Wait, you're listening to radio lab from WNYC And NPR tired of the everyday routine Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure. Yeah, want to get away from it all. Yeah, we offer you escape This way I'm going to talk from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure Okay, so this is an old time radio show from the 1940s, late 40s And they figured that It's called Escape, and I know he starts the same way, you know with We offer you escape That phrase, I love how they say it, and here's what's great about the show And why, it seems like a good way to start this show, our show Is it immediately after they say that phrase? They then present you with a scenario From which there seems to be no escape?
You are hanging by your fingertips on the sheer face of an ice cliff Here's one So spend a thousand feet above instant death with your strength running out of trance for a statement There's a million of this You are aboard a tiny junk, one of ground off the coast of Borneo You are lost in a London fog You are a passenger, a port of suffering You are the subject of an experimental sea ancient aimless terror I can't take development to a no escape Wait, one more, one more, just for kicks You are trapped in a remote valley at the end of the walled in by sheer rock residents And surrounding you, closing in on you Is a band of blind things Who want your eyes How can you not listen to that? What is better than like a story where the walls are closing in on you You don't know what you are going to do, what I am going to do, what I am going to do And suddenly, escape! It's like the best story ever That's true So, ready? This hour The opprio!
Three bizarre scenarios! Two stories of people And planets Trying to yearning Two Will they make it? And if they do, what are they escaping? Two Okay, enough of that, I am Jad I am Robert This is Radio Lab And to start, let's talk about escape artists Because why not?
Right, I mean this is an escape show Exactly The most famous escape artist in history is probably Harry Houdini And our first story is kind of a Houdini story It comes from our producer Pat Yes It's about a guy whose nickname is Little Houdini, right? Yeah, I heard the story from my friend Ben Hello? Like months ago Oh, your brother? Ben, your journalism friend My journalism friend Yeah, I am a reporter with the Tampa Bay Times Florida, but our story begins At the Turny Center Penitentiary And only Tennessee That's what we caught up with little Houdini He was between his gates He said Couple of guards walked us into this huge cafeteria It's out of this little tiny table And brought out Chris Chris Gay That's his name Do you have an interview with brother in every day?
Yeah, we talk to him again I guess the first thing I noticed was He was even smaller than I expected him to be He was going to be little, you know, nickname He was a very little Houdini I sure, maybe 5'5", yeah, 140, 130 His prison uniform was pretty baggy on him He was wearing a white ball cap And he had a big smile stretch across his face I think it's actually a dick-a-dack thing I think it is But I think what's addictive about it It's a way to punch him in the stomach Say, hey, this can be done I may not have been a y'all, I might have told me I can't do it in my life More people I've told me that I know I can do it How many times have you escaped? Probably about 13 13? 13? 13?
Out of jail? Yeah, and unfortunately, all 13, I made all 13 I did a little research to see how that compares to other Houdinis And there are a few people who come close But as far as I was able to find out Nobody alive has that many escapes Could we say pretty safely that he's the greatest jailbreaker alive? I'll go ahead and call him that, yeah So I got a wife from him and pretty much without you I'm pretty much without you Because he's going to listen to the escapes He has escaped every way you can imagine Sit my hand up and up with the diardokes Went out the bag between the waist or whatever Jumping fence Pulled all my clothes off set my boxer shorts Like handcuffs He said picking a handcuff key is one of the easiest things he's ever done Sure enough He's used everything from a pen spring to a safety pen Even once A zipper time might handcuff you out my zipper Scrambled out windows, ran out doors, climbed over walls Snuck under walls, drilled through them He's faked suicide Twice, he's tricked the cops by drawing out fake escape plans Pulled their dogs by covering his clothes and pepper A bunch of pepper Another time he didn't have any pepper but He'd found some roadkill He's dog, he didn't smell like a skull He rubs it all over his body to erase his scent Pretty good hiding too He's had a tree, jumped out a trap door Then he cut the floor of his trailer Once he hid in a grave All over the shallow grave Ended up on a college campus someplace outside of Landa And he hid out on top of an air duct For two days Until the coast is clear One of the interesting things about Chris is that Even though he's been doing this for 20 years There's never a record of him assaulting anyone No I refuse to do it Stole things, but pretty much only things to help him run I always refuse to go in somebody's house I always refuse to go in somebody's garage He says he got rules for himself about how he breaks the law Almost like a coat In fact, the story that got then interested in Chris in the first place Is kind of the perfect example of this This was a few years ago in 2007 Then got a press release From the Florida Highway Patrol be on the lookout for, you know, Chris Gay According to the press release, here's what happened Chris had been locked up in Alabama When he got a telephone call from his family He said my mom was a... Was that?
Get cancer So he faked suicide, busted out of the prison transport van That was bringing to the hospital, stole a truck And just started driving home Who's going to see his mom? To his last respects And he expected to live very long As he comes around the bend of the road to where his mom lives He's driving a Walmart tractor trailer And he's got like a dozen cops on his tail When I get down there I run off the road Crashes a truck into a field near his mom's trailer He jumps out of the truck He just was running to a house They started to drive the cars and run it told me And just before he makes it inside They chase him into the woods And he disappears Before he gets here A few days later Chris turns up in Daytona Beach Driving a tour bus that belonged to Crystal Gale With the country singer Yeah He stole Crystal Gale's tour bus Intensive and then drove it to Florida Yeah So you get this press release and you think what? I thought, uh, how do you mess with a story like this? So Ben writes his story for the newspaper Big news And pretty soon Tonight, a luxury tour bus that normally carries TV news people on it took off And he's an escape artist and something of a folk hero And soon Chris became something of a folk song Literally But we Chris got caught a Grammy award-winning bluegrass picker named Tim O'Brien put out a song Called The Dallard of Christopher Daniel Gae Pretty soon a famous Hollywood director Bought the rights to the movie They were recently trying to get, uh, Johnny Gae up to do it But, uh, they didn't know about it It's perfect You know, here's the underdog making a run for it For what scene that's on to be really good intentions And part of me thought, you know, I mean this is awesome But it's also **** I mean, there's gotta be more to this story Absolutely Who's this guy, really?
And why does he keep running? Proportion destination on the mind You know what, tell us we're going? Going to. But, uh, we're going to go to the end.
And I'm going to the end. And I'm going to go to the end And I'm going to go to the end I'm going to go into Buckeye Bottom road To talk to Tari Gay That's Tari is Chris's older brother Who says he can tell us the whole story about how they grew up Here we are Chris grew up in a small trailer out in the middle of nowhere West of Nashville There are some junk cars off in the woods We find Tari hanging out with a couple buddies Chring up the beers So have as certain things you don't know about or anything or We start talking about what it was like when they were kids No, we lived in a little big trailer down there He points off into the woods across the street Don't test land It was Chris and Tari And a little brother named Eddie who went by Cotton And then it was Leanne Leanne Gay He's older sister. Cotton's in jail, so we weren't able to interview him. But we and Atari both told us that going up in that trailer was hard.
We grew up like mountain people, you know. No electricity, no rainwater, did their wash in the river. It wasn't as much food around. It used to be a big field of plums, a big plum ficot.
We got an angry eat. But you can't live on plums. A lot of days we would be hungry. Leanne remembers to buy in bed when she couldn't go to sleep because her hunger pangs were so bad.
And Atari said, here, this will help you. And he ripped up. A little dang notebook paper. Gave it to Leanne.
He said, just chew it up real good and swallow it. And it'll help you. And for Kristen, his little brother, Cotton, those were the good days. Because mom and dad got a divorce in the family split apart.
Sorry Leanne went to live with mom. Kristen, his little brother. Who were 10 and 11 at that point, moved in with their dad. And dad, he really wasn't, you know.
I don't guess. He just went no provider. He wasn't around very much. I mean, he was a deadbeat dad.
He got where he could get off working with Roddy's. And he wouldn't come home for weeks at a time. He had tell him to go. If they was hungry to go, steal from churches.
Sometimes they'd hike through the woods to their grandfather's house. Their mom's dad. And Chris has hated him as little brother Cotton. We would go down there.
He got where he started making his fight each other. If we fist-filed each other in the wind or caught somebody, that's a, you know, he was mean. So that was their life. Eating each other out for food.
He had to go. He had to go. He had to go. It's almost.
So one night, one night, one night, and went and found their dad's rifle. And it was a 22. And a tube sock full of rusty bullets. And went out behind the barn, lit a tire fire, and made a suicide pact.
Cotton was going to shoot Chris in the forehead and then shoot himself. And Chris closed his eyes and Cotton put the gun to Chris's forehead. Chris heard him whimper and he opened his eyes and Cotton said, I can't do it. And Chris said, well, let me do it.
He took the gun and he put the barrel to his brother's head. And he couldn't pull the trigger either. And they were 10 and 11 at this point? 10 and 11, man.
And Ben says, if you take a step back, you can see that it's right about here at this point. That Chris and his brother start to steal. Like, really steal. They started out like little bicycles.
And then went to them, I guess, four withers and motorcycles. It's all stuffed with wheels. Chris remembers going with Cotton to sit on a bluff. Yeah, it was on the inter-cycle wheel.
We would go watch trucks with eye. And they would dream about getting in a semi and driving far away. So they went to, I guess, four withers and motorcycles and cars and gradually got bigger and bigger and bigger. To one day when Chris was 17, he stole a semi.
They didn't even really know how to drive it. But I kind of, inside of the keys was in it. So I started it up. And from there, there's really no looking back.
Can I pause you right there before you continue? Let me just name some modes of transportation. And you tell me yes or no, what you've stolen. Semi.
Bulldozer. Yes, skid steer. Skid steer. Tractor.
Back over. Anything that's the flies? I actually got in helicopter once. And we got in there, started flipping switches.
And we finally got the blades. We wrote plates. But it was a low, low thing. We got skid and got out of it.
Point is, this is a light for more than two decades. Feeling things that move, getting caught, and escaping. Skid, feeling things that move, getting caught, and escaping. Until eventually, he became that guy on TV.
A little hoo-dining who has police on the run and sticks the stakes. But then one night, something happened that seemed like it might break this loop forever. He met a girl. Yes.
Yes. Name was Missy. She was waiting tables at a little campsite diner. He thought she was cute.
And Missy. He just moved talker. I'll get in that. Yeah.
She liked the way he talked. And I was taking right off the bat. A few months later. I got pregnant with my daughter.
And made him. We've been together for a while. Life was really good. We still had all the money in the bank.
And I was working good for a regular construction. Had a good paint job. We're in the bulldozer. And I was actually going to school in Lebanon to get my senior license.
We had a knife trailer. And it had a refrigerator. Did you like it? Yeah.
I really liked it. Matter of fact, I was talking about daughter last night. It came real close with my daughter. She remembers it like it was yesterday.
He got her a dog. She named him Blackjack. The first puppy she ever got. That right there was the best moments in days of a happy days.
I think mine and his life. I ever. But then things got complicated. And one day when Chris and Missy were driving the car together.
We were going right there in the middle of Nashville. Chris says, look, I got to tell you something. I stole something. I sold a bobcat tractor.
From a construction job. I sold it. And to make ends meet. As soon as she heard that Missy whipped her head around.
And I like hitting with a big mat right in the middle of Nashville on night 24. A big mat. Yes, I did. But it was only funny for a little while.
A couple days later. Somebody told on the yard. He got arrested. He stayed in jail for about two years.
And then escaped. I don't know how exactly. But before long he stole again. And ended up back in jail again.
And Missy? I stayed by his side. Again. She was determined.
He'd come home from his escape saying, I'll just take the bin locked up. He'd be in a way for you guys. He'd want to be away from my kids. And I didn't want to be away from me.
He's time got locked up. Missy would write him letters. I was sending money because I worked the whole time I was pregnant with my 13-year-old. What kind of work were you doing?
Worked on a sand in line. Sanded rock and chairs. Chris, meanwhile, was thinking about his next escape. And when he came charging through the front door, thinking of Roadkill telling Missy that again, he had escaped.
I stayed with him. Again. But this time. I started asking for check stubs on a weekly basis.
And at an hour's up that he'd been gone from time he left the house, which I would knock down right in time there and from. You were keeping tabs on it? Yes, I was. She went so far as to take $5,000 out of the bank account that they shared by a trailer for them to live in.
One that wouldn't move. You know, I was trying more or less to make him do right. And it seemed like it was working. But then one night.
Chris came in after working. Sat down the living room with Missy and their daughter to watch some TV. Next time we know we heard a loud beating at the door. Well, you know, I jump up and he jumps up.
And next thing I know, he was moving that kitchen table and sliding it out. Next thing I know, he raises the rug up off the floor. And he jumps down there and he says, cover it back up. So I cover it back up, put the table back and answer the door.
And they came in and they walked all around the house. And they left. You bought this house to keep him still. And he'd cut a trap door in it.
Yep. He stayed up on his front of the whole time. They were walking over top of him. Wow.
Yeah, I guess it was more or less. I was young. I knowed. But I was also in denial.
But eventually something happened that forced her to admit just how bad things had gotten with Chris. Day before Halloween, Danielle and her daddy went down to Walmart and she picked out a little witch outfit. But she was open up and then you know she was four. You know, trick or treating for a four-year-old.
That was a big thing. Next morning it's Halloween. Her daddy looked out and said, well, baby, I'm going to work. I'll say this afternoon, you know, I'll get home.
Well, get your outfit on you and we'll go trick or treating up in Nashville. And that afternoon Danielle was sitting on the back step and she was just sitting there in a white T-shirt and I asked, Danielle, what are you doing? I went, no, my daddy, get home. He said, we're going to go to Nashville and we're going to go trick or treating.
I said, OK, he'll be back in a little bit. And she sat there and she sat there. And he never came home that night. You, um, I don't really hear like, I don't hear a lot of bitterness from you.
No. Is that accurate? Yes. Why?
Well, as far as me being upset with Chris or hating Chris, yes, ma'am. Is that what you're asking me? Yes, ma'am. How could you not forgive Chris?
18 years. That's how long I've known that boy. And I have seen firsthand where he lived, how he lived. I'm a fighter.
I go to church. My kids go to church. I learned to forgive people. And Chris has had a hard life.
He needs help. He helped that I can't give him. You saw for a while that you could give him the help? Yes, it did.
I should have been there for my kids. It took a lifetime on making us up. You know, on making up what I've done. So what do you make of the story, Pat?
Well, somewhere along the way, for Ben and I, this story really became about the simple question. Can a person like Chris, you know, grew up the way he did? Can a person like that change? Or do you just never escape a child like that?
People live with how they grew up. Yes, Missy, she says. If two kids and a wife that he loves, if we can't stop him, I don't know what can. But when we asked Chris, he said, it's in my mind, I'm going to change it.
I'm not only going to change it, I'm working to change. Really? Of course he has said that before. Truthfully.
What's different this time? You know, I'm doing classes that I don't have to take. I'm taking everyone up. I'm taking how to be a better deity.
I'm taking everything. And when I come up with Prodismar, I'm going to ask him, can I go ahead and complete another nine month program? Wait, is he's saying he's going to ask him to keep him in jail? Yeah.
The 20 years of running, he's asking the Pro Board not to live. Which made me think, I don't know, maybe. And Ben, what do you think? I don't think there's any way that Chris changes.
I think he's, you know, unfortunately doomed to stay in the cycle, which sucks, you know? I'm sort of ashamed that I have that opinion. Why? I mean, why do you think you feel that way?
I mean, my dad was pretty similar to Chris in many ways. Really? My father abandoned me when I was a young boy. And I got reacquainted with him when I was a teenager.
At that point, he was very sad alcoholic, who often made big mistakes. And I played high school football. And near the end of the year, my senior year, they put out this highlight tape. So I took that highlight tape to his trailer in Slick, Oklahoma.
And after shooting a lot of tequila, we sat down on the couch together, and I put the tape in. And we were watching me play football. And not long into it, my dad starts sobbing. Just balling tears running down his face.
And I look over at him and he says, I wish I could have been there. And I wanted nothing more in that moment. And today, then to ask him, why weren't you? And I think in some way, I get that opportunity in this job to ask my dad that question.
And says his dad never answered that question. And after that day, where they watched that football tape, nothing changed. Ben got older, graduated from college, got married, had kids. And his dad never showed up for any of it.
So he says, when he's talking to a guy like Chris, in some ways, I'm sitting across the table from my own father. Which doesn't give him a lot of hope. The only ounce of encouragement that I have, honestly, is if we find out that Chris has, indeed, when given the chance to get out of jail, said, no, thank you. Maybe that gives me an ounce of hope.
And a couple weeks ago, Ben got a letter from Chris. Can you just stay? Can you read for me? Yeah.
He says, dear Mr Montgomery, thank you for your letter. I'm doing well. I went up for parole. And yes, I did ask them to let me go through the program.
The final decision was to parole me upon completion of the program. I will complete it on October 4, 2012. So he's staying? Well, I better get this in the mail.
Thank you again for writing. I hope to hear from you again. Your friend, Christopher Daniel Gay. Thanks to our producer, Pat Walters.
And to Ben Montgomery, his story on Christopher Daniel Gay is in the Tampa Bay Times, which you can find online. And we've got a link to it from our website, RadioLab.org. We will return to escape in just a moment. But first, hi there.
This is Ben Montgomery. RadioLab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.flone.org.
This week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Steve Kerr, one of the best coaches in the NBA, and certainly one of the most outspoken. Calling the president of Bofun. I kind of regret that, even though I felt it in my heart, because I'm representing a large group of people, not only for our organization, but our fans too. Steve Kerr joins us next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC.
Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm John Abemrod. I'm Robert Quill, which is RadioLab, and today. We offer you and me.
Talk about escape. Stories about people being trapped and then getting out, getting free. In our last segment, we made a guy from whom will escape itself, became a trap. But now we're going to take our escape motif to a much bigger scale.
Yeah. And we're calling this, by the way, the outer limit. Because in this one, we're going to the outer limits of the human imagination. It began for us when we spoke with this writer.
Yes, I hear you're moving. And Dolnik is his name. And he told a story about. So this is Isaac Newton's story, for the most part.
And it's a story that involves the Earth, the heavens, God, humanity, and he might as well throw in the apple. The one thing everybody knows about Newton is that an apple fell from a tree and barked him on the head. Which isn't true, I was told, right? Isn't that apocryphal?
It's probably not true. But it's a story that Newton himself told. Oh, really? Because Newton, according to Ed.
All his life had this notion that he was different from other people, not only different but better. He had a pipeline to God. God was whispering secrets, the secrets of creation into his ear. No one else had been blessed in this way.
Other people's role in life was simply to bog him down. Not what I would call the most, modest guy. No. But at any rate, our story begins.
Around 1665, Newton is it Cambridge? She's a student. And Cambridge is hit by the plague. They send everybody home because although nobody understands how the disease works, they know that if people are crowded together, they tend to all get it.
So everybody go your separate ways. This is a kind of an enforced summer vacation. Right. And he's like 19 or 20 at this point.
It's 21, 22. OK. Newton goes home to his mother's farm. Mom is like, cool.
Now you can help me on the farm. But he says, no. Because he has a plan. He brought some books home.
A bunch of textbooks. He locks himself in his room. It sets himself not only to having mastered all the science that had ever been done, but to plunging on ahead of everyone else on his own, motivated by this religious faith that everything in the universe was set up by a god who wanted someone to crack the code. Newton believes he's the one.
And what was he doing in his room? I mean, does he? That's sitting there in like with a thousand giant textbooks? All that's known is that he did this.
He just went to his room and came out with what we're about to talk about. He came out with how gravity works, how light works, how rainbows work, how the tides work. And then having done all this. He did all this.
What did you do on your summer vacation, Jett? I know like my summer, I learned how to fold sheets like Marines, which I thought was pretty good too. So after having one flash inside after another, Newton now sets his mind to one of the great problems of all time, which for our purposes we will call the problem of the moon. And just to set this up.
What everybody before Newton and Galileo thought is there are a bunch of ordinary things here on Earth, like rocks, and they behave in the ordinary way that we know. You know, pick a rock, like go. It falls. And there are a bunch of much more different mysterious, elegant, perfect things in the sky.
Like the moon, which doesn't fall, it just floats there. So one could conclude that the moon has its own separate set of laws. There are one set of laws that work here on Earth, and another set that work in the heavens. And there's no reason it should be the same set of laws.
Any more than New York's law should be the same as Paris's laws. It kind of makes sense actually, having things float, earthly things fall. But then here's where the problem begins. Newton and a bunch of people at that time had gotten a hold of this new fangled thing called a telescope.
And one of the things they saw was that the moon wasn't this mysterious heavenly body that they said, it was a big rock, a regular lumpy potato-ish rock. Uh-oh. People were like, huh. But Newton being, of course, Newton thought, now, wait a second.
If the job of a rock is to fall, and if the moon is just another rock, why doesn't it fall down? Exactly so. What's it doing sitting up there night after night? Good question.
And it's at this point that Newton, sitting in his room wherever he was, we can imagine, makes a crazy mental leap. He thought back to a little thought experiment that Galileo had come up with, which initially might not make much sense, the connection. But it pays off. And here's the setup.
You've got someone standing in a big field with a gun that he's about to shoot. And next to that person with his gun is a person holding in his hand a bullet. So you've got a person holding a gun and a person holding just the bullet side by side? And the bullet in the hand and the bullet in the gun are exactly the same height above the ground.
And now somebody says, ready, aim, fire. And at the instant he says, fire, the man with the gun shoots that bullet horizontally. And at that same instant, the man next to him holding the bullet in his hand opens his hand and the bullet drops. So there's one bullet zipping along and then falling, and then the other one just falls.
Right. We shoot the bullet out of the horizontal gun, and we drop the bullet from right next to the gun. At the same time. Both bullets will hit the ground eventually.
But when they do, they'll be fire apart. And Galileo's riddle was, which of those bullets hits the ground first? Well, I mean, everybody would know that the one that would hit the ground first or the one that you just dropped, because the other one has to go all that. So this is a hard reel.
And the answer is. Wait, wait, why is it such a hard reel? Because everything that bullet you drop is just going to hit first. The gun's got to go all the way.
No. Those two bullets both hit the ground at the exact same instant. Really? That's an experimental fact.
The bullet from the gun and the bullet from the lens at the same time? Yes. This bullet that shot horizontally, it doesn't go like wily coyote running off a cliff. It doesn't go straight, straight, straight, straight.
And then fall. It's curving as it goes. And the thing that causes it to curve as it goes, of course, is gravity. It's the same gravity that is pulling the bullet that you drop.
Same gravity, same pull, same speed. So counterintuitively, when you drop a bullet and it falls through this long, when you fire the gun, it'll also fall for that long. Even though it ends up a mile away. See, that was Galileo's rule.
And that's as far as Galileo took it. Yeah. Newton looked at that and he said something smart. Firstly, he said, OK, this field.
Let's not pretend that this is some perfectly flat field that goes on forever. No, we're on the Earth. The Earth is round. And what roundness means is that the ground curves away below horizontal.
So really what's happening is that as the bullet is shooting across the field and falling to the Earth, the Earth at the same time is very gradually curving away from it. Now, of course, most guns, they don't shoot the bullet very far. And at that short distance, the field is still pretty much flat. But here's what Newton thought.
What if you could find just the right gun? That could shoot that bullet not just across the field, but across thousands of miles. And what if? As it falls, that bullet curves down towards the Earth.
In just the same way as the Earth is curving. Away from it. In this scenario? The bullet that we've shot will keep falling and falling and falling.
But the Earth keeps falling and falling and falling away from the bullet. So the bullet falls forever. The Earth curves forever. The picture never changes.
So the bullet then does what? The bullet is in orbit. Hundreds of years before Sputnik and other satellites, Newton has invented the satellite. And on top of that, he said, when we see rocks like the moon that are not falling, the reason we think they're not falling is because we misunderstand.
Really, just as the gun launched a bullet on Earth, and it goes and never falls, God, who was presumably a terrifically strong picture, launched the moon around the Earth at just such a rate that that would continue in its circle around us forever. This is a perpetual dance. The partners are bound together, but they never come close and they never break up either. It's this endless round.
From which there is no escape. What this does, what Newton did, is take the moon out of the domain of poets and musicians that are golden or in this kind of thing. And last so, to the same rules that we use here on Earth. In other words, what he showed is in a very real way, there's no separation between us and the heavens.
The same set of laws does govern everything. It's one universe, and I've explained it all. But once you figure out the laws of gravitation, then you can send spacecraft to Jupiter. Saturn, anywhere.
Out there. If you're a radio lab listener from way back, you might recognize that voice. So that's Andruia. Hi.
One of the first stories we did, actually. I interviewed her about working on the famous Golden record, you remember this? Sure. So the idea at the time was to put this record on the Voyager capsule, send it into space.
And on the record would be all these sounds it represented us. Kiss. A mother's first words to her newborn baby. Oh, come on now.
Good girl. Mozart. In any case, Anne was the one who was in charge of choosing all the sounds to put onto that record. She and Carl Sagan worked together on that project.
And here's the thing. We stopped our story as the rockets took off. But obviously, that was just the beginning of the story. And the Voyager capsules right now only dreamed of.
OK. And our producer, Loom Levy, has been. Sorry. I just turned my hands up way too.
Has been following the story. Ah. Ah. Yeah, you just turned it down.
Yeah. OK. So pick it up where we left. OK.
So in the point of the mission wasn't really to deliver this record, it was to go out and look at all the planets in the outer solar system. So starting in 1977, these two little spaceships, two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, went racing away from Earth, snapping pictures. And so every time Voyager would reach another planet, all of the Voyager people would get together, go into the imaging room and see the pictures come from the outer solar system. You remember seeing them?
I remember as a child saying live magazine. You know, I was seven when Voyager was launched. So this is Mera. I'm a professor at Boston University.
As a grown-up, she became part of the Voyager team. All the pictures, such as the kids, you look at the books and to see how Neptune looked, how Jupiter looked. You know, just complete revelation. Saturn.
The image of Saturn. Technicolor. Like pink and like reddish turquoise color. Yellow.
And those rings. Just spectacular. They could see active volcanoes on one of the moons of Jupiter. Finally, that vision of Neptune.
Oh, this blue jewel. Really blue. It's all came from Voyager. We had no idea how they looked like before Voyager.
Neptune was the last big cool planet and it was the last thing they were supposed to photograph. After that, the cameras were going to be shut off to save energy, but Kelsey convinced them to turn Voyager back to Earth and take a final picture. So on Valentine's Day, 1990, one of the ships slowly rotated so it was facing back to Earth and it snapped a picture. One last picture.
Describe it. So it's mostly empty. It's pretty dark. You can see sort of streaks of light coming from the sun.
And then you honestly wouldn't notice it if it wasn't pointed out to you. But down in one corner, kind of suspended in a sunbeam. There is a very small dot blue, a pale blue dot. That was us.
In Carl Sagan's words. Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved. Every superstar, every corrupt politician. Just everyone in all of history, everything.
The sun told you. Think of the rivers of blood. Look at the wrong. So that one indistinguishable group could have a momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.
It was one of those really rare images. Every single day, I hear from people who take that pale blue dot. So deeply to heart, it was a complete reframing. After that, the camas were turned off.
But here's the thing. The ships kept going. Going. Going.
Drifting through the darkness. Even though they weren't taking pictures anymore, they were using their other senses. Little instruments that detect how many particles are around what the temperature is. So they were hurtling through this empty space, really fast, measuring, sending that data back.
And scientists like Barov, where they're listening and waiting. For what? Was not clear. But they knew at some point these capsules would get to the edge.
The edge of what? The solar system. The solar system has an edge. I thought it was just a big spiral.
It has an edge. It's like a bubble. See, the sun has a wind. Every star has a wind, but the sun has its own wind.
It blows out through the solar system. It's very fast. It can be between 400 to 800 kilometers per second. Anyway, it blows out from the sun, passed all the planets, and it keeps everything else out.
Oh, so it's like a line of blue? Yeah, exactly. The wind gives it a shape. Right.
So these things are cruising out towards this edge, wherever it is. Scientists don't quite know where it is or what it is. The guys in the control room are like, picking the ships. They're like, hey, what's up?
What do you see? The ships are like, nothing. How about now? Not much.
No? Nothing. And how long before they actually see something? 14 years.
Oh, man. That's like driving through Kansas. But like a million times worse. But there comes a day, end of 2004, where they stop listening for a little while, because the antenna not only has so many antennas, and they have to use them to listen to everything.
So for a little while, the Voyager team's like, OK, you guys over there can use the antennas. We're going to lunch. Yeah, I mean, it's not like anything's happening. Nothing's happening anyway.
It's been 14 goddamn years. Knock yourself out. You guys, it's cool. And they come back a few hours later, start listening again.
And it's happened very suddenly. Everything is totally changed. Really? All of a sudden.
Boom. The speed of the wind dropped from around 380 kilometers per second to 100. Instantly. Just all at once.
And then everything out there started to get messy. Very turbulent. Much more turbulent. And before particles are also behaving a very different way.
And the fields are very weird. The fields. The magnetic field. So just like the sun has a wind.
The sun has a magnetic field as well. The field starts at the sun and then curves out in this kind of graceful arc through the solar system. And how the sun rotates creates what people call bilino skirt. You know how like a skirt will flare if you spin around real fast?
That's apparently kind of what this field looks like. But way out there, it seemed like the skirt started to fray. Maybe tear a little. Threads had broken off and seem to be floating around on their own, not connected to anything.
So what does this all mean? I mean if the fields are breaking down and the wind is dying down. You should have when actually creates the space of the solar system. Does this mean we're out?
No. I kind of thought that was what was happening. But no. It's not out and it's not quite in.
It's in the edge of the bubble. It's in the edge. But it's not like a little thin edge. It's a thick edge.
So the edge isn't just a little line that you cross at the place. Yeah. And while we listened, the two voyager ships moved through this edge for several years. Then something very interesting happened.
That the wind on Voyager 1 stopped. Like completely stopped? Yeah. So now we're out?
No. I mean this is what people thought. But the other measurements like temperature and the number of particles, the magnetic field. Doesn't tell us where the bubble was.
Nature surprised us again. So now we think there's a place at the edge of our solar system. Right. The edge of the edge.
That's utterly still. No wind at all. A pause. People are calling it a stagnation layer.
But there is a big discussion why this layer exists and how thick it is. And by how thick it is, she means when will it end? Because once we get past this, so has anything ever crossed this boundary before? No.
This would be the first man-made object to leave any star. And Voyager was like right there, smelling, touching that boundary. You know, you only do those things first once. Like your first kiss.
Your first taste of alcohol. Your first time driving a car. The first time you see the ocean. These things open up a whole new world.
First time out of the solar system. So when is it gonna freakin' happen? It might have happened while we were talking. We're thinking from now, any moment now, next couple of months or three years from now, four years from now.
It's close. Every day I open my Google alert for Voyager. And I look and see, did it happen today? Do you hear me?
Because if it happened before the show goes out and we pissed. Yeah. Every day. Yeah.
Is the first thing you do in the morning? Oh. All right. Good.
All right. Like the third thing. All right. So a quick update.
I'm Robert Krollick. I'm Robert Krollick. This is Radio Lab and today we're talking about escape. Escape.
And in this last story, I have a feeling that this guy actually does kind of make it through. This is true. I think he does. Honest escape.
But he does it in the most original and most unusual way. Here with the story is our producer Sean Cole. The story starts in the late 50s. There was this little boy in Richmond, Virginia named Joe and Gresia Jr.
He's seven or eight years old and he's just sitting at home, dialing various numbers on his parents' telephone. Just to see what happens. He was on a long distance call to information, you know, 555-1212 in a distant area code. This is Phil Lapsley.
I first heard Joe's story from him. And he heard very faintly in the background of the tone and he just started whistling along with it. And all of a sudden he heard a critique and a call went away. And it turns out that the tone in the background of the phone and his corresponding whistle was 2600 Hertz.
Musically it's about 7th octavee. So he has perfect pitch? Anyway he thinks to himself, that's very odd. Well that happened once.
I wonder if it happened again. He didn't even really know exactly what it was at the time. But he does it again and again. He didn't think it was particularly useful for anything.
He does talk about walking past somebody at a payphone when he was seven or eight years old and whistling this tone and having the phone at the phone call disconnect on the person. Wow! That's like having superpowers! That really is.
Yeah. Which means he could be a little walking bum. He could go to Grand Central Station where there are many people sitting in his thong boots and that he could make them all lose their phone call. Yeah.
And no one would know. Right but it was more than just a cool trick for him. This discovery was the beginning of a kind of a state. That's Jim.
It's all we have left of him, in fact. He died in 2007. But he left behind hours and hours of recordings of his voice, phone recordings. And as you listen to them, you pretty quickly realized that the little boy in that room who was playing with the phone, he was kind of desperate.
He went to this Catholic school for the blind, which he was born blind. And when he was there. Back in the fall of the big five. Things got pretty bad.
A lot of the nuns whipped their really hard. You know, and shook us. Only one. The vegetables abuse.
They used to have me get on the table. Get up on the table and lie down. It's about touching. Things were pretty bad at home, too.
Daddy was stuck at night. But now that has my phone up close. Listen to the dial tone. Nice, warm tone.
Never yelled. Never fought. What a wonderful. It was just a nice way for him to comfort himself.