American Innovations
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American Innovations
DNA science. Artificial intelligence. Smartphones and 3D printers. Science and technology have transformed the world we live in. But how did we get here? It wasn’t by accident. Well, sometimes it was. It was also the result of hard work, teamwork, and competition. And incredibly surprising moments.H...
Neueste Episoden
50 EpisodenBusiness Wars Presents: The AOL-Time Warner Disaster
Think business is boring? What about when your streaming bill goes up, or your favorite restaurant files for bankruptcy? Do you ever wonder what’s goi...
Listen Now: Flesh and Code
If you missed our announcement... we have a brand new podcast! Flesh and Code is a 6-part miniseries, where we investigate how technology is being u...
The Mystery of Stuxnet | Cracking the Code | S57-E1
In the summer of 2010, a mysterious computer virus called Stuxnet lands on the desk of Symantec cybersecurity analyst Liam O’Murchu. Stuxnet is unlike...
Man with No Memory | The Accident | S55-E1
Even as recently as the early 1950s, we didn’t understand that there were different types of memory, or how the brain processed and stored memories. T...
Predator Drone | From Albatross to Amber | S54-E1
What if you could design a spy plane that could be flown remotely and hover in the sky for hours, providing reconnaissance for troops on the ground? I...
Pushing Painkillers | An Untapped Market | S53-E1
Doctors once shied away from using opioids to treat chronic pain, citing the risk of addiction. But in the 1970s, a new generation of doctors started...
Social Media | Find Your Friends | S51-E1
Today social media is such a dominant part of our daily lives, it's hard to believe that only 20 years ago, it didn’t exist. Then a newly single tech...
Fracking | The Source Rock | S50-E1
In the late 1970s, oil and natural gas fields across the U.S. were drying up, making the country increasingly dependent on foreign oil. Then, a Texas...
Cryonics | Immortality On Ice | S48-E1
Not everyone chooses burial or cremation after death. Some believe in cryonics, freezing their bodies in the hopes of being reanimated sometime in the...
Storm Chasers | Tornado Alley | S47-E1
No extreme weather phenomenon fascinates us more than tornadoes. For most of human history, very little was known about how these graceful yet violent...
Hacking | What’s in the Blue Box? | S46-E1
Hackers: the criminals who prey on our digital lives. Today they steal credit cards and personal information, or even commit acts of cyber-terrorism....
Breaking The Sound Barrier | A Bullet With Wings | S45-E1
In the 1940s, as planes got faster, it seemed like they were hitting a wall -- literally. Many pilots tried to travel faster than the speed of sound,...
Lie Detector | The Heart of a Liar | S43-E1
Humans are shockingly bad at telling whether or not someone is lying. That’s why, a century ago, psychologists and criminologists developed machines t...
Mission To Mars | Seeing Red | S42-E1
Even after the Apollo program put astronauts on the moon, Mars remained out of reach. Then, in 1990, an ambitious engineer hatched an ingenious plan t...
Year In Review | When Will I Get the Vaccine? | S40-E1
2020 has been a year of struggle, uncertainty and loss. It has also forced us to adapt and innovate in nearly every aspect of our lives. But no innova...
Telephone | Call Waiting | S39-E1
In the 19th Century, the telegraph is the cutting edge of communication. No one can imagine anything better—except Alexander Graham Bell.
You ca...
Auto-Tune: From Cher to Kanye | S38-E1
All Andy Hildebrand wanted to do was make a computer program to help singers sound better. He never expected it to kick off a battle for the soul of m...
The Fight Against AIDS | The Epidemic Begins | S37-E1
In the early 1980s, a mysterious new disease spread like wildfire through the gay communities of major U.S. cities. Before it even had a name, AIDS ha...
Keeping Cool | A Chilly Reception | S35-E1
Muggy. Sticky. Miserable.
For eons, that’s just what summer was. In fact, when air conditioning first became available, few people took advanta...
Video Games | Electric Dreams | S34-E1
Call of Duty, Fortnite, Animal Crossing.... The video game industry generates billions of dollars each year. But not so long ago, video games were mos...
Radar | Welcome to Tuxedo Park | S33-E1
What technology won WWII? Most people would say the atomic bomb, but the real answer is radar.
As a small island country, vulnerable to aerial a...
Ferris Wheel | Wheel in the Sky | S31-E1
The 1889 World’s Fair in Paris dazzles attendees with the Eiffel Tower. So, when plans begin for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, the mandate is clea...
Enemy of All Mankind | A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt | S30-E1
On September 11th, 1695, two ships confronted each other in the middle of the Indian Ocean: one an enormous treasure ship owned by the Grand Mughal of...
Chewing Gum: Snapping and Stretching | S29-E1
It’s the mid-1800s and in Maine, John Bacon Curtis is back from clearing the spruce forests with a crazy idea. He’s going to sell ready-to-chew gum.
Dynamite: The Controlled Explosion | S28-E1
In 1846, an Italian chemist discovered the volatile compound nitroglycerine, the first major breakthrough in creating man-made explosions since the in...
Fighting Coronavirus: Bruce Gellin On How COVID-19 Could Change Vaccine Development | S27-E1
As the first in a series on fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Steven Johnson speaks with Dr. Bruce Gellin, president of Global Immunization at the Sabin...
Organ Transplant: The Kidney Twins | S26-E1
A century ago, organ transplants were the stuff of science fiction. But a handful of experimental surgeons believed that transplants were not just pos...
Valium: Miltown Magic | S25-E1
Anxiety. It’s something everyone experiences at some point in their lives, but for centuries doctors had no effective way to treat it. They could send...
Electronic Television: The Picture Radio | S24-E1
The invention of the electronic television was uniquely complicated for its time. So complicated, in fact, that the prevailing narrative is that it co...
Kodak Roll Film: As Convenient as a Pencil | S23-E1
Today, if we want to take a photo, we unlock our phone, aim, and click. It can be done on a whim, without a second thought. We document everything fro...
The Modern Ambulance | S22-E1
Today, if you or someone you know experiences a medical emergency, you dial 9-1-1 and a squad of trained medical professionals arrives at your door. B...
Electric Chair | War of the Currents | S21-E1
On August 6, 1890, a prisoner named William Kemmler became the first man executed in the electric chair. It was designed to be a more humane form of e...
Skylab: NASA’s Best-Kept Secret| Apollo’s Leftovers | S20-E1
Fifty years ago, America’s space program achieved its greatest triumph, when Apollo Eleven put the first men on the moon.
The Apollo program was...
Corn Flakes | The Brothers of Battle Creek | S19-E1
For the first 150 years of American history, American citizens were plagued by gastrointestinal issues. Diarrhea, gastritis and dysentery were pretty...
The Heimlich Maneuver | S18-E1
In the 1960s, choking was a national epidemic. In the United States alone, close to 4,000 people were dying from choking every year. Lobster, ham, and...
Innovation Fails: DeLorean | Driven to Succeed | S17-E1
Normally on American Innovations, we look at the history of the science and technology that transformed the world we live in. These stories teach us a...
The Birth Control Pill | But Can It Be Done? | S16-E1
When Margaret Sanger opened her birth control clinic in 1916, she knew she was breaking the law. Distributing contraceptives, or even literature about...
Star Wars' Cinema Technology | 6842 Valjean Ave | S15-E1
When STAR WARS debuted in May 1977, it gave rise to a pop-cultural phenomenon unlike any the world had ever seen. The movie was so singular and iconic...
Airplane | The Flight of the June Bug | S14-E1
Think for a moment about some of the pioneering developments from the earliest days of American aviation: The first pilot’s licence; the first flight...
XX Factor | The Woman Who Put Man on the Moon | S13-E1
Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are preparing to land on the Moon. The whole world is watching live on television. But something is very wro...