In 2000, subscribers to Forbes and Wired opened their mailboxes to find a plastic barcode scanner shaped like a cat that they had never ordered. The CueCat, made by Digital Convergence Corporation, promised to spare people the labor of typing web addresses: swipe a printed code in a magazine and your desktop browser would load the page. Investors including Belo Corporation, RadioShack, Young and Rubicam, and Coca-Cola poured in $185 million to make it happen.This episode follows the device from

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency's new Ariane 5 lifted off from Kourou carrying the four Cluster satellites, each about 1,200 kilograms, bound to study Earth's magnetosphere. For thirty seconds the flight was flawless. At 37 seconds the rocket swiveled its nozzles hard to one side, tore itself apart under aerodynamic stress, and self-destructed. Nothing physical had broken. The cause was a few lines of software inherited from the Ariane 4.This episode traces the chain reaction step by

In 1938 a chemist named Roy J. Plunkett opened the valve on a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas in a New Jersey laboratory and nothing came out. The cylinder still weighed as much as a full one, so he and his assistant sawed it in half. Inside was a waxy, slippery white powder. The gas had polymerized into polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a chain of carbon atoms sheathed in fluorine. Almost nothing reacts with it or sticks to it. It was patented in 1941 and trademarked as Teflon in 1945.This

The recording industry once demanded 72 trillion dollars in damages from a file sharing program, more than three times the gross domestic product of the planet at the time. The target was LimeWire, created in New York in 2000 by Mark Gorton. Written in Java, it ran on Windows, Mac, and Linux alike and connected users directly to one another over the Gnutella network. It also carried a heavy price. Around 30 percent of files on the network contained malware, and the free version once bundled a

In the spring of 2011 a handful of anonymous hackers knocked the CIA's public website offline, pulled user data out of Sony Pictures, and planted a story on the PBS site claiming Tupac and Biggie Smalls were alive in New Zealand. They called themselves LulzSec, short for Lulz Security, and said they did it for laughs. The group formed in May 2011 from an older crew known as Internet Feds. Its leader, Sabu, was Hector Monsegur, a 29 year old unemployed IT consultant in New York. Its voice on Twitter

In 1983, in the Castro Valley Village shopping center in California, Joseph Marver ran a failing women's clothing shop called Spirit Women's Discount Apparel. Watching crowds pour into a costume store across the street, he cleared out the dresses, stocked costumes, makeup, and props, and took in 100,000 dollars in a 30 day trial. The following year he opened a temporary seasonal storefront in a mall. By 1999 he had about 60 locations and sold to Spencer Gifts. Under Steven Silverstein, chief

The heavy metal espresso machine on the counter of a specialty cafe very often carries the name La Marzocco. The company began in Florence in 1927, when brothers Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi opened a mechanical workshop. Giuseppe had trained as a brass artisan with the Italian national railway, and he knew steam boilers. Early machines were tall vertical towers that hid the barista from the customer. In 1939 the brothers patented the horizontal boiler, which evened out brewing temperature and, almost by

In the 1960s a 4,000 pound, five-axis hydraulic arm rolled onto the stage of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. It poured a beer without spilling, knocked a golf ball into a cup, waved a conductor's baton, and played an accordion. The machine was the Unimate, the world's first industrial robot, and the stunt was calculated. Its makers, inventor George Devol and Joseph Engelberger of Unimation, wanted the public to see a precise, obedient helper instead of the mechanical monster of science

In 1982 the mayor of Woodbridge, New Jersey, banned pedestrians from wearing portable cassette players in public. The device behind the panic had started as one executive's complaint. Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka was tired of hauling the bulky TC-D5 recorder on long flights to hear classical music, so he asked Norio Ohga for a playback-only machine. Engineers gutted a dictation recorder called the Pressman, added a stereo amplifier, and on July 1, 1979, launched the blue and silver TPS-L2 in Japan

In 2007 a user named Wesley Williams, posting as Moto42 on a 4chan paranormal board, described a concrete and rebar statue that snaps your neck the moment you blink. He labeled it SCP-173 and wrote it as a cold containment report. Imitators followed, the community moved to Wikidot in 2008, and by mid-2026 the English branch alone held over 10,400 SCP objects and 6,300 tales, with 15 official international branches. It may be the largest collaborative writing project in history.This episode examines

The earliest known recording of a human voice was made in 1860, almost two decades before Thomas Edison, by a Parisian typesetter who never meant anyone to hear it. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville built a mechanical ear from a funnel, a membrane, and a boar's bristle that scratched sound waves into lampblack. He wanted to see sound, not replay it. His tracing of the folk song Au Clair de la Lune stayed silent until 2008, when scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scanned it and

In 1981 portable computing meant dragging a plastic box of nearly 25 pounds, the size of a sewing machine, through an airport and shoving it under the seat. It had no battery. The Osborne 1 was the idea of Adam Osborne, a successful author and publisher of computer books who believed price was the barrier keeping ordinary people from computers. He hired Lee Felsenstein to engineer a machine with the screen, two disk drives, keyboard, and motherboard in one rugged case, and sold it for 1,795

At about 8:30 on the evening of November 2, 1988, a Cornell graduate student released a program onto the ARPANET from a machine at MIT, a choice that hid where it really came from. Robert Tappan Morris said he only wanted to count how many computers were connected. His father, Robert Morris Sr., was a pioneering cryptographer at the National Security Agency. Within hours the son's creation was copying itself across VAX computers and Sun-3 workstations running Berkeley Unix, and administrators were

On March 26, 1999, a programmer from Aberdeen Township, New Jersey, used a stolen AOL account to post a Word file called list.doc to the Usenet group alt.sex, promising passwords to paid adult websites. The file carried a macro virus named Melissa. Once opened, it lowered Word's security settings, infected the master template, and told Microsoft Outlook to mail itself to the first 50 entries in the victim's address book under the subject line Important message from, followed by a trusted name.This

In the summer of 2014, for about eight weeks, it seemed everyone with a phone was dumping ice water on their head. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is remembered as a tidy charity triumph, but it began as something else. Versions of a cold water challenge had circulated since 1991 in the northern United States and northern Norway, with no link to any disease. That May, a New Jersey fire department that staged it with fire hoses was disciplined for using township equipment without permission.This episode

In the mid-1960s at MIT, Joseph Weizenbaum walked into his lab and found his secretary typing at a teletype terminal. She asked him to leave the room. She wanted privacy for a personal conversation with ELIZA, the program he had written between 1964 and 1967 and named after Eliza Doolittle of Pygmalion. Weizenbaum had built it to show that conversation between people and machines was a superficial trick. Instead, users confided in it, and psychiatrists proposed running it on many terminals to treat

On January 19, 2012, Kim Dotcom was marking his 38th birthday in a leased 30 million dollar mansion in Coatesville, New Zealand, with a helicopter on the lawn and a fleet of luxury cars outside. Then local police, acting with the FBI, raided the estate, seized his assets, and froze his accounts. The same day the U.S. Department of Justice took every Megaupload domain offline. The company he had incorporated in Hong Kong in 2005 had grown to 50 million daily visitors, 25 petabytes of stored data, and

An AI-generated image of Shrimp Jesus sits on Facebook above tens of thousands of comments that all say amen, and the crowd feels empty. That unease has a name. In 2021 a user called IlluminatiPirate posted a sprawling manifesto on the forum Agora Road's Macintosh Cafe, claiming that organic human interaction online had been wiped out and replaced by bots as part of a plot by governments and elites. The conspiracy was fiction, but the feeling behind it was real enough that The Atlantic covered it

The Dancing Baby, also known as Baby Cha-Cha and the Oogachaka Baby, was never meant to be seen by the public. It was a stress test. In 1995 the company Unreal Pictures was building Character Studio, an animation plugin for Autodesk's 3D Studio Max, and needed sample files to impress developers. Animator Robert Lurye took a file of an adult skeleton dancing the cha-cha, added air guitar and shoulder shimmies, and the team forced that motion into a scanned plastic doll sold as Toddler with Diaper,

The boombox began as a quiet convenience. In 1966 the Dutch company Philips combined a radio tuner and a cassette recorder in one portable unit, the Radio Recorder, so listeners could tape a broadcast without holding a microphone up to a speaker. This episode treats the machine as a biography subject with a character arc. Japanese makers such as Aiwa, Panasonic, and Sony added stereo sound and Dolby noise reduction, and in the late 1970s the youth of New York, Los Angeles, and Washington turned the