Found in the Machine | Podcast Guru

Details

Found in the Machine is a narrative podcast about the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world. If you've ever wondered who actually made the technology you use every day, and why you've never heard their name before, you'll feel at home here. This show is for the curious, not the credentialed. You don't need a technical background to follow along. You just need to be the kind of person who pulls on threads. New episodes unearth human stories from computing history every other week.

Recent Episodes

Inflection: The Voder, Voderettes, and Voice

In the summer of 1939, at the New York World's Fair, a woman sat beneath a three-story mural of a shouting man and shaped raw electricity into a human voice. In this episode: Homer Dudley: the engineer who reimagined the human voice as a handful of numbers at Bell Telephone LaboratoriesThe Voder: The human-driven machine built to imitate the effects of the human vocal tractThe Voderettes: 24 telephone operators chosen from hundreds who practiced for more than a year to play the Voder Hel...

16 MIN

Dead Reckoning: The Globus and Voskhod 2

In March 1965, two Soviet cosmonauts fell out of the sky into a frozen forest in the Urals, trapped inside a cramped capsule hundreds of kilometers from rescue. Their survival, and their journey home, relied on an intricate mechanical computer made of aluminum, clockwork, and paper. In this Episode Laboratory 47: the branch of the Soviet Flight Research Institute in Zhukovsky, run by engineer Sergei DarevskyThe Globus: the indicator of position in flight, a paper-wrapped aluminum globe ...

17 MIN

Humans of Mortal Kombat

Found in the Margins is a series of mini bonus episodes that will be available to Patreon members every other week alternating with the main show. This first episode is being shared here for all Found in the Machine listeners. Join the Patreon if you'd like to continue hearing these bonus stories. This episode explores the creation of Mortal Kombat, the strange reality of early video game digitization, and the landmark 1990s lawsuit that decided who legally owns a human body once ...

6 MIN

Cry Wolf: Waiting and Seeing with Camera Traps

Since the 1890s, we've been building machines that wait in our place, in the dark, for something to move. This is the story of how a thread across a trail became a sensor that can feel heat, and what we learn when we really look. In this Episode George Shiras: the Michigan naturalist and early wildlife photographer who rigged the first trip-wire camera traps in the 1890sPyroelectricity: the physical property that lets a crystal generate a faint electrical charge when its temperature cha...

18 MIN

Tidal Forces: Calculating D-Day

In 1944 the Allies needed to know exactly what the water would do on a coast called "Position Z." So a deaf mathematician and six young women in a basement near Liverpool calculated the future. In this episode Arthur Doodson: the deaf mathematician at the Liverpool Tidal Institute, the world's leading authority on tides, who guessed he was predicting a Normandy landing and said nothingSix women working as Computers: hired for their diligence, skill with numbers, and neat handwriting, t...

15 MIN