0:00 Out on the porch this evening, you can hear the water cutting cold and clear over the limestone shelf down in the creek, steady as a pocket watch that never lost a second.0:12 The folks who stood in the shoes of history on October twenty-ninth thought they were just putting one foot in front of the other, never suspecting that the ground beneath them had already shifted into an entirely new century.0:28 In yesterday's visit, we watched copper giants rise over New York harbor and new subway lines carve through the rock.0:37 But today, the story pivots from digging in the dirt to reaching clear out of our own boots into the unknown.0:45 Looking back through the long lens of hindsight, October twenty-ninth turns out to be the day when human beings kept throwing a switch they couldn't see, changing the run of the main line for everybody coming down the track behind them.1:02 Take that young fellow Charley Kline out at the University of California, Los Angeles, back on October twenty-ninth in 1969.1:11 It was getting on toward ten-thirty at night, and he was sitting at a grey terminal looking like a piece of heavy telephone switchgear.1:21 His job was plain as day: type five letters to establish a connection with the Stanford Research Institute up in the valley, just trying to send the word LOGIN over what the military called ARPANET.1:35 He tapped the L, and Stanford picked up the telephone and said they got the L.1:41 He tapped the O, and Stanford said they got the O.1:44 Then he went to tap the G, and the whole contraption gave up the ghost and went dead.1:51 So the first message ever carried across the backbone of what became our worldwide internet was just L-O.1:58 The network stuttered and blurted out an accidental hello to the world.2:03 Charley wasn't trying to invent a digital universe where billions of folks argue over supper recipes and run banks out of their shirt pockets.2:14 He just wanted a research computer to shake hands with another box up the coast.2:19 An hour later, they got the bugs ironed out and pushed the whole five-letter word through.2:26 Now October twenty-ninth is celebrated across the country as National Internet Day, and we treat that little stutter like the shot heard round the world.2:37 But to Charley that night, it was just a frustrating hiccup right when a boy wanted to pack his bag and walk home across campus.2:46 That is the thing about the biggest doorways in history: when you walk through them, they rarely have a sign posted over the lintel.2:56 You see that exact same gap between expectation and reality if you look back to Gimbel's Department Store in New York on October twenty-ninth, 1945.3:07 World War Two had just ground to a halt a couple months earlier, and Gimbel's took out a full-page newspaper advertisement to announce something they treated like pure sorcery: the first ballpoint pen sold in the United States.3:23 They called it the Reynolds Rocket, and they priced it at twelve dollars fifty cents apiece.3:30 Now, I know how that sounds.3:32 Twelve dollars fifty cents back in 1945 was a right smart of money, enough to buy a week of good groceries or a couple pairs of stout leather work boots.3:43 Gimbel's promised that the pen carried enough ink to write for two whole years without refilling, and better yet, it wouldn't leak even if you carried it up into the thin air of an airplane cockpit.3:57 People lost their collective minds.4:00 Police had to hold back thousands of citizens lined up around the city block in the October chill, all scrambling to hand over twelve dollars and fifty cents for a metal tube with a tiny rolling ball inside the nib.4:16 Nobody in that crowd had an inkling that one day ballpoint pens would be stamped out by the billion, given away free by dentists and insurance men, rolling loose under the floorboards of every automobile in the state.4:31 To the buyers at Gimbel's, that pen was high luxury, a miraculous little marvel of postwar engineering.4:39 We look back and see everyday junk we lend to a neighbor and never ask for back, but in that moment, it was proof that human hands could manufacture precision right down to the microscopic curve.4:53 And speaking of men who built things to last, October twenty-ninth in 1911 was the day Joseph Pulitzer laid down his working tools for good.5:03 When Pulitzer died aboard his yacht down in Charleston harbor, the newspaper world shook because he had spent forty years turning the printed page into a roaring furnace.5:16 He bought up the St.5:17 Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, mixing hard-nosed investigations of crooked city bosses with giant sensational banner headlines.5:27 Folks called it yellow journalism, and at the time, plenty of high-minded critics swore Pulitzer was dragging public manners straight into the mud.5:38 Yet in his will, written with the careful foresight of an old conductor checking his brake lines, he left money to establish the Columbia School of Journalism and fund the Pulitzer Prize.5:51 He understood what his harshest critics didn't: that the power of the press was a wild river, and if you didn't train people to steer it with craft and spine, the flood would wash the town away.6:05 Today, when folks hear his name, they don't think of sensational street corners; they think of gold-standard reporting.6:14 The noisy showman ended up building the very benchmark for truth.6:19 But that coin has another side, and October twenty-ninth carries one date nobody in this country can ever scrub clean: Black Tuesday in 1929.6:29 Five days earlier, on Black Thursday, the market had taken a sickening plunge, but the biggest bankers on Wall Street sat around a mahogany table and threw millions into blue-chip stocks to prop up the floor.6:44 Over that weekend, editorial writers and company presidents told the public that the storm had blown over, that the track was clear and the prosperity engine was running at full steam.6:58 People went to church on Sunday believing the worst was past.7:02 Then came Tuesday morning.7:04 The opening bell rang, and the bottom didn't just leak; the entire boiler blew.7:10 Over sixteen million shares were dumped in a blind panic.7:14 Western Union ticker tapes fell so many hours behind the trades that men were selling off holdings without knowing the price had already dropped to zero.7:25 In one single day, billions of dollars vanished into thin air.7:29 For years, people treated that single Tuesday like a sudden thunderstorm that struck out of a blue sky.7:37 But looking back now from nearly a century downstream, the evidence tells a far different tale.7:44 The wreck was already rolling down the mountain long before the bell rang.7:49 Farms through the Midwest had been suffocating under debt for nearly a decade; banks were tied together with paper-thin credit; and speculative money was moving on margins so narrow you couldn't slip a fishhook between them.8:05 Black Tuesday didn't cause the Great Depression all by its lonesome, but it was the day the illusion shattered.8:13 It was the moment the country realized that the prosperity of the roaring twenties was running on hollow ties.8:21 It could have gone differently if anyone in authority had stepped up two years earlier to rein in reckless margin buying or steady the rural banking system.8:33 But at the time, riding the high momentum felt so sweet that stopping seemed like treason against the future.8:41 You see that same tension between courage and circumstance in Geneva, Switzerland, on October twenty-ninth, 1863.8:49 A gentleman named Henri Dunant, who had seen the blood-soaked misery of the Battle of Solferino with his own eyes, gathered eighteen representatives from across Europe to sign an agreement.9:03 They formed what became the International Committee of the Red Cross, declaring that doctors, ambulances, and wounded men should be treated as neutral on any battlefield.9:15 At the time, old military generals grumbled that Dunant was a dreamer who didn't understand the brutal nature of combat.9:24 They thought his little committee wouldn't survive its first campaign.9:29 But Dunant held his ground, won the very first Nobel Peace Prize for his trouble, and built an institution that has pulled countless souls out of the line of fire.9:41 What looked like frail idealism in an autumn room in 1863 turned out to be the strongest shield humanity ever forged.9:49 The world doesn't move in a straight line; it jumps along switches and sidings.9:55 On this same date in 1940, the United States held the drawing for its first peacetime military draft, pulling blue capsules out of a glass bowl while arguing furiously over whether a free country ought ever to compel young men to train before a war even started.10:14 In 1961, Syria walked away from the United Arab Republic, ending its short three-year union with Egypt and showing the world that political dreams of unity crumble when local autonomy gets squeezed out.10:29 In 1980, the Philadelphia Phillies finally caught the final out to win their first World Series after ninety-seven years of trying.10:38 And on this date in 2012, Hurricane Sandy roared ashore on the East Coast, racking up seventy billion dollars in ruin and teaching coastal cities that rising seas don't care about zoning maps.10:52 Now, if you want to see what hindsight does to an impossible notion, think about October twenty-ninth in 1998.11:00 Space Shuttle Discovery stood on the pad in Florida for mission STS-ninety-five.11:06 Strapped inside was Senator John Glenn, seventy-seven years old.11:10 Thirty-six years earlier, back in 1962, he had ridden the Friendship Seven capsule into orbit, a young Marine test pilot clutching the controls while his heat shield burned red in the dark.11:24 In 1962, the experts figured space was strictly for youngsters with nerves of steel and perfect blood pressure.11:32 When NASA announced Glenn was going back up at seventy-seven to study how weightlessness affects the aging human body, skeptics made jokes about rocking chairs on the launchpad.11:45 But when those solid rocket boosters fired, Glenn proved that curiosity doesn't expire when the hair turns grey.11:53 He bridged the early space race to the modern era, reminding everyone watching that the horizon doesn't belong only to the people who were born yesterday.12:04 That, friend, is the lesson that stays with me as the light fades behind the ridge.12:10 When we look back ten years, fifty years, or six centuries—back to Charles the Seventh taking the French crown on this day in 1422, waiting seven long years until Joan of Arc finally led him to his formal coronation at Reims—we always think the winners knew they were winning and the fools knew they were failing.12:33 They didn't know anything of the sort.12:36 They were just tapping two letters into a stubborn keyboard, paying twelve dollars for a pen that didn't spill, or stepping onto a train that hadn't blown its whistle yet.12:48 We are living through the very same kind of days right now, making small choices that future generations will mark down as the hour everything swung on the hinge.13:00 Well.13:00 That is about the size of it.13:03 Take care of yourself until we meet back here on the porch tomorrow.
