A German engineer wanted a cheaper cigarette. The popular crooner Bing Crosby wanted a vacation. Satisfying both desires inadvertently led to the invention of the laugh track. Along the way there were Nazis, spoils of war, and more than one accidental encounter. Tying together this quirky history is the Magnetophon.
The hit of the 1935 Berlin Radio Show was the Magnetophon, a reel-to-reel tape recorder developed by AEG and I.G. Farben (now known as BASF). One decade and a world war later, a young electrical engineer named John T. “Jack” Mullin was serving with the U.S. Army Signal Corps when he came across the machine at a German radio station. Impressed with the device's remarkable playback fidelity, he shipped two disassembled Magnetophons to the United States, along with about 50 reels of magnetic tape and schematic drawings. He then set about rebuilding the machines, swapping in U.S. motors and vacuum tubes.
When I started at Spectrum 25 years ago, a senior editor suggested that I find a “rabbi,” by which he meant someone who could mentor me in how EEs approach problems and evaluate potential solutions.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the skills employers expect from new graduates. In response, universities are scrambling to launch new courses, research centers, and industry partnerships that prepare students for today's workforce. But building a cutting-edge AI curriculum demands funding and access to industry networks, resources that remain unevenly distributed across higher education.
Physicists have been trying to measure the fundamental gravitational constant for well over two centuries. The current accepted value of big $G$, as it's known, is $6.67430\times 10^{-11}$ cubic meters per kilogram per square second. It also has an uncertainty of ${\pm} 0.00015\times 10^{-11}\ \mathrm{m}^{3}/ (\text{kg s}^{2})$. As far as constants of the universe go, that's very uncertain.
ON A FINE BRIGHT afternoon last fall, my colleague Matthew Gore-Kormanik (or Zigula, as he prefers to be known) and I decided to unwind with a game of Fortnite. In the game, we were strolling along with the infamous Sith Lord Darth Vader, chatting about this and that. Darth seemed in a good mood, and soon enough he was spilling all his dark evil secrets. He gave us detailed instructions on how to count blackjack cards at a casino and what the steps are to producing napalm.
IN THE CHILL of a London spring night, under overcast skies, iconic Trafalgar Square opens around me. Admiral Nelson rises on his pedestal, the National Gallery rests behind, the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields sits nearby. From the 13th century, the site served as the Royal Mews for hawks and then horses. By 1844, it was a public space at the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world.
IN FEBRUARY 2024, a young man lay somewhere on the frozen shore of James Bay, Canada, surrounded by snow and darkness, succumbing to hypothermia. When he failed to get home on time, his frantic mother sent a Facebook message to Elizabeth Kataquapit, then chief of the indigenous community Fort Albany First Nation in northeastern Ontario. Kataquapit used Facebook to alert the community's search-and-rescue squad, who jumped onto their snowmobiles and drove into the night. Before dawn, they returned with the dazed man, who told rescuers he'd given up until wolves nudged his hypothermic body. “The wolves told him to wake up,” Kataquapit says. “I really believe they saved his life.”
In 2005, Nokia sold its billionth mobile phone, a budget-friendly device that went to a customer in Nigeria. By then, the company, based in Espoo, Finland, was making one of every three cell-phones globally. • But just nine years later, the mobile-device maker offloaded its entire handset division to Microsoft for pennies on the dollar, compared to what it had been worth at its peak.
If you're wondering what dark matter is, you're not alone. Astronomers don't know. But they've determined that this invisible material must be far more abundant than the stars and nebulas that they can see. They've surmised as much from observing the gravitational effects of all this perplexing dark stuff, launching a decades-long campaign to understand its nature.
In the 1970s, American Fireworks, a family-run pyrotechnics company in Hudson, Ohio, used a “home run box” to offer quick and easy fireworks displays for the Cleveland Indians (now the Cleveland Guardians) baseball games.
Take a moment and try to imagine your life without the wireless advances of the past three decades. Have you lost your luggage? What a shame AirTags have not been invented. The airline representative has promised to call with updates, so settle in for a long wait by the kitchen telephone, because there are no affordable cellphones. You'll be stuck listening to whatever is on the radio while you wait, because there are no streaming services. That's not even to speak of all the movie plots that would have been ruined.
"Why are you here?" Fabrizio Pilo, an electrical engineer, asks me as we sit in an outdoor caf & eacute; near his home in Cagliari, an ancient city on the island of Sardinia. It's a fair question. I'm a journalist from the United States. I'd just stepped off my flight 2 hours prior and come straight to this meeting, suitcase still stowed in my rental car.
The phrase “not in my backyard” is the rallying cry of citizens everywhere resisting projects proposed for their locality. Whether it's affordable housing, a waste treatment plant, or a new data center, they may recognize the benefit of the activity. They just don't want it near them. And the roots of that resistance differ from place to place. When it comes to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, companies and policymakers need to know where, exactly, people are coming from.
Even though some artificial-intelligence experts warn that scaling up large language models (LLMs) is hitting diminishing performance returns, companies are still coming out with ever larger AI tools. Meta's latest Llama release had a staggering 2 trillion parameters that define the model.
In the North 10,000 photography bunker, Berlyn Brixner was listening to the countdown on a loudspeaker, his head inside a turret loaded with cameras and film. He was one of the only people instructed to look toward the blast—through his welder's glasses—ready to follow the path of the fire-ball as it launched into the sky. The two Mitchell movie cameras at his station would deliver the best footage to come out of the Trinity test, used by Los Alamos scientists to make some of the first measurements of the effects of a nuclear explosion.
I have been an application-specific IC (ASIC) designer for almost three decades. Over that time, I've moved through the full academic trajectory, from graduate student to full professor; later, I transitioned to industry after an unsuccessful stint at entrepreneurship. When I made the switch to the private sector in 2019, I began focusing on a critically important aspect of the electronic industry: silicon intellectual property.
Floppy disks are several decades old—many of the disks are degrading, and the data stored on them is at risk of being lost. In response, Leontien Talboom, a technical analyst at Cambridge University Libraries and Archives, led a project preserving floppy disks and their data called “Future Nostalgia,” which concluded in January.
On a Wednesday night in November 1987, a British photographer named Richard Greenhill invited a group of robot enthusiasts to his attic to tinker with scavenged electronics. Their main objective: to build a two-legged walking robot. Designed by Greenhill's friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert, the robot used compressed air to extend and contract its 28 “air-muscles.” The robot's bones were made of wood, with joints at the hips, knees, ankles, and toes, providing 12 degrees of freedom. The group called itself the Shadow Group, and they soon managed to get the Shadow Walker to stand up reliably and balance itself. But mastering the art of walking proved to be a far bigger challenge.
One morning in May 2019, a cardiac surgeon stepped into the operating room at Boston Children's Hospital more prepared than ever before to perform a high-risk procedure to rebuild a child's heart. The surgeon was experienced, but he had an additional advantage: He had already performed the procedure on this child dozens of times—virtually. He knew exactly what to do before the first cut was made. Even more important, he knew which strategies would provide the best possible outcome for the child whose life was in his hands.
