Throughout humankind’s journey, we’ve often been led forward, or backward, by Tims and Als. The story of the develop | dG1fY3F2UG5abkJYYzQ
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00:00You know, Alfred Vail and Samuel Morse actually got along pretty well for a while there.
00:06They developed a sweet new state-of-the-art telegraph system that blew every other telegraph out of the water.
00:12They introduced a code so ingeniously versatile and easy to use that it remained in service long after the telegraph itself had been phased out.
00:19After having a cable run between DC and Baltimore, they sent and received the message that became world famous and knocked everybody's socks off.
00:27And you could argue, as I do, that this marked the beginning of the internet in a very real sense.
00:33It was code passed through a network that was extended and upgraded so gradually in such a piecemeal fashion that these very same telegraph lines eventually communicated directly with telephone lines,
00:43which later passed data back and forth with coaxial cable lines, which to this day still connect to fiber optic lines.
00:50The chain has never broken.
00:52This telegraph wire from 1844 and the cable snaking through the studs of your living room wall right now are functionally the very same network, the very same thing.
01:03The internet began there and then.
01:06And Morse and Vail acted the part, too.
01:08They used it to ask each other what they had for dinner.
01:11Vail used it to play a game of long-distance checkers, making him probably the first online gamer in history.
01:16The one-two punch of this telegraph hardware and this code made for one of the very greatest technological leaps in the history of humankind.
01:23You'd figure that both men ought to have monuments built in their honor, but that's only true of one of them.
01:30See, it's been argued, and pretty convincingly, that Alfred Vail was not only primarily responsible for the Morse telegraph, but the true inventor of Morse code.
01:39But Vail found himself shut out in terms of both the money and the acclaim.
01:44Morse slapped his name on everything and kept Vail at arm's length.
01:47Vail died next to broke.
01:49Morse died very rich decades later.
01:52What really stuck in Vail's craw, though, was that after a while, Morse started to refer to Vail not as his partner, or his co-inventor, or his collaborator, but his assistant.
02:04Al's my assistant. He assists me. Al is my assistant. He assists me. I want you to listen. Al is my assistant. He assists me.
02:14A century and a half later, piping through the coaxial cable line shared by this very same internet, the sitcom Home Improvement introduced us to the characters of Al Borland and Tim the Tool Man Taylor.
02:25Throughout the construction of the 19th century internet, there was always an Al, and there was always a Tim.
02:31What Al would design and build with craftsmanship of the highest order, Tim would destroy through brute force, vanity, ignorance, and an inability to sit still.
02:40And what Tim would destroy, Al would selflessly put back together again.
02:44The story of the construction of the internet in the 1800s is a story of Al's and Tim's.
02:50Near-death experiences, unsafe voltages, disasters at sea, grudges, and infighting in men who could not get along,
02:57the geniuses who got their hands dirty building the future, and the tragic idiots who nearly destroyed it.
03:03And you know what's funny? We needed them both. The geniuses among us propel history forward, but so do the dummies.
03:13To tune in, i'll see you all probablyiroa look good, but then we looked back, tick
03:20even withnie.
03:21In addition, i'll see you all a little bit.
03:22I wish I could last as I remember.
03:27coordinators have all the details on the premise of Al and Tim.
03:30But nothing was really helpful when I was wondering how its Look pulled into him.
03:33aha!
03:35Yaallah!
03:40Yaallah!