The American Freedom Train and the invention of text messaging

27:12From my management and my colleagues, I got pretty nasty comments. They said, look, Fred, this is the first service which has a limitation of message length in telecommunications. What innovation is this? And then they said things like, this is so short that it has no use at all for users. This is totally useless. But as Fred begins tapping out test messages, he sees just maybe his idea could work. I took a typewriter and I typed short messages. I invented messages. What can I say in short words or in a few words? Then I looked to fax. Faximile at the time had these forms where you wrote some sentences by hand and then you faxed it to other people.

27:57I counted the number of characters of these messages. Then I looked at postcards. All had also less content than 160 characters. So I had the proof and I presented this to my management. The proof was enough to convince them. And it was agreed he'd continue developing his idea for a short message service or SMS. But texting's full potential was still underestimated. Nobody thought that this would be a very big thing. And nobody saw that SMS would explode in such a way and would be such an element of the youth culture, etc. It was seen as an additional possibility to be used by a minority of people and also experts who had a special interest in it.

28:45It was not seen as a mainstream at the time. The introduction of mobile phones in the 1980s had brought about a revolution in digital telecommunications across the world.

29:19Back to any one of 500 million telephone subscribers throughout the world. Excuse me, sir. Do you have a cellular phone? Why, yes, I do. Oh, so do I. Ameritech, your link to better communication. In Europe, engineers joined forces to develop a system that would allow people to use their mobiles across different countries and move seamlessly from one network to another as they travelled around. Fred became part of the group, which was on the lookout for new ideas. I thought not everybody is interested to carry a laptop around all the time. Could we not have a simple text service, but it should be on all phones?

30:03And then I developed a concept for this. If you look at mobile phones at the time, they had a keypad, which had also characters on it, so you could type messages. It had a display, so you could show text on these displays. So every mobile phone was actually ready to accept Fred's new messaging system, and the group accepted his plan to send texts using one of the phone's little-used control channels. The prospects for SMS were looking good, but there was still one issue to overcome. We needed to use the formats which existed on these control channels, and they used packets of data to transmit.

30:44Now, before Fred carries on, I just want to explain. These packets of data are the way messages are transferred across a network, like an envelope being sent from one mobile to another. These packets had a limited length, so my concept had this drawback that the messages were limited to 160 characters. But after the evening in front of his typewriter, Fred has the answers to any concerns. And in July 1985, his plans get the go-ahead. Most people accepted it in principle. Some people of course thought this is a crazy idea, but there was no energy to block me to go ahead and I was convinced of this and my team was convinced of this and so we were allowed to go ahead.

31:33It's another two years before a team of European engineers turn his short message service into a reality. Then in December 1992, the very first text message is sent by a British engineer wishing his boss a Merry Christmas.

31:55But SMS, well, it just didn't catch on. People didn't use it. There was one director of a large network operator who said, why should I type a message on a clumsy keyboard if I can call the guy? And so this was more or less the mood. Some networks had disabled it. Some networks offered it for free for a certain period. And some networks had it in their networks and could not block it, so they were forced to offer it for free. And then, by the mid-1990s, as mobile phones became cheaper and the number of users grew, things began to change. Young people discovered it. Young people have, of course, not much money.

32:44They got their first phones from their grandparents and then they discovered that the short message was cheaper than the cheapest call. So they started to use this amongst them and they were also proud that the adults couldn't do this and so it became part of the youth culture it became a very large amount of traffic. Now, the craze for sending text messages shows no sign of abating. In fact, last month, people in Britain sent over a billion of them. In 2002, just ten years after the very first text, more than 250 billion text messages were sent worldwide. At the school gate, on the way home, evidence of the text messaging craze is everywhere.

33:29The phone makers never expected it to take off. It was teenagers who decided this was the way to keep in touch. I send about 15 a day. I send about 20 because I just love texting people. And the 160 character limit. That introduced a change in the English language with the use of text speak, abbreviations and emojis. But fast forward to 2012 and the number of text messages began to decline. overtaken by free apps from competitors like Messenger and WhatsApp. The problem is that SMS has not been further developed and therefore much room existed for new competitors. SMS was a door opener for a very big market which people hadn't seen that you could use a phone as a data terminal and communicate simply with text or later then with also additional formats like pictures etc.

34:28It has really opened this field and it has also created to some extent this field. But I mean, WhatsApp uses a number of concept and ideas from SMS and I'm the father of SMS and hence I must be the grandfather of WhatsApp. Fred Hillebrand, the father of SMS, was speaking to Jacqueline Payne. Before texting and mobile phones, and particularly in parts of the world where access to news media was restricted, radio was a vital means of communication. Radio Free Europe started broadcasting news to audiences behind the Iron Curtain 75 years ago. It grew to reach nearly 50 million people a week in 27 languages across 23 countries.

35:14Rachel Naylor has been hearing more from the former Deputy Director, Arch Puddington. In Munich, a giant radio station, nearly three times as powerful as any in the United States, the 135 ,000-watt radio-free Europe station was built with donations to the Crusade for Freedom by 16 million Americans. It's 1950 and we're in Munich in Germany, or the radio capital of Europe, as the BBC reports. This radio station here doesn't beam its signal at the people of Western Germany, but at people living behind the Iron Curtain. It's just part of the Western armament engaged in the Battle of the Aether. In that Western armament, by far the biggest and most powerful weapon is called Radio Free Europe.

35:57That battle was the Cold War, and the US was concerned about the rise of communism. The communist strategy was to smother all independent voices. The press was completely censored. anti-communist journalists were arrested or sent into exile. And there was one source of news, basically, which was the communist government. And so we thought that the best way to counter that would be to set up a media. That media was Radio Free Europe, or RFE. And that was Arch Puddington, the former deputy director of RFE at the New York Bureau. Its first broadcast was at 11am on the 4th of July, 1950, by legendary Czech journalist Ferdinand Perutka, the listeners in Czechoslovakia.

36:57He announced, this is Radio Free Europe calling. RFE also broadcasts to Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania.

37:17As the power is thrown on for the first programme, Radio Free Europe begins telling the truth to Czechoslovakia, striking a powerful new blow for freedom behind the Iron Curtain. By the 1960s, it was spending$40 million every year on 515 hours of broadcasting, employing 1 ,100 staff in Munich. The five departments which compile the programmes for the five countries are staffed entirely by exiled nationals from those countries. These men are concerned only with making the programmes, not with getting them through the Iron Curtain. That's another problem altogether. A problem involving 200 engineers, several relay stations and 31 transmitters, cited for technical reasons, on the coast of Portugal.

37:58The voice of freedom has a long way to go, particularly when he mustn't shout too loud. Programs included news, politics, comedy, jazz and pop music, and even a program with coded messages.

38:15This one says, calling Mr. 147L, place 75H, we have received your message. It goes on to say, your son is safe in America, in the city of Cleveland, Ohio. He and his wife say to you, keep up your hope, for the communists will be driven from our homeland and freedom will prevail. RFE also broadcast warnings. Citizens of pressure. In your town, the manager of the Café Czergo, Stefan Stupinski, is a dangerous agent of the state security police. And slow news bulletins, so those listening discreetly to illegal broadcasts could take notes for their friends and family.

38:58The concept was simple. RFE played what the communist authorities would not. Here's Arch again. Take music. They didn't like the music of Bela Bartók in Hungary. So Radio Free Hungary played a lot of Bartók.

39:24I'll give you an even better example. the communist authorities condemned rock and roll as some kind of horrible music that the capitalists in the West had concocted to subvert their young people. So Geza Ekech devoted himself to playing the best of it and all of a sudden it became a huge hit among Hungarian youth and he got floods of mail from inside Hungary. The communist authorities in Hungary hated him. Initially, RFE was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, but it also received private donations through the Crusade for Freedom, thanks to appeals by the likes of the American president, John F.

40:13Kennedy. Individual Americans, by giving to Radio Free Europe, may be sure that they are bringing a beacon of light in the countries to which millions of us are tied by kinship and whose hopeful freedom all of us must share. Radio Free Europe needs and deserves our generous help. But as its listenership grew, so did the threat to its staff. In 1981, a bomb exploded at RFE's headquarters in Munich, injuring six. But that wasn't the problem that worried people the most. There was another problem, which was the efforts of communist authorities to infiltrate spies into basically every service. And all of them were penetrated at one time or another.

40:58And so did that happen while you were there in your office? It did. It did. We had a Lithuanian correspondent who started to work for us. He's a young guy. And at some point he'd been there a year or so. Then all of a sudden he disappeared. Where'd he go? Where was Brodeus? and then a week or so later he appears in the Lithuanian communist press denouncing Radio Free Europe as trying to stir up trouble, trying to encourage Lithuanians to leave the Soviet Union etc etc. But bombs and spies weren't the only thing Arch and RFE had to worry about as the BBC reported in 1977. No other western radio broadcasts as loud or as long claims so big an audience, 4 million daily in the Soviet Union, 13 million in Eastern Europe, or causes so much offence to the governments of target countries.

41:55They spend more money jamming the programmes than the stations spend transmitting them. The positive thing is that it was a very inexpensive way of getting your message across. The negative thing is the communist authorities did have a way of countering that, and that was to jam it. and you'd send horrible noises up to interfere with the radio-free broadcast. And there was a kind of frequency wars. So it was not such an easy thing to listen to, but our listeners were loyal, and so we did prevail, and eventually a number of the countries that we broadcast to stopped jamming. 30 years after RFE started, the Cold War ended in 1991.

42:45There was a decision that we would function as a regular news station. We opened bureaus in Russia, we opened bureaus in Ukraine, and so on and so forth. And that's, of course, now what's under threat from the Trump administration. Radio Free Europe would never have happened if you'd had everyday normal dictatorships instead of communist dictatorships because communism was this unique system. Its basis was myths and lies. And Radio Free Europe helped to penetrate and puncture those lies. And I think, you know, Radio Free Europe played, no question, a substantial role in that.

43:38That was the freedom bell to remind you that you are listening to Radio Free Europe. The former deputy director of Radio Free Europe, Arch Puddington, was talking to Rachel Naylor. Next, we've got this week's sporting witness, and this is the stuff of every young football fan's dreams. In 2009, a British 17-year-old won a reality TV show earning him a six-month contract to play for the Italian champions Inter Milan. During his time there, the club enjoyed the greatest season in its history. Ben Henderson has the story. It was just loads of drills with cameras there, which we found a little bit odd.

44:20Had to write in our details, which was a bit odd as well. This is Ben Greenhalgh. In 2009, he was 16 years old and desperate to be a professional footballer. He signed for sixth division club Welling United, and represents his county. Then one day, his manager takes the team to this unusual training session. We were doing things in the certain games and challenges and shooting, and people had pointed me out. People said, look, let's get him in the final game. I looked over to the side and saw Inter Milan badges, which I felt was a little bit odd. Why would there be Inter Milan badges in London?

44:54Ben is identified as a top talent, and a few months later he's flown to Como in northern Italy to compete in football's next star, a reality TV show on Sky One in which young players are eliminated at each round. The prize at the end of it all, a six-month contract playing for Italian champions Inter Milan. It's every young footballer's dream, being signed by one of the biggest clubs in the world. 7 ,000 boys apply. I could easily be the next Fia Walcott. I am football's next star.

45:30After a gruelling competition, Ben's fancy footwork takes him to the final round. In the last scene, he's standing side by side with the other finalists. Both of their families look on as the winner is announced. After five weeks of observation, we have decided that the winner of football, the next star, is Ben. It was unbelievable at that time. It was just everything was on top of the world. But then you start sort of thinking and going, oh, hang on a minute, yeah, I'm actually playing for Inter Milan. I don't really know how I took it in my stride to go and move to Italy, just like that, as a 17-year-old, to a different language.

46:14Couldn't speak the language at all. I'd practised, but when you're practising England, it is nothing. You need to be chucked in the deep end. And there were moments where I did start to miss being at home and things like that. In early 2010, Ben is in Milan attending his first training sessions. He's in the youth teams, but from time to time trains with the first team players, some of them legends of the game. Patrick Vieira is the one that I will always mention because he looked after me as a young person, he always said hello. He'd always put his arm around you and he'd always say, how is it going?

46:44Which is a big thing because, like we're saying, as a younger player at a world-class football club, you know your chances are limited. But he was there to always check how you were and he was asking about how my Italian was going. So just very much thoughtful questions. So he is the one that he almost became a little bit like a mentor.

47:04As well as father figures like Vieira, Inter Milan had the best teenager in the world at the time, Mario Balotelli, who was renowned for his unusual behaviour. Balotelli was someone that I remember while we were top of the league with Inter Milan and we were winning everything that year. and he's going into Milan in an AC Milan shirt and getting everyone to take photos of him. And that's obviously Inter's city rivals, the worst thing he could possibly do. And that probably is the one-off, maybe if not the biggest rivalry in world football. And what was he like behind the scenes, Balotelli? Could you chat to him easily?

47:40In a change room, if he's not starting, yeah, there'd be a reaction. In terms of how the game's gone, there'd always be a reaction. But actually, as a person, really funny, really funny guy. I just don't think he ever thought about his actions I don't think he ever thought it through I remember we had a reserve game against Chieva I think it was and their team coach was coming up into Interrello which is where we played the academy games and he's parked his Lamborghini right in front of the gate sideways so they couldn't get in and he's got out of the car, walked and sat in the stands and everyone's like Mario can you move your car and he's like no but he was just laughing about it and it was one of them brilliant character but you could look at it two ways He still had an unbelievable career and he's probably been himself the whole way through, which is fair play.

48:25Inter's team was full of big names, but nobody was above the manager, also known as the special one.

48:34Jose Mourinho was the man in world football at the time where everyone was in awe of him. Everything he said was like gold dust. And because he had that awe about him is why the players were so good for him. So much respect for him. I've never, and I don't think I ever will see, a team respect their manager in that way. He would always say hello. He was a bit more relaxed himself, I guess, because they were winning, but he always gave good advice. And the one advice for me was, your passion can never drop for the game. Things will happen, and things do happen. He said, your passion can never drop.

49:03You need to keep going. And I'm not saying I've lived by that because Mourinho told me, but I definitely have lived by a statement like that. Ben couldn't have joined Inter at a better time for the club In Italy they won the league, Serie A and the Coppa Italia Then in the Champions League They brushed aside England's league leaders, Chelsea Then toppled a great Barcelona team Spearheaded by Lionel Messi The only thing that stood between them and a historic treble Was Germany's biggest club, Bayern Munich Who they played in the 2010 Champions League final in Madrid But all that success meant Ben never played a single game for the first team.

49:43There was always a moment where it was like, when am I going home? Am I getting a new contract? What is going on? And it was sort of just running with it. Then, on the eve of the final, a stroke of fortune. We got flown out as a reserve squad, or the under-19s, which were classes at the time, and we were there. We were there, we felt it all, we felt we were behind the players. And to be fair to Mourinho at the time and all the players, they made you involved. Things went exactly as planned on the pitch. Argentine striker Diego Melito scored twice to crown Inter champions of Europe. It was the greatest season in the club's glittering history.

50:21It was unbelievable to be part of a football club in that manner and just to see them winning and knowing that you see these players on a day-to-day basis so you feel a bit of a relationship with them. But I think the funniest bit was there were Champions League medals and I managed to get one which I probably didn't deserve, but more of a, here you go, lads, you've travelled with us, we've got these, here you go. And it was only as time sinks in a little bit more, you go, hang on, this is a Champions League medal. Maybe because where I wasn't out there on the pitch and things like that, you don't feel like you've earned it.

50:51So you're not that sort of mesmerised. But to be fair, yeah, unbelievable to be able to say that nowadays.

51:00Ben had gone from England's sixth tier to earning himself a Champions League winner's medal. After that night in Madrid, Ben's contract was extended and he played well on loan at Italian third division side Como. By 2012, though, he was back in England at his old club, Welling United. He went on to enjoy successful spells in England and Scotland, both on the football pitch and the golf green. Three or four years after the Champions League, I played a lot of golf, probably over the last 10 years. it's become quite modern to have a fancy something there to mark your ball with. Medallions have become a thing or big poker chips and things like this.

51:40And so I thought, you know what, everyone else has got these golf medallions. I'm going to drop a Champions League medal. So I think I finished the golf round and there are times when you might leave your marker down, might have fallen out of my pocket. And I remember just going home like normal. And then it got to the point of thinking, where's my Champions League medal? And I remember I was ringing the golf club up. it was shut and I've gone in the next day and I've said have you had anything and he's saying yeah we've got your Champions League medal and I think luckily I got along with the pro really well because I think had that been someone else I think they're probably taking your Champions League medal and it's going elsewhere but no I was I was very grateful that they looked after it for me and that was a lesson in itself to stop trying to do stupid things with your mates

52:31star was speaking to Ben Henderson. Finally this week, a lingering cultural moment in history. On the 31st of December 1999, in a lighthouse in East London, a piece of music started playing. It's called Long Player, and it's set to keep going without repetition until the year 2999. It was created by Jem Finer from the band The Pogues, using 234 Tibetan singing bowls. Megan Jones has been finding out more. The world was looking forward to the year 2000 as this sort of almost mythical marker. And there was paranoia that all computer systems would fail, etc. And I thought, well, this is kind of...

53:18I'm more interested in a thousand years. You know, it seems like a bit odd. There's not more focus on the sort of deeper, sort of longer spans of time. One idea I had was to make a giant hourglass, something maybe 50 feet tall, and the top would be full of water or sand or some material that would take exactly a thousand years to drop into the bottom section. Actually, it was a film I saw that sort of led to the way Long Player It Works now, which was called 24 Hour Psycho. It was a film made by an artist called Douglas Gordon. Well, he didn't make the film. The film was a Hitchcock film called Psycho.

54:08But he screened it so that it slowed down. It took 24 hours to show it, and it was amazing. That started making me think, well, actually, that might be an interesting way. to make a long piece of music is to take something that exists and just slow it down. Long Player was born, but how did you make it into something people could listen to in hundreds of years to come? I realised quite early on, despite the fact that I was composing it on a computer, that wasn't really a very good starting point because we don't know how long computers will be around, whether there'll always be electricity, etc, etc.

54:49So it had to be in a form that could be played just by people without electricity. And so a long period of process of deduction led to the idea of using these instruments that long players played on called singing bowls. They're literally, well they're a bowl, so you can hold them in the palm of your hand and you can play them.

55:15The beautiful thing about the sound of these is that either you strike them and they sound like a bell, very sonorous, or more interesting, you can run a wooden stick around the rim of them and they just sort of hum, they drone.

55:40you compose six pieces of music using the bowls how does that become something that lasts a millennium what the kind of system does is every two minutes it takes a starting point in each of those six and plays for two minutes after each two minutes the starting points move on slightly clockwise but for each of these six pieces of music they move on a different amount. It's a bit like a planetary system if you imagine looking down on planets going around the sun they're all going around at different rates and then every now and again they line up. So these six sections they sort of go through the pieces of source music at different rates and every thousand years they're all back right at the beginning again in line.

56:25It takes 234 singing bowls, doesn't it, to play every note in this 1 ,000-year-long composition, which is pretty incredible. And we're sitting here in this lighthouse with wooden beams above us and creaky floorboards. But in the middle of this room is this huge circular structure, this planetary system you just mentioned, which is taller than us and holds those bronze bowls of all sizes and on different levels. and there's also what looks like a wooden shed next to it and there's a glass front where you can see the computer inside, which is where it's played from. But of course, at some point, long player will have been switched on.

57:03So tell me about that moment. Yeah, well, it had to start at midday on the 31st of December 1999. Four, three, two, one!

57:20So it seemed like a good way to start it. Not to wait till midnight here, but to start it where it first started, you know, the other side of the globe. For me, it was a very nerve-wracking thing. Despite the fact I'd sort of mocked this up and tested it and tested it and tested it, knowing what computers are like, they can be very contrary. And the one time in a million you need them to really behave, they do the wrong thing. I was actually outside here, outside the lighthouse, with maybe about two or three hundred other people, all waiting. We had speakers sort of up, we put upstairs on the outside of the lantern room.

58:11And then very precisely, the second hand moved to midday. this very faint sound started and faded up. And it was a really amazing, moving, incredible moment.

58:36I don't think everyone cheered or anything, it was more like everyone just started breathing again.

58:52People understood that what they were hearing was actually what you'd hear right at the end as well. So it's like this very weird feeling that you could see. You were here at the beginning of 2000, but you were actually sort of hearing the beginning of 3000 as well.

59:18You can listen to it online. Is there anywhere quirky or strange where you've heard it since the start? Listen to it, you know, on tops of mountains and in caves and, you know, amazing bits of landscape, tops of buildings, all over the place. Is there anyone that you've heard about that's listened to it and you thought, wow, as if that person has listened to it. There was a photo of the man who's now called King Charles listening to it up in the lighthouse with his hands over his ears, so I don't know what he thought of it. It will loop for the first time in 2 ,999, making it the longest musical composition.

1:00:04How does it feel knowing it could still be going on then? If it is to be still playing then, And, you know, it's kind of fascinating to speculate of, you know, of how it'll still be going on. What, you know, what form it'll be, you know, will it be the bowls? Will it be, you know, presumably people won't have computers. Who knows? We don't know what's going to happen in the world. You know, what dark ages the world might go through. Whatever happens, it's hoped Longplayer will continue going with a trust set up to look after it.

1:00:47The musician Gemfinder was talking to Megan Jones, and what a thought on which to end. His creation, Long Player, will still be playing after all of us alive today have shuffled off this mortal coil. That really is leaving your mark on this world and its history. We'll be back on a much shorter timescale, next week in fact, with more first-hand memories from the past. but until then this is Max Pearson from all of us here at the History Hour and Witness History thanks for listening goodbye. Sporting Witness takes you to the events that have shaped the sports world through the eyes of the people who were there.

1:01:20We weren't going to ask permission we're just going to do it. It was such an amazing feeling it was incredible. He started to write a story about how he came up with the idea for the red and yellow cars. I got to go we cried a bit We laughed a bit. It was wonderful. There's a magic during those moments that carries your soul. We were truly blessed to be a part of history. Sporting Witness. Subscribe wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:01:48I am Nina Khrushcheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962. And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of US President John F. Kennedy. We explore what was a terrifying moment in history. The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. How close the world came to nuclear war. And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink. The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev. All episodes available now, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.