ReThink History: Can You Hear Me Now
For most of history a message moved only as fast as the person carrying it. Then it moved at the speed of sight: a fire on a hill, a flag on a mast, a semaphore arm on a tower. Then it moved as electricity, then as radio waves, then as pulses of light in glass. Today it moves by laser between satellites. Each leap made the last one look quaint. The telegraph replaced the courier, the telephone replaced the telegram, and the phone in your pocket replaced the phone booth. Can You Hear Me Now is a fourteen-part ReThink History series on the trajectory of telecommunications. It begins with beacon fires and signal flags. It follows Morse code from telegraph wires to signal mirrors to a prisoner of war blinking a message to the world. It covers the cable laid under the Atlantic, the telephone monopoly that wired a nation, radio and television on the public airwaves, the glass fiber and digital code that carry nearly everything now, the cell tower and the satellite. In every era it asks who owned the channel. The series ends in October 2026, when companies began putting AI data centers into orbit, and it tests a bold forecast honestly against the physics, the economics and the history of failed predictions: that machines, not people, are becoming the network's main customers, and that this will make the cell phone itself quaint. New here? Start with Episode 1, Fire on the Hill, at the top of this playlist. Researched and compiled by Nick Mackenzie. Narrated by AI from a sourced research dossier.
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or paste the RSS link into any podcast app.
Episodes
Ep 1: Fire on the Hill
When a signal can only say yes or no, how much can it really carry? In a play first staged in Athens in 458 B.C., a watchman waits a year on a palace roof for one fire on the horizon.
Ep 2: Flags, Arms and Placards
In 1836 France discovered that its own state telegraph had been carrying Paris bond prices to two bankers in Bordeaux for about two years.
Ep 3: Dots, Dashes and Blinks
On 2 May 1966 a captured American naval aviator, Jeremiah Denton, sat before a camera in Hanoi and blinked one word in Morse code: T-O-R-T-U-R-E. United States naval intelligence read the word off the film.
Ep 4: What Hath God Wrought
On 1 May 1844, news that the Whigs had nominated Henry Clay left Baltimore on a train and reached the Capitol about an hour before the train did.
Ep 5: The Wire Under the Sea
In August 1858 a ninety-eight-word message from Queen Victoria took about sixteen hours to cross the first Atlantic cable.
Ep 6: Mr. Watson, Come Here
On 10 March 1876 the first words anyone wrote down as heard over a telephone were a request for a man to walk into the room.
Ep 7: Through the Air
On the night the Titanic sank, the operator of the nearby Californian took off his headphones and went to bed.
Ep 8: Light in a Glass Thread
In 1966 the best glass fibers lost almost all their light within about twenty meters.
Ep 9: Can You Hear Me Now
On 3 April 1973 a Motorola engineer stood on a New York sidewalk and used a handheld phone to call his rival at Bell Labs.
Ep 10: Mirrors in the Sky
In 1960 the first American communications satellite was a silvery balloon that people could watch from their backyards.
Ep 11: When the Endpoint Isn't Human
By one security firm's count, fifty-three percent of web traffic in 2025 came from automated software, not people.
Ep 12: The Quaint Phone
On 1 October 2026 a SpaceX rocket carried a refrigerator-sized Google satellite with four AI chips into orbit to find out whether a data center can run in space.
Ep 13: Wearing the Network
At noon Pacific time on 28 February 2025, every Humane Ai Pin, sold as a way to leave the phone behind, stopped working at once, because its maker's servers were switched off.
Ep 14: The Last Interface
In January 2024 a man paralyzed below the shoulders received a brain implant and was soon playing chess by thought.
Explore further
Part of the listening path Building the Public Country (stop 5 of 5).
Neither Snow Nor Rain
The Infinite Dividend: The WPA
The Only Way Through
Who Tore Up the Tracks?