The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 99: My Little Machine

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

A truly democratic machine and the man who didn't invent it.

The ocean delights us as playful otters restore coastal kelp forests. The ocean teaches us how our choices impact even the deepest places. The ocean connects us. Visit Monterey Bay Aquarium.org slash connects. This is the way I heard it. Lewis looked at the site before him and sighed. What a mess. Hanging chads, dangling chads, swinging chads.

Call them what you will. Hundreds of those little round caps had failed. to properly separate, and now the whole country was freaking out, as pundits and partisans argued over intent, operator error, and a disenfranchised citizenry. It occurred to Lewis that while humans might crave democracy, they were poorly equipped to preserve it. So Lewis designed a machine that would eliminate the problem of dangling Chads once and for all. Then he took his prototype to Congress, where it was championed by a politician named Joe. Joe had run on a platform that promised equality for everyone.

Equality in the schools, equality in the workplace, equality wherever possible. Though initially uncomfortable with Lewis's solution, Joe understood that a machine would be more objective than a human and would in fact eliminate operator error. So Joe presented Lewis's design to Congress and argued for its immediate implementation. Justice, he said, requires that everyone, be treated the same, especially when the stakes are this high. But then Joe spoke the words he would live to regret for the rest of his long and tortured life.

My little machine, he said, will do the work in the twinkling of an eye. Remember it when Al Gore told Wolf Blitzer, I took the initiative in creating the internet? Remember how that little pronoun came back to haunt him? Remember the way the media teased him at every turn for what seemed like an exaggerated claim? Well, this was Joe's Al Gore moment. The next morning, the papers published images of Lewis's invention right next to Joe's last name, and the words he had spoken the day before, my little machine. And that was that.

Editors and comedians were relentless, accusing Joe of stealing Louis. Lewis's idea. Joe tried to set the record straight, but it was futile. Somebody wrote a song called My Little Machine that rhymed nicely with Joe's last name. The song went viral, and by the time the next election rolled around, Lewis's invention, now universally known as Joe's Little Machine, was in every precinct working round the clock, guaranteeing that no more of those chads would hang and no more citizens would go home feeling disenfranchised. Incidentally, if you haven't seen it in action, Joe's little machine really is a wonder. Not only does it eliminate operator error, it increases public turnout.

When it debuted, hundreds of people were lined up to try it out, and thousands more showed up to watch, all while chanting Joe's name. Naturally, Joe was mortified. He begged the government to rename the machine the Louisette, which he argued was more fair, all things considered. But words, like elections, have consequences, and Joe's words would ultimately drive his own family to change their name. In order to escape the association, he foisted upon them. As for Lewis, the actual inventor, he held on to his name, but lost a good deal more. like so many of his countrymen, Antoine Louis was accused of crimes against liberty, whatever that meant, and quickly sentenced without a trial.

In the public square, they strapped him onto the rollerboard, face down before the crowd, and wheeled him into position. On the positive side, Antoine Louis didn't have to worry about intent or operator error. No, thanks to him, human executioners were no longer a factor. I refer, of course, to the headsmen, experienced professionals whose practiced swing would remove your noggin with one perfectly placed blow, unless, of course, you lack the means for a proper gratuity, in which case you'd receive a glancing blow that would leave your rounded cap dangling from what remained of your partially severed neck, hanging there like a chad on a ballot that would never be counted as you waited in agony, hoping the next swing might finish the job before you bled to death in front of the jeering mob. No, Antoine-Louis didn't have to worry about any of that,

nor did he have to worry about being burned at the stake or drawn and quartered or skinned alive or broken into little pieces while stretched naked upon the dreaded wheel, or any of the other medieval punishments popular in Paris, back in 1792. All those methods were replaced, you see, when Joe persuaded the French government to execute everyone the same way, regardless of their race, gender, class, or age,

Viva egalite. Thus, in just nine months, Antoine Louis, and 30,000 of his countrymen, were decapitated by a machine that he designed a machine named after a politician who wanted to eliminate the death penalty, but settled instead for making it a lot more humane, a lot more egalitarian, and to his everlasting horror, a whole lot more efficient. Such as the legacy of Joe and the little machine that still bears his name.

A little machine called the guillotine. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Granger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible. So when a conveyor motor falters, Granger offers diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem.

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