What happens when one combines practical carpentry skills with the the abundant theoretical knowledge of AI to build a chair? James Bridle recounts his experience…
In 1840, a surveyor took a chisel to one of the outer walls of St. John’s Church, on Old Haymarket in Liverpool, England. They carved a horizontal line into the stone, a couple of inches long, and below this, three radiating lines, getting wider at the base: a broad arrow. The broad arrow had been used in England since the fourteenth century, and later across Britain and its colonies, to mark government property, but the horizontal line was a relatively new addition. Into this crevice the surveyor would have placed an angle iron, or “bench,” used to support a leveling rod, from which elevations could be taken. Thus, the broad arrow and the line were known as a “benchmark.”
The benchmark on St. John’s Church, recorded in the records of the government’s Ordnance Survey, its official mapping agency, marked one hundred feet above sea level. Chiseling it into the stone meant that someone else could come along later and set up a leveling rod in exactly the same position and take their own reading, transforming it into a datum line: a reference point for further, and repeatable, surveying.
For a few years, the benchmark on St. John’s was the reference datum for the whole country, until it was realized that more accurate measurements should begin at the mean tide level. A pole was set up in the Victoria Docks, also in Liverpool, and the fluctuations of the tide observed for nine days. The resulting mark was used as the fundamental reference until the 1920s, when it was shifted again, to Newlyn, in Cornwall. Benchmarks continued to be carved into churches, civic buildings, milestones, and country walls across the country, all referencing the tidal datum at Newlyn.
“Sea level” is actually different everywhere, but in Britain, it remains a function, plus or minus, of ODN: Ordnance Datum Newlyn. This is the level measured within the town’s tidal observatory, constructed on the South Pier in 1915. The observatory takes the form of a hollow tower in which several floats are suspended, connected to a recording device. An inlet pipe allows the tower’s well to fill and empty with the Atlantic tides. Between 1915 and 2015 the mean sea level at Newlyn increased by 1.83 mm/year—and by 3.8 mm/year between 1993 and 2014. Each change in sea level is reflected in an incremental adjustment to elevations across the land.
The last official benchmark was carved on a milestone located outside a pub in Loughton, Essex, in 1993, before satellite-based systems took over the datum (today, a GPS antenna sprouts from the top of the tide tower in Newlyn). The Ordnance Survey still maintains a record of over half a million benchmarks, although many more have disappeared. Hiking clubs lead expeditions to find them, and hobbyist benchmarkers check them off their lists. When you start looking for them, you see them everywhere.
“Benchmarking” remains in use today as a term for establishing a baseline against which other data can be measured and judged: software performance, product quality, profitability, growth; quality, time, cost. But it’s worth remembering its origins not as a tool for establishing hierarchies, but for leveling; for connecting, rather than separating; and for understanding the whole earth, and everything that happens upon it, as a continuous, indivisible field, stretched across cities, forests, and mountains, and ever susceptible to the rhythm of the tides.
A couple of years ago, I found myself stuck in an apartment in Athens, and in desperate need of distraction. I’d been living with my family on a Greek island, where we had space, and time, and had started to build a house; but at the end of 2023 my partner, Navine, became severely ill, and we had to return to the city we’d lived in for five years previously. She spent nine months in hospital; I visited every day, while also looking after our three-year-old son between nursery school and sleep and school again. I had less space, and a lot more stress, but I also had time to fill, and was itching to use my nascent carpentry skills. I needed to make something, with the limited tools and materials I had to hand—anything would do, it just needed to keep my body, and my mind, busy.
It was around this time that the current wave of what we’re calling artificial intelligence started to excite, and demand, attention. I actually studied AI at university, twenty years ago: exactly the wrong time, it turned out, to be studying it. The history of AI is one of booms and busts: “AI winters,” they were called, when the field seemed to sputter out after a series of advancements, and twenty years ago it was decidedly chilly. We learned about expert systems and neural networks from aging professors, but all the sensible students were learning about classical logic and statistics as preparation for careers in digital finance. It was another decade before the field would regain its energy, and—this is a controversial take—it would have little to do with conceptual breakthroughs. Rather, the growth of the internet, with its accompanying boom in processing capacity and data storage, would allow those same ideas—primarily neural networks—to be supercharged by graphics cards, digitized text and artworks, surveillance and social media, and the wholesale transference of everyday life to the online world. The AI “revolution,” if that’s what it is, is not a technological breakthrough, but the overwhelming accumulation of power and data in the hands of a few companies: power and data which rightfully belong to, and have been stolen from, everyone. But I digress.
I’d been noodling with this idea for some time: What if we used AI for something actually useful? It feels like we’re applying this new tool to all the wrong things: beating us at the games we enjoy, supercharging predatory capitalism, extracting and burning fossil fuels, depleting the planet’s resources, conflating images with art, encouraging extremism, suppressing rights, hallucinating, and so on and so forth. Wouldn’t it be infinitely more interesting if AI helped us do useful things in new and better ways, ways which we could not have imagined alone? Intelligences which we engaged with more like colleagues and collaborators than slaves and masters.
The one thing computers have always been really good at, one of the few qualities which genuinely impress me, is optimization. They can take a human-designed thing, an object or an algorithm, and ruthlessly strip it to the bare essentials while maintaining its functionality. Give a clever machine some widget, like a structural bracket or a complex workflow, and it will produce some alien-looking thing, a third of the weight and twice as efficient, which a human mind would not have conceived. That’s cool, that’s interesting. Of course, applied to culture, society, and the wider environment, such an idea of efficiency is a disaster, but it’s pretty neat for objects, as long as a human is keeping an eye on things.
I thought I might be able to make use of this particular skill to create something with what I had to hand: By combining my rudimentary carpentry abilities with the machine’s knack for efficiency and strangeness, something interesting might happen. Specifically, I didn’t want to design a process which would ultimately replace me, or take over the rewarding bits of work, but something more like a smart carpenter’s mate, that could do some of the sums and make useful suggestions and leave me to do the fiddling and the sanding. A collaborator, not a boss…
[Bridle recounts the first iteration of his collaboration of his collaboration with ChatGPT…]
… There are two qualities of the chair that ChatGPT and I built that stand out. The first is that it looks flimsier than it is, but it works. The AI told me to use a sheet of very thin ply for the seat, so thin that I considered laminating two sheets of it together. It gives a little when you sit on it—but it holds. That’s exactly the kind of optimization I was looking for: a decision I wouldn’t have had the confidence to make, but, again, it works. It might even be slightly comfier that way—although I have no way of knowing if the machine actually intended it, structurally or comfort-wise; it might have been going on dimensions alone. Still, the chair stands.
The second quality of the chair is that it is unnervingly big. Not too big—it’s actually pretty comfortable for a six-footer like me—but it’s definitely bigger than you’d expect, verging on the uncanny. This I find to be absolutely fascinating.
What we have here is, quite literally, a chair designed by someone who has read a lot about chairs but never actually sat in one. They know what a chair should look like, what it should do, the mechanics of how one is put together, the physics of holding you up. But they have no embodied experience of the world, no history with chairs or any other object, no physical memory. They don’t know how it feels, not merely to sit in a chair, but to encounter one in the world, to place it among other things in a home, to live with it, to be around it every day as one goes about the mundane business of life. This is the idea of a chair brought to life; but things—objects, beings, relationships—are not mere ideas, and you certainly can’t get every aspect of them from books. The chair is low stakes, but, once again, you wouldn’t want to run a society, or a culture, or a planet this way.
Since building that first chair, others have been created. This is where the benchmarking bit comes in. A few weeks after the ChatGPT chair, I made another one, this time with an AI model called Mistral. Mistral is a French company which made a lot of claims to be more ethical than ChatGPT (whatever that really means), and I’d been told it was more accurate and precise when it came to technical matters. Once again, I described my request, and we went back and forth a bit, and then I tried to do what it told me.
Mistral’s chair didn’t stand up at all without some serious modifications: I had to add a bunch of cleats and bracing around the legs to make it stable enough to sit on, which eliminated any purported gains in efficiency. It was definitely more interesting than ChatGPT’s doll’s-house effort, with a short back and slanted armrests. It was also waaaayyy too high. My feet didn’t even touch the floor. So much for Mistral’s accuracy and precision—but points for making something a daring European chair designer might actually have come up with.
AI is unfortunately very hot right now. At a time when we could be attending to decarbonizing our societies and building more robust communities to help us through the turbulent years ahead, we seem to be giving most of our attention to a technology which not only burns through energy and other resources, but actively works to make our relationships less secure and our information environment less coherent. The art world is not immune to this tendency, and so when I received requests for AI-themed work for events and exhibitions, I turned the chair-making process into a set of instructions which anyone could follow, and sent it over.
The first iteration took place in Tokyo at an exhibition called “AI is Not Magic” in June of 2025. The curators followed my instructions, inviting Anthropic’s Claude AI to make them a chair from a selection of materials in the studio. It turned out a pretty nice chair, but the quality of the finish made me suspect that an experienced carpenter was involved at their end. Conversely, when a conference called ThingsCon in Amsterdam asked Elon Musk’s Grok AI to have a go, the system told them to build a lounge chair and gave very precise cutting instructions, but none of it fit together at all. As the ThingsCon team noted, “The system could produce—confidently, fluently, at length. But it couldn’t understand what it had made.” The chair they eventually ended up with, after much modification, was “grammatically coherent and practically useless. […] It’s a strange object—part furniture, part evidence.”
Each chair is indeed a piece of evidence—a benchmark, in the truest sense. Each iteration of the work produces a different outcome, which we can judge and compare. Each AI model reveals its own tendencies, biases, and limits, in physical form, easily appraised by a layperson. We are benchmarking; we are benchmaking; we are literally making a bench (fine, a chair, whatever). I appreciate processes where you learn to do a thing, a thing that you didn’t know how to do before, and at the end of that process you have not only done it, but you can see the results. And, in this case, sit on them.
This benchmarking has a deeper meaning as well. Carving a broad arrow into a church wall doesn’t reduce or isolate anything. Rather, it reminds us that every action is made in context; each benchmark refers to every other one, in a continuous, connected line through space and time. When we build, when we think, when we act, we do so in honor of every object, thought, and action which has preceded this one, and we are changed by the process. AI wants us to forget this, by making every output its own miraculous creation. But we owe the world more than that…
[Bridle reflects on the experience…]
… Building the AI chairs taught me something about AI, but it didn’t teach me much about making chairs. Ultimately, I was the teacher, taking what I’d learned elsewhere to make the “practically useless” suggestions into something stable and self-supporting. The AI undoubtedly learned more than me from these interactions: how to speak, what interests (some) humans, how to flatter, how to slant and tailor its responses to my demands.
The anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, may he rest in peace, had a good bit on authority. He said that anarchists don’t oppose authority per se, but they study and critique it, and appraise its legitimacy. What he liked, he said, was self-subverting authority, authority which undermines its own basis. He gave the example of a teacher: A teacher knows something useful to their student, and so they have a natural authority; but if they do their job well, at the end of the process the student knows what the teacher knows, and their authority is spent. The hierarchy is flattened, and no further unequal power can accrue. The student is changed, and so is the world.
Of course it’s possible to learn things from AI, but, for me, real intelligence resides not in an ability to extract and dominate, but in the capacity to share, co-exist, and thrive together. There are many ways of being intelligent, as many as there are living beings, each one unique and valuable. The real challenge of AI is not in building ever more powerful systems—this is difficult, but inevitable—the challenge is to find what relationships between different intelligences benefit us all. The challenge is to choose the kind of world we all want to inhabit. Benchmarking—the practical, embodied work of exploration and mediation—is an attempt to find our way towards such a world…
As we measure twice before cutting, we might recall that it was on this date in 1985 that the first discovery of a fullerene was published in the journal Nature. In September of 1985, the American chemists Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, colleagues at Rice, met with Sir Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, England. In 11 days of research, they discovered the first fullerene, C60, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms. The discovery of this new structure (AKA “buckminsterfullerene” or “buckyball”) opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work.
Scheduling Note: (Roughly) Daily will be off tomorrow, but should return on Saturday…
Astronomers, photographers, and star gazers in general have been living with (that’s to say, looking for out-of-the-way locations in order to avoid) light pollution for over a century. But of late, they’ve been grappling with a newer challenge: bright satellites that stand, like grafitti, between observers — no matter how remote — and the treasures of the night sky.
To create this composite image [and as above], photographer Brendan Larsen captured almost 600 photographs over a two-hour period and then manually stitched them together.
This is the most time-consuming photo edit I’ve EVER done!
I left my camera photographing the night sky over Mt Taranaki [see here] for nearly TWO HOURS, capturing 578 photographs.
The result? An estimated 14,450 satellite trail appearances, representing approximately 1,400 individual satellites! 😱
I manually masked in EVERY SINGLE TRAIL from the original photographs — approximately 45 HOURS of editing to create this one image!
The Guardian has more on how he created the image (which, despite many online commenters’ beliefs, is not AI):
Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”
The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites.
“I could start to see the pattern emerging and realised: ‘Wow, this looks really awesome.’ I knew if I carried on it would look even better and more impressive in terms of satellite numbers.” [source article]
I was initially startled. Then confused. Then fascinated all in quick succession.
And then I felt a deep sense of betrayal once I realized that what I was tracking with my eyes were a series of small satellites. And btw: that they likely had ruined my long exposure that I was capturing at the time.
As we search the skies, we might send far-sighted birthday greetings to Audouin Dollfus; he was born on this date in 1924. An astronomer and aeronaut, he was the successor to Bernard Lyot as the principal French authority on the solar system; Dollfus discovered Janus, a moon of Saturn.
While Dollfus made use of terrestrial telescopes, he was creative in finding a way past the challenges of light pollution and closer to the objects of his study. With his father (the aeronautical pioneer Charles Dollfus), he holds several world records in ballooning, including the first stratospheric flight in France. He was the first to carry out astronomical observations from a stratospheric balloon, in particular to study Mars in a detailed way.
The asteroid 2451 Dollfus is named in his honor, and one of the largest craters on Mars was also named for him.
The answer, they learned, is that whether you tie the common shoelace bow tie knot with the stronger reef knot or the weaker “granny” knot, it’s subject to “catastrophic failure” in two stages: impact and inertia.
“They filmed a runner on a treadmill in slow motion, and used a mechanical pendulum to recreate the forces acting on a shoelace’s knot. And it turns out, every step you take, basically, is trying to untie your shoes.”
“When your foot hits the ground, the impact stretches and loosens the knot. At the same time, as your leg swings, the loose ends of the laces whip backwards and forwards, until, eventually, one starts slipping through the knot.”
How do aglets help or hurt your knots? What’s one of the oldest surviving shoes? How was Velcro invented? And what are some of the other ways you can tie your shoelaces? Peters reviews the history and physics of shoe and knot design in the 5-minute video…
As we lace up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that the U.S, military introduced the four-wheel drive reconnaissance car that we know as the Jeep. In World War II, Jeeps were used by every service of the U.S. military. An average of 145 were supplied to every Army infantry regiment. Jeeps were used for many purposes beyond the obvious, including cable laying, sawmilling, as firefighting pumpers, field ambulances, tractors, and, with suitable wheels, would run on railway tracks.
Jeeps were immediately impactful on military footwear: they required durable, specialized footwear for their drivers and crews– so spurred innovations in military boots, rubber-soled shoes (and protective gear) to meet the demands of rugged terrain and combat conditions. Alas, they did nothing to address the issue of lace tying.
Einstein fought to save our everyday notion of reality from the strangeness of quantum mechanics. But, as Charlie Wood reports, those who set out to aid him keep poking holes in his argument…
One of a human’s earliest developmental milestones is an understanding of object permanence. It generally takes less than a year for a baby to realize that when an adult hides their face behind their hands in a game of peek-a-boo, they don’t cease to exist. There’s more to the world around us than what we perceive.
This suggests — or at least, it suggested to Albert Einstein — that the world is “real,” in the sense that things in the world have properties that are intrinsically true no matter what anyone thinks. A red billiard ball is red, even in the dark, and even if no one is checking its color. The redness is a property belonging to the ball, not to some device measuring the ball, and not to the mind of some person operating the measuring device.
Yet quantum mechanics, a thoroughly validated theory of how the world works, seems to suggest otherwise. The theory’s math assigns redness to the billiard ball at the moment you measure it. Before then, the theory gives you only a set of probabilities telling you what color the ball might be. Key founders of quantum mechanics suggested that this math reflects the nature of reality — that in some sense, a single, objective reality doesn’t really exist.
In 1935, Einstein rebelled against this surreal reading of quantum theory, proposing one of the 20th century’s most famous thought experiments. But his rebellion was doomed. In 1964, the physicist John Stewart Bell showed with a thought experiment of his own that reality had to be stranger than Einstein assumed. Subsequent work would put Bell’s thought experiment to the test — and prove him right.
Then, 50 years after Bell, Matthew Pusey, at the time a graduate student at Imperial College London, took on what remained of Einstein’s notion of reality and — without originally intending to — delivered the killing blow.
The paradigm-shifting theorem became known as PBR, for Pusey and his academic accomplices, Jonathan Barrett and Terry Rudolph. Since the publication of PBR in 2012, many theorists have come to accept that it rules out our most commonsense understanding of reality.
“From the moment [PBR] came out, people knew it would be a landmark,” said Jacques Pienaar, a physicist now at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
At the time, Pienaar, like Pusey, had been walking in Einstein’s footsteps, dabbling in theories designed to show that objective reality exists and that quantum mechanics merely describes our incomplete knowledge of it. But when the PBR theorem appeared, Pienaar remembers thinking, “That’s it. The program’s dead.”
This is the story of how Einstein, Bell, and finally Pusey and his collaborators killed reality as we know it. In three theorems, they proved that quantum mechanics is incompatible with the world we perceive. And since experiment after experiment — including a recent realization of PBR — has established that quantum mechanics is the law of the land, something about reality has to go.
The question that remains is: How much do we have to give up?…
[Wood recounts the fascinating history of attempts to grapple with the issue, which have, cumulatively, strengthened the conclusions (and thus implications) of PBR. As to those implications, he concludes…]
… Many physicists have taken PBR to mean that the quantum state must be real — an objective property living in particles, people, and planets. If so, impossible-seeming events like collapse must also have some physical correlate. This stance amounts to taking the extreme path of Bohmian mechanics and other “realist” interpretations. As Pusey pithily puts it, PBR guarantees that “if anything is real, the quantum state is real.”
But to conclude that the quantum state is definitely real is to misunderstand the PBR theorem, because PBR also leaves open the other extreme path: It could be, as the Copenhagenists have steadfastly maintained since the days of Bohr, that in some sense nothing is real, including the quantum state. It’s perfectly possible that the quantum state lives in our minds and has no direct connection to an objective reality. In this case, the redness of the billiard ball would be inextricably linked with the act of observing it — precisely the state of affairs that so deeply offended Einstein. “Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?” Einstein once famously pressed his colleague Abraham Pais.
PBR doesn’t give us the answer. What it does do is end a century of bargaining with quantum mechanics. By ruling out the possibility that reality is real while the wave function is not, PBR requires that physicists either fully embrace the notion of an objective but entirely surreal reality, or fully reject objective reality altogether. “Do you bite the bullet, or do you try and dodge the bullet?” Pusey said.
Pienaar was one of the few physicists who were still playing around with middle-of-the-road theories, though with waning interest. PBR contributed to his choice to give up on objective reality once and for all. He switched to a modern offshoot of Copenhagenism known as QBism.
QBism asserts that the world itself may exist, but quantum mechanics can’t describe it. All the theory can really do is capture our relationship to — and subjective experience of — the world. “You need two to tango,” Pienaar said. “Without two systems, there’s no relation. And reality is nothing but relations.”
And yet, some physicists remain unsatisfied with the two extreme options: a surreal reality or no reality. So they are beginning to pick at the fine print on the technical definition of reality. “Maybe the correct way of thinking about a state of reality is something a bit more woolly, that doesn’t quite fit into this straitjacket,” Pusey said.
In this spirit, Hardy questions whether reality needs to necessarily have a single, objective state at every given moment. Perhaps states could somehow spread out across multiple moments. He doesn’t yet have a fully fleshed-out proposal, but his goal is to come up with a deeper, more general notion of reality that is still recognizable.
If underdogs like Hardy succeed in saving some notion of reality, it won’t quite be the one Einstein wanted; Bell and PBR guarantee that. But it may yet turn out to be the sort of reality Einstein needed, one that makes enough intuitive sense to win the hearts and minds of physicists, especially those fatigued from a lifetime of labyrinthine debates about what is real. “It needs to have the ring of truth, so that when people see it, they can’t unsee it,” Schmid said.
* Niels Bohr, who also famously– and relevantly– observed: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”
###
As we get real, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that the discovery of the “charmed quark” subatomic particle was announced simultaneously by the two American experimental groups responsible: an MIT group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and a SLAC-Berkeley group at the Stanford Linear accelerator center.
The existence of the charm quark was first predicted by James Bjorken and Sheldon Glashow in 1964. The new particle, made up of a charm quark and its antimatter opposite, anti-charm, was the fourth quark to be indentified; with a mass of 3095 MeV (or 1.27±0.02 GeV/c2), it had a lifetime about 1000 times longer than that of other particles of comparable mass. Its announcement set the world of high energy physics on fire and is now known in the physics community as “the November revolution.”
For their photo-finish discoveries, the scientists leading those groups, Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.
Einstein’s observation seems obvious in these days of Wikipedia and Google. But as Alex Houston reminds us, it wasn’t always so. She explains how telephone directories– and the people who used them– helped invent “information” as we know it…
For over a century, the physical phone book could be found everywhere, yet seemingly belonged nowhere: a book without a genre, at once mundane and mysterious, raising questions that vexed courts and corporations alike. In print, it’s all but vanished, though it lingers in the names of the websites and search engines that replaced it, the data they were built from, and the way we’ve learned to interact with information.
Southwestern University’s collection of Georgetown, Texas directories—eighteen volumes spanning 1913 to 1959—charts the evolution of the phone book in fine print and shows how it helped shape a vision of something new: networks people could not merely connect to, but could also ask things of.
The phone book is nearly as old as the phone itself. The telephone was born out of a mid-1870s race to improve upon the telegraph, which required trained operators at both ends and dedicated wires between them, and still wasn’t fast enough for an increasingly global market. The directory followed soon after to encourage its adoption and use.
In retrospect, the competition to top the telegraph ended on February 14, 1876, when two men filed competing U.S. patent claims for a method of transmitting speech electrically. Courts would eventually set the course of the American telecommunications industry by naming Alexander Graham Bell the sole inventor of the telephone and his Bell Company the sole holder of rights to electronically transmitted speech. At the time, though, there was real doubt about the business value of the so-called “talking telegraph”—enough that when Bell offered Western Union his patent, the telegraph company declined. The refusal reflected the verdict of the “practical telegraph men,” which Elisha Gray—the loser of the patent battle—put plainly: “In a business light it is of no importance. We can do more . . . with a wire now than with that method. And speed is the only thing we are after.”
The public, too, “had to be educated,” as the Bell Company itself put it, “to the necessity and advantage of the telephone.” Advertising could turn people into customers, but helping phone owners form what Bell called a “telephone habit” required a different tool. A 1941 article in the Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, “Business and the Telephone, 1878: As Illustrated by Early Directories,” links the telephone’s rapid adoption by businessmen to the equally speedy evolution of its instructive paper counterpart. Printed in New Haven in February 1878, the first phone book was not a book at all but a single page, with fifty-odd names listed in no discernible order. Boston and New York issued improved versions over the following months, with added attention to organization…
[Houston further unpacks the history of the telephone directory, explores the role of (mostly female) “operators,” and the emergence of “information”…]
… Given users’ demonstrated penchant for pushing the limits of acceptable use, it’s remarkable that telephone companies would hand them a word so obviously open to interpretation. But they did, and people interpreted it in its broadest sense almost at once. One consequence was a drop in directory use–why look up a number when you can ask someone for it? The result was notices like the one in the 1932 Georgetown directory, which scolded subscribers with the observation that “Nearly half of the numbers asked of information operators are correctly listed in the directory,” and implored them to “save time” by looking first.
But the bigger problem was what else people asked. As a Boston Daily Globe reporter observed in 1907, the telephone user had “learned that the telephone company maintains what is known as an information desk . . . and so when he has yearned to know something which would require the consultation of a dictionary, a directory, or a gazetteer, or in some cases the application of ordinary common sense, he adopts the easier method of stepping to the telephone and calling up, ‘Information’.”…
… Telephone companies began rescinding the offer of “Information” almost as soon as it was introduced. But just as the rollout of the word itself differed by region and exchange, so too did its withdrawal. Bell engineers studying operating methods concluded as early as 1904 that “the giving of information which is contained in the directory should be discouraged.” The Georgetown directories show that conclusion being carried out decades later through a new form of mechanization: the dial.
The 1940 directory featured a two-page spread on the dial—not for Georgetown, which remained manual, but for Jarrell, which converted first. Here, the information operator could be reached not by asking for her, but by dialing 00, though she would still—tantalizingly–“give you every possible assistance.” Georgetown followed in 1954, and “Information” went with the switchboard: subscribers were instructed to “Dial 11” for “Numbers Not in the Directory.”
In 1968, more than a decade after “Information” disappeared from Georgetown’s telephonic vocabulary, Bell officially retired the term and renamed the service “Directory Assistance.” Publicly, it maintained the personal framing—one ad observed that “When she was called ‘Information,’ people kept calling her for the wrong reasons”—while privately acknowledging an intentional shift toward mechanization. Nearly a century after the public had to be educated into the “habit” that built the telecommunications business, AT&T’s chairman, Frederick Kappel, said there was now a need for “public understanding that without mechanization, without automation” companies “couldn’t come close to giving the quantity and quality of service that customers today require.”
While, as one op-ed writer put it, the change to “Directory Assistance” meant the loss of “something warm and reassuring” found in “a friendly voice say[ing], ‘Information,’” a look back at the history of the telephone reminds us that intimacy was never the point. The phone’s invention sprang from a search for speed, and the insistence on its efficient operation had produced the very “human” function now being withdrawn for the same reason. Yet what the directory had taught, across all those years, was a habit in two parts: look it up, and when the book fails you, ask somebody.
In 1991, the Supreme Court held that a white-pages listing was “devoid of even the slightest trace of creativity” and therefore not copyrightable, overturning a century of doctrine that had protected directories as a reward for the labor of assembling them. In the Court’s view, the listings were raw fact, free for anyone to use. The value lay in what could be made of them, which was precisely the business of a fledgling tech industry inventing new ways to connect information and the people who used it. By the mid-1990s, companies were building online city directories using directory data, reducing the print versions to relics.
Two decades earlier, in 1969—a year after “Information” became “Directory Assistance”—a conference at the University of Chicago had taken up the future of information. In a keynote speech, psychologist and computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider called the decisions ahead “truly a crux for our civilization,” leading either “down to a mindless complex of electronically stored and retrieved facts” or “up toward a realization of the potentials of human creativity and human cooperation.” The stakes, he said, came down to a distinction: “It’s a choice between data and knowledge. It’s either mere access to information or interaction with information.”
As we look it up, we might send imaginative birthday greetings to a woman who helped shape modern telephony: Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; she was born on this date in 1914. Better known by her stage name, Hedy Lamarr, she became a huge movie star at MGM.
By the time American audiences were introduced to Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr in the 1938 film Algiers, she had already lived an eventful life. She got her scandalous start in film in Czechoslovakia (her first role was in the erotic Ecstasy). She was married at 19 in pre-World War II Europe to Fritz Mandl, a paranoid, overly protective arms dealer linked with fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany. After her father’s sudden death and as the war approached, she fled Mandl’s country estate in the middle of the night and escaped to London. Unable to return home to Vienna where her mother lived, and determined to get into the movies, she booked passage to the States on the same ship as mogul Louis B. Mayer. Flaunting herself, she drew his attention and signed with his MGM Studios before they docked.
Arriving in Hollywood brought her a new name (Lamarr was originally Kiesler), fame, multiple marriages and divorces and a foray into groundbreaking work as a producer, before she eventually became a recluse. But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lamarr’s life isn’t as well known: during WWII, when she was 27, the movie star invented and patented an ingenious forerunner of current high-tech communications…
Read on for the story of the movie star who invented spread-spectrum radio, the secure signal technology that helped the Allies avoid having their radio communications intercepted by the Axis forces, and that lies at the heart of the cellular phone system that we all use today: “Why Hedy Lamarr Was Hollywood’s Secret Weapon.”
“Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid” – Hedy Lamarr
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