Bob The Vid Tech; Message In A Bottle

The following program is made by an NPC to serve all of our diverse communities and is made possible by the generous support of our members. Thank you Brianna. I'm ready for my vacation. What are you going to go this year. Bob the Vitex here. Really you boys grew up if you want to be rude. I wish I could you know I did the only thing I don't want to be. OK I'll be right there. Now Brianna you know how to contact me in case of any emergency comes up right. Got it. You know I'm sure we're going to miss talking to you about all of our favorite shows. But please don't forget to write me a postcard or send me an e-mail. Sure thing Ocean City. Elect. Obama rigged a Jordan Thanks Pop.

Oh no. Am I too early. Or. Am I too late. Where is everybody. She wears. A Volvo walk. Hey. What's that. Dear friend. Estoy solo damn good Islam. I have no one to play with and I don't know how long I can survive. If you find my message

please help me. Oh my god someone's in trouble. Can they be. And who sends messages in a bottle an evil. Comedy big brick. Wall. How can I get a logo. That was. The. Message you know bottle and mpg kids and family special. Kids. Seems like I missed all the fun here at the beach but now it looks like someone may really be in trouble. Maybe we have some time to do some investigating. Do you want to help me solve a mystery. Story.

Let's call Briana and see if she'll help. Bob the detective Briana come in over the vents actively Ana come in over here. Hello. You should be having fun building a fair capsule by now. You really need to learn how to relax. Actually I can't find anyone here and I found this strange message in a bottle. I was hoping you could help me say where are you right now. I don't recognize that place where now it was supposed to be a surprise for you when you got back. But I'm in the new super computer room here at NPT. You know I built it so that we could go online and look up Fun Facts and help kids learn even more. That's perfect. Could you scan this message and see if we can find any clues to who this mystery person is. It has some strange codes. I don't understand. It's saying something about the languages of the world. It will take some time to decode it. But I did

find someone you could meet to find out when you're ready when you are vid tech Apprentice. Here we go. Where am I. We here at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. What's going son. Is there anyone here who can help me weed these words that sentences written in Spanish high above the bit. Hi I'm David Lightfoot. Tell me David Spanish is that a kind of a language. Yeah that's a language. There are many languages at that well how many. Over 6000 languages. They come in groups. People will speak differently depending on the groups that they're members of. That's really cool how have languages changed over time. Because words change meaning you just said that's really cool. How cool used to me to be of low temperature. But that's not how you used it. You meant it's neat it's interesting it's cute. And that's how you use the word the key people who change languages over time are children and children are

always changing language or making up their own forms of communication their own words a way of sort of identifying themselves as they grow up and they'll make up words words like fantabulous. Or chai Norma's. And that's really. Not. That. And some of these words stick and others don't. So we didn't always speak English like this. It was different so if you go to a play by Shakespeare it doesn't sound like the English that you and I speak. Oh Rumi. Romeo. Romeo you understand it but it sounds different. You go back a 600 years ago and it's different again in your sounded like this. I don't know if I'll have a grading lesson. And I'm a burned hard. OK Claire do you think you can teach me some words in Middle English. I think you can't. Let's go. On. For a lawyer for. Six

six seven and if you. Can tell we did it. Give me a fever. So one of the languages are there. Well there's Italian which out of bad guys and Italians sounds quite a lot like Spanish jack of a day made up of these people. And there's German coming in Georgetown and German doesn't sound so much larger target and more Spanish to get that based on the scan comment stuff might be going to have a baby or take the voice. I mean this Arabic some Arabic sounds very different very different from German even more different from a title. I don't know. And then there's Spanish. When all the above Spanish is spoken by many people around the

world originally in Spain in the New York I don't use the other George that it's India and millions of people in this country it's the second most commonly spoken language in the United States. There are hundreds of languages in Europe this Finnish Basque German Polish Lithuanian in Asia there's a Thai Cambodian Chinese Korean Japanese in Africa many hundreds of languages where cosa in this country we have many Native American Indian languages Hopi Navajo a gypsy I had no idea there were so many languages in the world and they all sound so different from each other. Now we know this was written in Spanish. Let's check with Brianna. Hey Briana How is the computer diagnosis going. Well I figured out that the first line means I am alone on an island but the rest is going pretty slowly on my free. I do have a new location for you to visit to find out about how some messages get from one place to another. Are you ready.

A story least I'm ready. To. Be. It's the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum. Let's go inside. This place is kind of spoke. If you think it's kooky Now imagine what it would have been like as a postal writer back in the sixteen hundreds carrying mail along this trail. If the previous writers hadn't marked the trees by carving notches in them you probably would have had a very good chance of getting lost along the trail. Hi I'm Bob and I'm Bruce Peterson. First how did the mail service begin in America. Well that goes way back to the first European settlers. Really want to keep contact with those they left behind in Europe and the only way to do that in those days was by mail. So the Dutch wrote back to the Netherlands the French to France the Germans to Germany to English to England then as we stayed here longer

generations were born here and so we started writing mail to each other here in the colonies and that really helped of course the nation because prior to that we were independent counties but the mail fraud is together and we help to bind the nation and move us towards creating a democracy. Well then how did mail get from one place to the other. Well as my post a writer for the longest time any time to make it in really and they'd be going from post to post with his Post writers were stationed and because it was called posting we have the word posters come down to us today. You notice anything unusual about these newspapers. They will have their work posted exactly and that's because colonial printers would name the newspapers by the way they were transmitted by post or by courier as the United States got bigger What happened. Well the mail faced some real challenges 1849 gold was discovered in San Francisco and once gold was discovered how everyone wanted to get from east to west. Well the quickest way in those days was not by land by water by clipper ship around the horn of South America. Three months journey or through Central America by coastal steamer till we finally had

that overland commercial route and used this here the stagecoach. This was twenty five days from St. Louis Missouri to San Francisco. Hey let's move it we've got mail to deliver 25 days nonstop. Well one of the more famous ways of delivering the mail was of course the Pony Express and the Pony Express cut the time down to just ten days by curing it in relation writer to writer from St. Joseph Missouri to San Francisco on the Pony Express was established in 1860 but it was only in existence for eighteen months because as soon as the telegraph came into being that replaced it and the Pony Express just rode off into history. Are some one of the first post offices like postal. This is pretty much like the town it serves. It can be new. It can be old it can be larger or you can be small. Welcome to Bob's post office but the one thing they all had in common is that this is where the federal government reached out to its citizenry. So one of the first letter carriers began during the Civil War. Forty four different cities had letter carriers would actually bring the mail from the post office to your house. Well rural citizens for a long time had to go to the post

office to get their mail. But then world redelivery or Aristide came into fashion Mail free. Coming to your home but you don't know where the first test was on a county wide basis. Maryland another great moment in Maryland history. Wow cool truck I wonder if I could take it out for a spin. Not that one. It's out of service. Hi I'm Bob. Hi I'm on land from one of the first organising trucks about 19 06 in Baltimore City. Rather than walk or use harsh language they started to motorized because it was crashed into a vision and it got mailed back to the post office because for distribution. Do you have your own training here. Oh Lobo trained a very important for moving the mail. In fact special cars were set up called Railway post-office cards for the mail could be distributed and processed while the train was going down the tracks. How fast of the mail sorters have to work. One letter a second. 60 letters a minute why do you think I could do it. Let's try.

100 men use planes to deal with things that I know of go faster than airplanes. The first flight took place in California. The plane flew from Petaluma California to Santa Rosa in 1911. Well that's only eight years after the Wright Brothers had the first motorized flight that is a world war one military bomb it was modified and it would carry about 500 pounds of mail that that plane was an experimental effort. That boom was used to snag a canister of mail that wished on a wire between two posts and. Applied it would slow down at the same time a canister of males being blacked out the other side of the plane and a small town with no airport got an air mail pick up and their mail delivery. That's what I call express mail. So how big is the postal

service. It's very good. Over 200 burning. Pieces of mail of the billions. That's a billion billion a little less than half the world's mail. Roughly 350000 letters. There is a. Stream today. To liberate someone hungry. For you. Know your. Address. If you want to people write letters. Well because communication between people is such a wonderful thing we've always done it. It's actually a physical piece of paper that you're spinning from one person another. It's your handwriting. It's your heart and soul it's fun. But most importantly when the other person works it. That's a piece of paper they think I'm going to remember from you say when was the last time you got a letter. Funny you should ask. I just got this recently but I can't figure out his address. Can you not it. Oh maybe if you flipped it around. This reminds me I need to write my pen pals more often. Briana are you there. I sure am Bob the computer decoded the address and it's Ocean City Maryland Ocean City Maryland.

I was just there. Boy it sure is a big place to find just one person. Any other ideas. Well those numbers on the message could be a phone number but it doesn't seem to make sense. I just found some paper that might be able to help. Hold on tight. Wait a minute. I'm back of this subject tells time someone told me you needed help with the phone number. Oh I sure do high on Bob the bit I am thinner than that. Sandy what our phone numbers phone numbers are the numbers that you dial on the telephone when you want to make a phone call and every home has its own unique telephone number. Oh how did phones begin a man by the name of Alexander Graham Bell created the telephone back in 1876 that's over 100 years ago and he made the first phone call. He sure did that you know what he said. Entrepreneur we haven't thought that far you know. He actually called his the thing and he said Mr. Watson come here I want you.

If you've ever seen a phone number like this it looks all mixed up to me. Did you hear that Briana pulls through 60. It always works on liars when you pick up the handset years down. That's Remember when you talk on the phone your voice travels over these wires and then outside goes up the side of the house and then there's a telephone pole. So how big are telephone poles. They range from 25 to 100 feet tall. They're pine trees. They have farms they grow just to be telephone poles and the wire that came out from the house connects on the pole and then all those wires connected cables they carry him back to the central office. So what exactly is he doing down there. Rick's working on the underground telephone cable TV or cable for feet underground all the way back to our office. So how can I get to where those cables are going. Rick can help you out. While there must be hundreds of wires here actually there are 250000 wires coming through here and every one of those connected to a

telephone. Hi I'm boss of Intel growing Welcome to the cable cable fault. You've seen the cables in the manholes. That's where all the cables come in from under the street and they go up stairs into where our central office equipment is. This looks like miles of spaghetti. This is the downtown main distribution frame. Each one of these wires that you see the doll time to announce and we make a connection to make sure that your telephone number goes to your house. So where are we now. This is the downtown central office. When were the dolphins come from these walks you actually give me a little food here so when I pick up the phone. And go to dial a number you're actually programming this computer by the numbers Richard. Whether you're going to make a local call or a long distance call to the party you want to speak to it we could call my relatives in Hawaii. I think we'll be out with.

Aloha Carol how do phone calls get sent all over the country. All of our central offices are connected together via fiber optics microwave even submarine cables and satellites to get to one part of the world for the oil. So these machines just handle phone calls. No they handle one more than that. They handle your bank's AGM machines Cove Air Force. Even the internet go over these large areas. But what about all those phones I see people using with no wires at all. I'm sorry Bob. Somebody else going to have to help you with that. It's a TV tower just like back at the station. Actually this is the cellular tower. Hi I'm Bob. Patty and Patty a cellular tower You mean like for cellular phones. I see people using cellular phones all the time but they don't have any wires How does it work. The cell phone is just like a radio really and sound waves. There is a device that when you talk into it the sound comes out the top and they go up. That

hour. And I will send them to wherever we're calling who does the word celular me. Oh Bob the scientist that invented cellular software drew it out on their paper that looked just like a honeycomb like the cells of a cellular towers something like a lighthouse picture three light houses. Each one has a circle of light around it. But in this case it's a circle of sound. The drive towards the first light house and it can see you from the tower. It takes your call you keep driving and eventually you're going to pass that lighthouse but you'll begin to see the red light house the green light house in the red light household talk. It'll transfer your call over to the next day when you pass the red light house the yellow light house will see you. You'll continue on till you get to the next one with this one fades the next will pick you up each time. They'll know where you're going. So when I'm making the cell phone call how does it get to the person I'm calling it comes right in here this is the cell site the calls come in through those great that black wires that come across here. Come down into the RCA. Or so yeah. What's that. That's great it when trolls frame me they're all radio they can do can handle up to about 30

comp. the peak and in here all your poll will come in at the same time this has to sort them out. There are actually phone calls in here right now I guess a lot of them but they're going to give you a lot of it takes a toll call in here and I'm bored with them all out and change them into. The language that the brain can understand this is the situation room cool room it looks like the walkers at school. Woman hang up a jacket now Bob. Actually this is the brain that we were talking about occurrences when you're on your mama you're pulling your brother down all those halls and everybody else's calls come in to this machine and this machine uses time division multiplexing. Think of a rolling home. And you have all the little cars on the roller coaster and they all have a number on them one two three four and so on. Cars are around very fast. Casey your conversation doesn't car number one someone else's conversation will go in number two number three number four. The roller coaster goes around. Rostov. Your piece of conversation. Come on out to whoever you're talking to. Comes back around and gets another. Very very fast. So what's next.

Welcome to the control room. One of the things we do is we look at these computers and they show us a little pictures of what's happening outside of the cell sites. But something is broken it might flash it you inbred. And then we would know hold we need to fix that. The other things we do with engineering in the planning to build a new cell towers and self lights you know when you need new cell sites let me introduce you to somebody who is great when people are having trouble with their cell phones What do you do to help them. Well my job is to look for weak signal urges also busy signals and all that. Do you use the school truck decided to let that run let's go. Cool Greg you've got a computer in your car can we play some video games. No no. This could do to you to see if the cell phones are working or not. My job is to make sure that the cell phones work properly in certain areas that I drive. So you're kind of like a troubleshooter. True. Phones All right here jump on

the chrome thing. What are all these voices on here and we all jumped because the supercomputer back at the office is simulating voices of male and female so that we can understand what a person is saying on the cell phone. Gee whiz we keep learning so much but we don't get any closer to solving the mystery. Any new ideas Briana. I think that the code is the numbers they were all mixed up. But when I try to call it just rings and nobody answers. So the last clue in the message that has the symbol that means X when you use e-mail. Are you ready as ready as I'll ever be. You. See I'm at the University of Maryland College Park. I'll bet there's someone here who can help me. Know.

What's going on here. Hi everyone I'm positive I know you guys look really smart. Can anybody here figure out what this means. It looks like an email address but way out of order email you know I've always wondered what the email me how he can help you. He actually stands for electronic joint stead of putting a message on a piece of paper with a stamp in an envelope or actually sending it through the computer. Email addresses are really amazing. Just imagine if somebody else had my name in another part of the world. How would your email get to me. Email addresses actually consist of three parts at the beginning there's a name in the middle there's an and sign at the end. There's a domain name and domain name. It's sort of like the town on a paper envelope. So there's like dot edu for school or educational facility there is done. Or for a nonprofit institution. And dot com for a money

making company. So how does an electronic piece of mail get from one place to another. It starts on my computer hops through all these other computers on different networks and finally ends up at yours. Now when you say a network what exactly is that. Well each organization like the University of Maryland has a whole bunch of computers and they're all connected together by cables that makes a network. Maryland Public Television has its own network of computers. And then each of these networks are all connected by cable. And this network of networks is called the Internet the Internet the Internet. So how old is the Internet. Oh it's about 35 years old. It actually was created just after I was born. Then the World Wide Web started to come into play about 15 years ago. And then e-mail only became popular 10 years ago. So let's have our team show you how email works. Just imagine that each e-mail is represented by a balloon. Each person here is going to. A bunch of computers and all of these strings are the networks between the computers so really this whole group is the Internet. The way that will send a message from one

person to another is by finding the next closest group of computers. And so if I have a message for a sentence of the next closest group and then they'll send it to the next closest group the next closest who finally gets to the destination. Instant messaging is sort of like e-mail and that allows us to communicate one to one. But instead of our e-mail going through all of this crazy Internet instant messaging goes through a single computer run by some single large service usually a large company. Hi I'm the company so instant messaging works as long as we're both connected to the same company at the same car. So what's coming up in the future. Internet based video telephones will have a special kind of tele. With a little camera and a little screen and then I'll be able to talk to you and see you at the same time. Does this e-mail address make any sense to you. Well if we look at the letters this way it spells NPT org. Hey Brianna are you getting any of this.

I'm already on it. If you rearrange the letters to fit them and mpg down bored watch my brother Biff Briana get him on screen right now we've got to find out what's wrong. Oh hi guys. Bit for you OK I found your message in a bottle you know did. Geez I could have avoided that fine I had to pay a fine. What did you do now Biff. Well I was waiting for you to get to the beach and I spotted this cool machine on the boardwalk. It's only 25 cents you can make your own message in a bottle but the machine must have been broken and my message was all messed up. So I sort of dropped it in the water accidentally. You. Know. Oh OK well maybe I threw it because I was a little mad. So why didn't you ask them. I wanted to have me if I heard it ran. My mom had been texting on the phone with said to me later on there you go oh

gosh Briana there are so many different ways to communicate with each other. But when I think about it all communication follows the same basic pattern. A person sends a message through a pathway to a receiver. It's that simple. You could write a letter and send it through the mail to someone you could pick up a phone and call other people on phones which are connected by wires. You could write an e-mail or an instant message and send it through the Internet or you could talk to people like I did today and your voices travel back and forth. Even biffs message in a bottle if wrote a message put it in a bottle in the ocean was the pathway that carried it to me the receiver. I want to say a big Thank You to all the people who helped me solve the mystery especially you. This is Bob the Vitex binding you to always keep the lines of communication open. See you next time. The preceding program was made by NPT to serve all of our diverse

communities. And was made possible by the generous support of our members. Thank you.