, like, bleeding edge technology, because we might be able to move beyond the goggles a little bit. Takeaway number two, allegedly there are now contact lenses that let you see infrared light even when you close your eyes. That sounds like hell. That sounds hellish. No, absolutely not, Alex. That's a literal recurring nightmare I have where there's something scary. I don't want to see and I close my eyes and I can still see it because I'm asleep and I'm

dreaming. Anyways, explain this nightmare technology to me. It is also, like the dystopian version would be it's an advertisement that you can't close your eyes against or whatever. Yeah, you're closing your eyes. It's like, drink more, super soda. I couldn't come up with a good future product name. So I just super soda. The future dictator abolish regular soda.

And now we all have to drink super soda. Right. That's the canon. Super soda. Yeah. this is from a study about a prototype published in the journal's cell in May 2025. It seems like we're still figuring out exactly whether this would work well or not or be something we could all do, but it's potentially a new format for night vision using infrared light a little bit differently than either active infrared or thermal.

Sources about it are Ars Technica, Smithsonian Magazine and The Guardian. It's a Chinese university study that demonstrated very limited vision of infrared light by using contact lenses that are built with special nanoparticles. There are nanoparticles in the contacts. But I'm on my eyeballs. No further questions. Yeah. And if they want to go inside, run my brain, that's fine. You know, whatever. I'm not doing it that good. I'm so tired these days. My brain's not working anyways, so go for it. You'll just find a desolate wasteland with a single tumbleweed floating past. The nanoparticle wipes its brow.

Like, this is going to be some work. Oof. All right. So they use nanoparticles on this. And is this like an actual thing that they've tested or is this theoretical? They say they initially tested it on mice. And, of course, we know grain of salt with mice, but then they studied it on humans with contact lenses and got similar results.

And also apparently the mice, they just injected the particles directly into the mice's eyeballs. And then said, if any humans will ever do this, it has to be something like a contact lens. So we got to take a step back. I mean, you know, look, if you're not willing to have a syringe inject mysterious nanoparticles directly into your eyeballs, do you even deserve infrared vision? I do. I feel like if no one ever learned anything about Elon Musk as a guy, a lot of people would have been taking him up on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not me, but, you know, others. So now we've created a bunch of mice with a grudge who can see infrared, which seems like a good idea. Well, yeah, that's a really good movie premise, actually. This is like, yeah, this is like the origin story of Predator.

Oh, wow, it is. The mice are like, next I'm going to be a huge guy. That's the last step. Yeah. Tom is so screwed. Tom, the cat. I'm fully clocking that now. Instead of Tom and Jerry, it's Tom and the predator, a forfer mouse.

A giant mouse. Spike is just very confused. He's like, hey, I'm just the third character, man. Leave me alone. Spike is the dog, by the way. I feel I'm worried that Tom and Jerry is leaving the cultural zeitguise. Probably, yeah. It's probably you and me and elderly people.

Because we had like Cartoon Network during the day, you know? Yeah. But yeah, so they tested nanoparticles and what they do is convert tiny amounts of infrared lights into visible red and green and blue. And then to present that to your eye from up close. So it's basically just doing all the work at the contact lens level. and then you see it. Sort of like how glow in the dark stuff will take in light that is not visible to us

and then exude light that is visible to us, except on a contact lens sort of? I don't know if that totally describes it. It reminds me more of cathode ray tubes where it's like turning electricity into a picture, but it's turning infrared light into a picture. Okay. So it's like you have like an array. of these nanoparticles and they are activated by the non-visible light. And then we can see that from the surface of our eyeballs.

Yeah. And then they do like a digital process to present us with visible light. Okay. Got it. Which is so hard to understand. This is so like advanced since the cyberpunk to me, very neuromancer. I haven't had enough brain injections to get it. Same.

And then it also works with one other thing we apparently already knew about the human eye, but I did not know. The human eye, when we close our eyelids, tiny amounts of near infrared light go through our, you know, mushy physical eyelids to our eyes still. If your eyelids are mushy, there's a problem. I'm melting like a big candle. Is that a bad? Yeah. Yeah, like apparently they all had already studied this and knew this, or I mean, other scientists studied it. But so they said, okay, if the near infrared light penetrates the eyelid and also when your eyelids are closed, the visible lights not really getting through, then not only does this technology let you do some infrared night vision when your eyes are open. But when you close your eyelids, you can also see that same thing, which is nuts.

It's so wild. Yeah, like I don't. understand what the use case for that would be, though, because, like, I wouldn't want that at all. Like, when would you need to see with your eyes closed? Yeah, like, never. Just open the rest. I guess if your eyes are, like, dry and tired, but you've got contact sense, so I don't know, take them out. Yeah, you can blink. Blinking is pretty fast, so. It's like an infomercial, like, are you wasting time blinking? And there's the red X over there. But it's so fast.

Oh, we live in hell. But I guess like if you wanted to block out visible light but not infrared, then you could close your eyes and only see the infrared. But I don't know why you would want to do that. That's the only thing I can think of. Right. Like as they advance this, that might be a behavior that specifically makes this tech work better. It's like you're using your eyelids to shield your eye from distracting visible light or something. Yeah, like if you're driving and it's too bright, but yeah.

And the description of the experiment, they've mostly tested it with flashing signals. The article says it's akin to Morse code. And the tech did work. The subjects could only perform the task of seeing this infrared flashing signal with the contact lenses and then could also do it with their eyelids closed. But we haven't really tested it beyond that. We don't know how much true night vision will be achieved. but what a wild thing from like a year ago.

We'll see where it goes. Yeah. All right. Can you see this obnoxious flashing light even with your eyes closed? You can. Great. Yes. And folks, that's a lot of things about how night vision works and where it could even go in the wild future.

We're going to take a quick break, then learn the entire history of this thing. at a few really weird ways it presented. And we're back, and we have a couple more night vision takeaways. And the next one is basically the origin of night vision goggles. Takeaway number three, one of the inventors of television is also one of the inventors of night vision goggles. Oh, that kind of makes sense. It actually really fits together. And if folks have heard this stuff about cathode ray tubes, we talk a lot about where TV came from.

It was really two guys named Philo Farnsworth. and Vladimir's Warrikin. And that second guy, Vladimir's Warrikin, he and his team at RCA, built the first practical night vision goggles. They did it. Oh, good for them. It's cool. Yeah.

And like, this guy should be world famous. And I feel like Philo Farnsworth's name I heard as a kid and Vladimir's warican never, never came up. Yeah. I heard Philo Doe for sure as a kid. So the other guy, Vladimir, that was. whole thing was an interesting thing where there was sort of some parallel invention and maybe some contentiousness about who was actually coming up with TV. But he like definitively there was no one before him that did the night vision. Yeah, that's right. There were like experiments in it that developed

some very impractical gear, it turns out. And then after that, Swarikin and his lab built good goggles. I'm just like imagining like some gear where it's like something. that it only works with like some big like flashing light. It's like night vision, night vision, night vision. That's basically it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why not?

Then it's just like you have a flashlight and you call that night vision. Yeah, this, the, the dumb stuff was during World War II. And then it's work and built it afterward. So again, it's pretty new tech at all too. And key sources are a feature for Smithsonian magazine by correspondent. Emily Matcher, as well as resources from the New York Times and Lemelson Center at MIT. And I won't go deep on his working because he's in that cathode ray tube show. He was born in 1889 in Tsarist Russia and then left for Paris and then the United States

before the Russian Revolution. And back in 1910, as a St. Petersburg college student, he combined two other scientists work into an early hybrid model of television. Philo Farnsworth was four years old at the time Zwerken was sort of the inventor of television before him. Okay. But they had like slightly different. Just go listen to the episode.

Yeah, yeah. And then like Zwerken comes to the U.S. briefly works for Westinghouse, but then becomes kind of a top researcher at Radio Corporation of America, RCA. It's the equivalent of being at a giant tech company, but back then. And within a few decades,

He and his team racked up more than 100 patents on all sorts of different things, but especially with vision and presenting images and all sorts of things that make sense with night vision. And then after World War II, the U.S. military approached him and said, can you make a better version of something the Nazis tried and that we tried to copy? It's like, excuse me? Keep talking. Keep talking. Please say something that makes this sentence a little better.

Yeah, the Nazi German military cobbled together a very, very early forerunner of the active infrared kind of night vision. Right. Active infrared is where you shine infrared light over everything and then see what comes back. Right. Like security camera, baby monitor. Yeah. It's just like really unsettling. And they're like, you do not see anything?

You see nothing? Yeah, it's such a stupid machine for a war. So the Nazi machine... The Nazis were stupid? Shock. Yeah, I know. It's shocking. Their system was so cumbersome and giant.

They had to mount a huge infrared searchlight onto a truck. And then shine that huge thing and then get a picture back. So everybody just sees the big, loud, hot truck. Like, I don't know. I don't know what that was going to do. I don't know about these Nazi guys, Alex. It doesn't sound like they have very good ideas. And then, like, the Allies heard about that, tried to build a version.

By the end of the war, they had built a version where a soldier has a giant heavy machine and a backpack. But, like, still too heavy. It's, like, weighing their whole body down where they can't really move much at all. So the war ends without any great night vision gear coming into play. Okay. And then the Army says this would probably work, excellent famous scientists, Vladimir's work, and can you finish it? And by the early 1950s, they built a few versions of infrared image tubes. It wasn't goggles so much as a sniper scope sort of shaped machine.

But it's infrared night vision. Whoa. Okay. So how did they solve the problems that the Nazis couldn't figure out? It seems like it's mostly good engineering. like just making things smaller and smaller and more efficient and more efficient. Like the Nazis were just not good enough at any of the engineering tasks yet. Hmm. Okay.

And if they'd been given, you know, 20 years, they probably would have done it. Right. Or if they didn't just like wantonly kill people for no reason, that might have. I don't know. I'm a hot take. I don't like the Nazis. Yeah. Same here. Takeaway number four. Yeah, and so Zwariken and his team, they built two different tubes. The first one was intended for snipers. They nicknamed it the sniper scope. And then they built a second, even smaller night vision tube that was for any soldier to scout a situation.

They called that the snooper scope. That's cute. That's cute. And that was so portable and effective. Then other engineers wanted to invent other approaches to night vision. Like once you have one way to do it, you think, okay, what other systems can we do? Right. I think it would be pretty embarrassing, though, to get sniped by the snooper scope. And again, it's that active infrared, so it's shining infrared light, and the enemy can build a camera to see that and see you look very obvious.

So within about a decade, engineers develop low light amplification, the green view. The first main uses of that were the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. And then the following decade in 1970s, people start prototyping heat vision and thermal imaging. And so that timeline in 1970s of heat vision starting, that's also why audiences were amazed by Predator in 1987. It was still pretty new. I see, I see. It was like really new. It's like some black mirror stuff. Yeah, people were like, oh, this is really neat and wild and holy cow.

Yeah. Right. Right. And so, yeah, that's where all this stuff comes from, basically the mid-19. And specific people, but especially the little known co-inventor of television was like, yeah, my lab can do that too, sure. I heard about the dumb Nazi truck and we'll do something better. Right, right. You do not see us.

We are not here. That's not really a German accent. But I feel like if you're doing an impression of a Nazi, it can just be a weird voice, you know? It doesn't have to be very German. I'm a Nazi. It's not. I don't think he could just be any weird voice. Look at this.

Yeah, any dumb guy? Look at my truck. It sees in the dark by screaming. And another weird war thing here is takeaway number four. A few people online push a story that night vision goggles in the Vietnam War were a way of seeing demons. sold no further questions right now we're talking yeah

this is basically two urban legends on top of each other claim that American troops put on night vision goggles in Vietnam and saw demonic forces that you cannot otherwise see with the naked eye I do believe this was probably some sergeant like if you farted and like you know the men on

or him were like, what was that? He's like, oh, pretty sure it was a demon. Oh, that's a demon. Yeah, yeah. He's a demon. Don't think about it. Let's go watch Bob Hope at the USO or something. Don't think about it, yeah.

Yeah, and this fits into the timeline we just talked about of the invention of this stuff. The Vietnam War is where, especially the U.S. military, prototyped and figured out a lot of low light amplification. So the green view, you just take what little light is there in Amphilification. amplified as much as you can. And U.S. troops first went to Vietnam in 1965. In 1966, the military starts testing a few different night vision devices, partly through a high-ranking officer who was also a trained physicist and could lead the way. And they got two breakthroughs through that.

They built a relatively silent plane for scouting. It was called the QT2, and that used an infrared camera to see, because that tech was pretty well-neged. known. The other innovation was night vision scopes for infantry. And those were nicknamed Starlight Scopes because they're amplifying the tiny amount of starlight in Vietnam. Those scopes especially really amazed troops because this was really new kind of gear, like that the U.S. interest in war in Vietnam kind of pushed this technology forward. But the trouble is, from there, people have built two urban legends about it. The second layer is seeing demons, right? But the first layer, people claim that U.S. troops were given night vision devices that have a red display, not a green display.

But that's false. The starlight scope had a green display. And that is like the rest of low light amplification in most cases. What's the significance of the why red? Yeah, I think people think that makes it make sense that you would see demons. I see. Because of like art of what hell would be and so on, you know, in Satan. I see. Okay. It doesn't make sense.

And there's also a story from a few decades before this gear of people trying to make night vision gear based on dysionin glasses. I don't really understand the chemistry of it, but it's something that just doesn't work all that well and might be toxic. Yeah. I mean, it sounds toxic. What is dynin? Dysianin, it's a dye made from coal tar. Oh, okay. And it was used for photography, and then people tried to make goggles, which, like, early 1900s spiritualists thought showed you stuff.

So that's part of where we get this demon claim. Right, right. So people take the urban legend, like a few urban legends of dysioning glasses were spiritualists early 1900s, occult things. Also, troops had night vision gear. Maybe they had read Dysianin stuff in the jungle. and they saw the demons is the belief. Right. Did they try to just have a truck that, like, shown really bright light that went, like,

where are the demons? Show us the demons. We're here for demons. They're your demons. We are here for us demons. Show yourself demons. Yeah. And then, like, the way people tell this fake story,

either claim that the dangerous chemicals cause troops to hallucinate demons or that they really saw into the supernatural world and saw demons. And then people claim the U.S. government covered up either the poisoning or the supernatural gate, you know, but it's all, it's all fake. The sterilized scopes had green phosphorus and the scouting planes, even if they had a red display, that's not the story. The story is infantry, seeing a demon coming around a tree, you know. It's kind of interesting that we would jump to that. There's like so many more like wild horrific stories out of the Vietnam War that why do you need to embellish with a demon rumors? Or that's just interesting to me that people would like sort of fixate on night.

Like when did this urban legend pop up? Was it like contemporary with the war? It seems to have mostly come around thanks to the internet. Like people might have been saying it around the time. But if they just sat at someone in a bar or whatever, it's the internet that really spread it. Bored people on the internet. Yeah. And then also the tragedy is just lots of guys got PTSD in Vietnam.

And that's probably just processing some of it, you know. Yeah. No, exactly. I think it's interesting that it's like in some ways I think it's easier to process the idea of demons rather than just people killing each other. Yeah. It's like it's the other version of the CEO fart. and not want you to talk about it. It's like, let's just, demons is what I want to think about.

Thank you. Pretty sure it's demons. I do like to use that as an excuse. Like, who ate the rest of the chocolate? You know, demons. Pretty sure it's demons. Yeah. Check if I wipe my face.

Okay, good. Continue saying demons. Good. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, and then one very last quick takeaway here about Night Vision is takeaway number five. We had baby monitors before we had night vision, and the first one sort of looked like Darth Vader.

Well, yeah, because baby monitors used to just be walkie-talkies, essentially, right? Yeah, and it invented pretty early in the history of radio. Yeah. This story, the two key sources are an amazing site called Paleo Future by Matt Novak, and then also the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. I just figured, hey, when did people build the first baby monitor where a camera can see your baby in the dark? And the answer is they just did that later. First was a radio version where you hear it.

And it was sparked by a famous crime. In 1932, Charles Lindberg's baby was kidnapped. Oh, the Lindberg baby, yeah. Yeah. And then like, so everyone in America and on Earth basically heard about this. And one of the people who heard about it was the president of Ziniburk. Radio Corporation, who had a young daughter. And he said, how do I build technology to make sure my baby is not the next baby kidnapping?

Yeah, that was like one of the, I mean, not the earliest sort of true crime things, but it was definitely one of the big true crime things in the U.S. It had such a huge cultural impact. Absolutely. Yeah, it was like a lot of things have been called the crime of the century across history, but that one probably actually was of the crime of the 1900s. Yeah. And so Eugene McDonald Jr., president of Zenith Radio, just orders his giant tech company to build this.

And they do it. And they do it with radio kind of walkie-talkie-ish tech. In 1937, Xenith introduces something they call the radio nurse. And so it's just a transmitter in a receiver. You put the transmitter in the baby's room. The receiver lets parents hear the baby crying. And the ads correctly say, like, maybe they're hungry, maybe they need a diaper, maybe they're not okay. When you hear the crying, you can go check it out.

Yeah. Yeah, you sent me photos of these interesting devices. Yeah, they look ominous. Yes. And the other thing about it, because, you know, the head of the company is so passionately into this, they pull out all the stops to try to make it nice. and that means for the design of the radio nurse, they hired a famous sculptor. His name is Isamu Noguchi.

Like there's an entire museum of his work in New York City. He's a big deal in sculpting. Interesting. And also furniture design and lots of other stuff. So he did a really cool and modern art kind of approach, but I said it looked like Darth Vader because he made the receiver, like the receiver end of the radio nurse,

a stylized version of a female nurse's head, but also it's like black colored. And it's supposed to be like that bonnet kind of thing, an old-timey nurse has. Oh, interesting. It really looks like Darth Vader to me. I know Darth Vader was not a character yet, but. Yeah, it's just kind of like a little ominous, but the other one's less intimidating looking. That just looks like a piece of bread.

Yeah, the baby's end, the like transmitter is just sort of white. and plain looking. And then you look at a Darth Vader nurse head to project your babies crying to you, which people in the 1930s said, awesome, I don't have to hover over my baby anymore. It's interesting because some of this technology is like to make it so that you reduce the amount of work that you have to deal with the baby.

But I think it's kind of like become sort of like at a certain point, it's like the more technology that you have to monitor everything. that your child is doing, actually creates more work for you because you have to constantly check all of the monitoring. Yeah, totally. Yeah, one thing about baby sleep we've been learning from basically explain that a baby in during sleep will make a lot of noise. And most people don't know that.

So they're like rush in all the time, you know? So yeah, you're right. The monitoring can just be more work and more of us. My baby's favorite move at night is to go, yeah. And then like there's like a big fart after that. Are you sure that's not Cookie during her weightlifting routine? She'll be that. She's getting built.

Cookie. Cookie's favorite thing is to be a little loaf on the staircase so that every time we go up and down the stairs, it's like, all right, got to skip the cookie step because there she is. Wow. Our Cat Watson, who's very doglike, is also doing that? And I kind of stepped on his tail the other day by accident. And it didn't catch his flesh. It just got a bunch of orange fur everywhere. Brett's theory is that they're so desperate,

or cookies so desperate for her attention that she's like, I've got to insert myself like where people go up and down the stairs so that like they will by accident brush against me and give me the attention. Being not all her needs are being met, but perhaps her emotional needs are not. being as coddled as usually they are. Let's wrap the episode, go hug our pets.

Let's do it. Yeah. All right. Bye, folks. Bye. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, which Katie vastly enhanced. I double-checked what she found about reindeer, and it's incredible. Reindeer and in a different, maybe less impressive way, salmon, can do a biological change that's the closest natural thing to a human switching on night vision goggles. Takeaway number two, allegedly there are now contact lenses that give you infrared night vision even when you close your eyes.

Takeaway number three, Vladimir Zweriken, one of the co-inventors of television, is also the main inventor of practical night vision goggles. Takeaway number four, people claim. that Night Vision goggles from the Vietnam War either forced or allowed soldiers to see demons. But it's really a few different urban legends and tech stories all put together. Takeway number five, the first ever baby monitor did not use Night Vision and was an audio-only system that looked like Darth Vader.

And then the number section this week was mostly the three big things of how Night Vision can work. Low-light amplification where it's kind of greenish, active infrared where it's like a security camera, a baby monitor, shining the light out and seeing it. And then what I almost want to call passive infrared, but is really thermal imaging or heat vision, made particularly famous by the movie Predator. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support our show at maximum fun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the strangest uses and thefts of night vision gear by modern militaries, including one way it's making drones cute to one side. Visit sifpod.fod.fun for that bonus show for a library of more than 24 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximumfund.org.

Key sources this week include a lot of historical information about the invention of night vision gear. In particular from Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times, the Lemelson Center at MIT, the amazing research blog Paleo Future by writer Matt Novak, and digital resources from the Henry Ford, a museum in Dearborn, Michigan. We also leaned on a lot of science writing and some scientific studies, such as work in the journal Current Biology by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, also work in the journal Cell by a Chinese university team, and lots of coverage of that from the journal Science, BBC Science Focus magazine, West Texas A&M University. And then if you want to find out about false demon reports in the Vietnam War, I'm linking to Army Aviation Magazine,

as well as Smithsonian Magazine. That page also features resources such as native-dashland.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people, and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy,

and I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator.

This week's pick is episode 12. That is about the topic of sirens, as in like emergency sirens that make a loud, One wild story there, police cars, in particular NYPD, develop some of the most physically impactful emergency sirens in modern history. They want you to experience it with more than your ears. So I recommend that episode. You want to know about that. I also recommend Katie Golden's podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more, which has a gigantic, amazing catalog.

Our theme music is Unbroken Unshavened by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for editing this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that?

Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artists' own shows. Supported. Directly. By you. Thank you.