How a Medieval Street Riot Built the FIFA World Cup: The History of Football - Episode 8

Aleksandra Ganeva: Hello, welcome back. So, if you're watching and not listening today, you'll notice something's different. This is my first ever video episode. You can actually see my face now. And yes, I spent way too long on the lighting. We're not gonna talk about it. If you're listening on audio, hello, you're not missing anything important, I promise. Same story, I just happen to be sitting in front of a camera this time. Right, let's get into it. I want to start with a question, and I actually want you to think about it and not just let it go past. When did you last really? Look at someone's face. Not a glance at a photo, not half watch someone on your phone while you are doing something else. I mean really look. At that tiny shift in someone's expression just before they say what they actually mean. At the thing that happens around their eyes when they're genuinely pleased to see you and not just being polite, but actually happy. At all that information that a face carries all the time without anyone thinking about it. Here's something I think is super wonderful about us as a species. Newborn babies within hours of being born, before they can do basically anything at all, will consistently turn their eyes toward a face shaped pattern over any other kind of pattern. Every time. The human brain has an entire region dedicated almost entirely to processing faces. Nothing else gets its own section of the brain like that. Not food, not danger, nothing else. We are right down at the most basic level face reading animals. And for most of human history, and I know it's Hard to imagine now, but truly it is for the vast majority of history, in fact. If the person you wanted to look at wasn't physically standing in front of you, you just couldn't see them. They lived in your memory, a fixed image. Something that was already in the past. Today you can see someone live, moving, With the light changing on their face in real time, from anywhere on earth. That shift from absence to presence, from memory to life is what this episode is Not just the technology, but the reason we wanted it so badly that we kept working on it for over a century, through failed experiments and world wars and years of infrastructure that wasn't ready yet. Mama Alexandra, welcome to the hidden life of things, everyday history for anyone who's ever looked at something ordinary and wondered, how did this actually get here? Let's go back to the beginning. Before anyone could transmit an image, someone had to figure out something really basic. Something that sounds obvious when you hear it, but actually isn't at all. What is an image? Like what is your eye actually receiving when you look at something? For most of human history, the answer educated people accepted was, and I know this sounds strange now, that your eye sends something out. That seeing is an active process, a bit like a torch. Light leaves your eye, touches the world, bounces back. Plato believed this. Euclid, one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived, built his entire theory of optics on a version of this idea. And honestly, it's not completely mad. If you've ever been in total darkness and still had a sense of the room around you, the idea that your eye is doing something outward feels almost right. The person who proved it wrong, not by arguing about it, but by actually doing experiments, was a mathematician and physicist working in Cairo, Egypt, in the early 11th century. His name is Abu Ali al-Hassan ibn al-Haytam. In Europe he became known as Al Hazan. He wrote a seven volume work called The Book of Optics, and in it he showed, through careful, repeatable experiments, that light travels from objects into the eye, not the other way around. He also described the camera obscura principle, which is this if you make a tiny hole in the wall of a darkened room, light comes through that hole and projects an image of the outside World onto the opposite wall, upside down, moving, completely accurate. He explained exactly why it happens. Light travels in straight lines, passes through the hole, and reconstructs the scene on the other side. That explanation is the foundation of every image capturing device that has ever been made. His book was translated into Latin in the 13th century and became one of the most widely read scientific texts in medieval Europe. Kepler read him. Descrats build on him. The camera, every camera, including the one that might be recording this right now, traces its lineage back to a man sitting in a darkened room in Cairo, The camera obscure as a physical tool became popular with artists from the Renaissance onwards. You'd set it up and it would project a live image of whatever was outside onto a surface inside your box or room. Painters used it to get their proportions right. It was in a sense the world's first live feed. The image was real, it was live, but the moment you moved the box, it was gone. And that became the question that drove the next three centuries of tinkering. What if you could keep it? answered that in the 1830s, and the moment you could fix a still image permanently, the moment light could leave a lasting mark, the next question arrived almost immediately, with that particular impatience that people always have when something almost works. What about movement? Okay, so this is something most people have never really had to think about because it just works in the background. But film and video are not the same thing. Not just technically, they have completely different relationships with time. And I think that matters. Film is chemical. Light hits a surface coated with light-sensitive stuff, triggers a reaction, leaves a permanent image. One frame of film is basically a tiny photograph. When you project a film in a cinema, you're showing 24 of those photographs every second. Your brain, because of something called persistence of vision, which just means images linger briefly after you see them, blends all of those stills into the illusion of movement. But here's the key thing about film. By the time you watch it, it's already done. The chemical reaction happened. The frames are fixed. The moment is sealed. Film is always at its core about the past. And there is a reason old home movies feel a bit sad even when the content is happy. The medium itself has that pastness baked in. Video is electronic. Instead of a chemical reaction, light gets converted into electrical signals, and electrical signals can travel almost instantly. Video isn't trying to preserve a moment. It's trying to capture right now. Film became the medium of cinema, art, and carefully put together version of reality. Video became the medium of news, live sports, and eventually the video call. One is about looking back, the other is about being there. And the first person to actually make video work to display a moving electronic image on a screen wasn't necessarily the lone visionary in Britain or America that the standard history usually gives us. He was actually a 27 year old engine. At a technical college in a city called Hamamatsu in Japan. His name was Kenjiro Takayanagi. He'd read about emerging ideas around electronic image transmissions in a French science magazine. And I love this detail. Ideas were crossing borders long before the technology itself did. He got completely absorbed by the problem, and with pretty limited resources at his college, he started building. On Christmas Day, the twenty fifth of december nineteen twenty six, he made it work. He transmitted an image onto a cathode ray tube screen. A cathode ray tube is basically an early electronic display. A glass tube where a beam of electrons gets fired at a screen coded in a material that glows when it's hit. The image was a single Japanese character, the first character of the Japanese writing system. It was 40 lines of resolution, small and blurry and flickering, and it was As far as we know, the first time a live image had ever been shown on an electronic screen. Takayanagi kept going. Through the late 1920s and 1930s, he got his system to a quality comparable to early commercial television. He later joined NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, and worked on Japanese television for decades. He lived until 1990. He got to see HD television. He got to see what that one flickering character on Christmas morning 1926 eventually turned into. The West largely ignored him, partly because of the Second World War, which completely disrupted Japan's pre-war research, and partly because the standard English language account of television history tends to focus on Don Log in Britain and Philo Farnsworth in America. Both of whom were real and important, but neither of whom was working alone, and neither of whom was first in every category. The history of television isn't one inventor, it's lots of people in different places, working from the same basic ideas, getting to similar answers within months or years of each other. Takayanagi deserves to be in that story, so he's in this one. Now I want to tell you about someone who I think might be the most underrated inventor of the 20th century. His name was Gregorio Zara. And before I tell you what he invented, I want to tell you who he was because the full picture matters. Born in 1902 in Lipa City in the Philippines, top of his class in primary school and secondary school, mechanical engineering degree at MIT, one of the most competitive universities in the world, then a master's in aeronautical engineering at the The University of Michigan, highest distinction, then a doctorate in physics at the Sorbonne in Paris, also highest distinction. He went home to the Philippines and over his career registered 30 patents: a solar-powered water heater, a solar-powered stove, an airplane engine that ran on plain alcohol, which honestly deserves its own episode. And then in 1954 and 1955, he built and patented something he called the Photophone Signal Separator Network, which is just a technical way of describing a device that lets two people see each other on a screen while talking on a telephone line. A video call. He patented it in 1955. Skype launched in 2003. FaceTime launched in 2010. Gregorio Zara patented video calling in 1955. He was 50 years ahead. The technology worked it was real and documented. The problem wasn't the idea. The problem was that none of the world around it existed yet. The bandwidth, the compression, the network, the devices All of that still had to be built. The world hadn't caught up to what he'd made. I find this one hard to sit with. He saw something clearly enough to build a working version of it. And then he watched the world take half a century to get there. He died in 1978. The video caller, something billions of people use every day, arrived roughly twenty-five years after that. He never got to see it become normal. There's a type of inventor who keeps showing up in history. Someone who gets to the right answer at exactly the wrong moment. Not wrong because they were mistaken, wrong because the world around the idea wasn't ready. All the supporting pieces still needed building. Zara needed the internet, the internet needed decades. And by the time everything was finally in place, he was long gone. I just think he deserves to be known. That's all. I'm Talk about something that I think a lot of you have felt but maybe not had words for. Why are video calls so tiring? Genuinely. You finish a day of back-to-back calls and you feel more drained than after a whole day of in-person meetings, even though you haven't left your chair. What's going on there? It's not just in your head, or actually, it is in your head, but not as a personal weakness. It's been measured. A team of researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria ran an experiment where students attend attended the same class twice, once in person and once on a video call, while hooked up to EEG machines measuring brain activity and ECG machine measuring heart rate. Within 15 minutes of the video call starting, the measurements showed elevated fatigue And a real struggle to focus. The in-person session showed neither. Video calls are harder on your brain than being in the same room. Not an impression, actual brain waves. Why? A few reasons, and all of them are interesting. The first is lag. Not the obvious kind where someone freezes mid-sentence, tiny invisible delay, as small as 150 milliseconds, which is well below what you can consciously notice. But in normal conversation, timing carries meaning. A slight pause. Before someone answers means something different from an instant reply. When lag messes with the timing even a little, your brain registered that something is off and exhausts itself trying to figure out what that is. The second is body language, or rather the lack of it. On a video call, you see a face in a rectangle, everything else is gone. The way someone's posture shifts, what their hands are doing, the physical space between you. Your brain is built to pick up all of that constantly. When it isn't there, your brain keeps reaching for it and keeps finding nothing. That reaching wears you out. And then there is the self-review, that little window in the corner showing your own face. from Stanford found this is one of the most straining parts of a video call. You're spending the entire conversation simultaneously being the person talking and watching yourself talk. That split being participant and observer at the same time doesn't happen in any other normal human interaction. It's exhausting in a way that's hard to describe, but it shows up clearly in the data. Turn off the self-view, honestly, your brain will thank you. And yet, despite all of that, the fatigue, the lag, the missing signals, the slightly weird experience of watching your own face while you try to have a conversation, we keep doing it in numbers that would have seemed completely unrealistic twenty years ago. Because the alternative is not seeing someone at all. And when you really need to see someone, that's just worse. I want to tell you about something called a miniature portrait, because I think it puts all of this in perspective. From roughly the 16th to 18th centuries, so before photography, one of the most treasured things a person could own was a tiny painting, small enough to fit in your palm or inside a locket you wore around your neck. Portrait of someone you loved, a face painted in extraordinary detail that you carried everywhere. Monarchs sent them to each other as part of marriage negotiations. Henry VIII was famously shown a portrait of Anne of Cleves by the painter Hans Holbein before he ever met her, which influenced his decision to pursue the match. Soldiers carried them to war. Lovers wore them against their skin. The miniature portrait was the best available technology for one of the oldest human needs, to see the face of someone who isn't here. People in previous centuries didn't have less of this need, they just had worse ways of meeting it. And when you read letters from people separated by war or distance, one thing comes up again and again. I am afraid of forgetting your face. Not just missing someone in general. The specific quiet fear of the image going soft, of not being able to picture them clearly anymore. We build photography to stop forgetting faces. We build cinema to see faces move. we build television to see faces live. We build the video call to talk back. Every step in that chain is pointing at the same thing. Being present across distance. The very stubborn, very human refusal to accept that being apart means being unreachable. And here's the thing about the video call: it's the first technology In all of that history that goes both ways at the same time, the miniature portrait was one direction. You could look at someone's face, But they couldn't look back. The letter arrived days or weeks late. The telephone call was live, but you couldn't see anything. The video call is the first time two people anywhere on earth can look into each other's eyes at the exact same moment to see and be seen simultaneously. That might sound like a small thing, but it took eleven centuries. From Al Hazan's darkened room in Cairo. ⁓ To a Christmas morning in a college in Japan, to a physicist in Manila who built the thing and then watched the world take fifty years to catch up, to the cables under oceans and the satellites and the compression algorithms and everything else. And what all of that delivers in the end is something a kid could explain in one sentence. You can see someone, they can see you at the same time. That's it. That's what all of it was for. So the next time a video call connects, the moment the pixels settle and someone's face appears, just take one second before you start talking. you're looking at the result of a thousand years of people trying to work out what light actually does. At a Christmas Day experiment in a small college in Japan in 1926, at a physicist in the Philippines who saw the future clearly enough to build a version of it and then watch the world take 50 years to get there. at a mathematician in 11th century Cairo sitting in a darkened room with a small hole in the wall asking a very precise question. And on the other side of all of that, a face looking back at yours. The technology is just the bridge. You already knew that, which is probably why you keep crossing it, even when the connection drops and the lag is annoying, and your own face in the corner of the screen is doing something slightly strange. The person on the other side is worth it. That's always been the point. History isn't only in museums. Sometimes it's live on a screen in someone's eyes on the other side of the world. If this made you think of someone you haven't called in a while, go and message them. The podcast will still be here. You can find the Hidden Life of Things on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you listen. A follow or a like genuinely helps, and if there is someone in your life who you only ever see on a screen, send this one to them. They'll know exactly why. And for next time, here's a little riddle. It has been kicked, banned, celebrated, and blamed, sometimes all in the same centuries. Kings outlawed it because it distracted their soldiers from archery practice. Medieval towns tried to stop it because it kept destroying their streets, and yet, no matter how many times someone in authority told people just stop playing it, they just kept playing it. It has started genuine riots, ended wars for a day, and united more people at the same moment than almost any other thing humans have ever invented. You probably watched it, played it, or argued about it recently without thinking twice. What is it? I'll see you there. Stay curious, I'm Alexandra and I'll see you next week.