Belting your favorite song over prerecorded music into a microphone in front of friends and strangers at karaoke is a popular way for people around the world to destress after work or celebrate a friend’s birthday. The idea for the karaoke machine didn’t come from a singer or a large entertainment company but from Nichiden Kogyo, a small electronics assembly company in Tokyo. The company’s founder, Shigeichi Negishi, was singing to himself at work one day in 1967 when an employee jokingly told him he was out of tune. Figuring that singing along to music would help him stay on pitch, Negishi began thinking about how to make that possible. He had the idea to turn one of the 8-track tape decks his company manufactured into what is now known as the karaoke machine. Later that year, he built what would become the first such machine, which he called the Music Box. The 30-centimeter cube housed an 8-track player for four tapes of instrumental recordings and included a microphone to sing into. He sold his machine in 1967 to a Japanese trading company, which then sold it to restaurants, bars, and hotel banquet halls, where they used it as entertainment. The machine was coined karaoke in the 1970s to describe the act of singing along to prerecorded music. The term is a combination of two Japanese words: kara, meaning empty, and okesutora, meaning orchestra. In a few years, dedicated establishments known as karaoke bars began to open across Japan. Today the country has more than 8,000, according to Statista. The karaoke machine has been commemorated as an IEEE Milestone. The dedication ceremony was held in June in the area that houses karaoke booths connected to the Shinagawa Prince Hotel in Tokyo. Negishi’s family attended the event along with IEEE leaders. Negishi died last year at the age of 100. He was grateful that people enjoy karaoke around the world, his son, Akihiro Negishia, said at the ceremony, “though he didn’t imagine it to spread globally when he created it.” Accidentally inventing one of the world’s favorite pastimes Shigeichi Negishi grew up in Tokyo, where his mother ran a tobacco store and his father oversaw regional elections as a government official. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from Hosei University in Tokyo, he was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. He became a prisoner of war and spent two years in Singapore before being released in 1947. He returned to Tokyo and sold cameras for electrical parts manufacturer Olympus Corp. In 1956 he started Nichiden Kogyo, which manufactured and assembled portable radios for the home and car, according to the Engineering and Technology History Wiki entry about the karaoke machine. Negishi would start each morning singing along to the “Pop Songs Without Lyrics” radio show, according to a Forbes article. He typically didn’t sing in the office, but one fateful day he did. Negishi was inspired to engineer one of the 8-track tape decks his company manufactured into what is now known as the karaoke machine An 8-track tape deck can play and record audio using magnetic tape cartridges. Nichiden Kogyo’s Music Box was a 30-centimeter cube with slots to insert four 8-track tapes on the top panel, with control buttons to play, stop, or skip to the next song. Inside each 13-centimeter-long rectangular 8-track cartridge is a loop of almost 1 cm-wide magnetic tape that is coiled around a circular reel, as explained in an EverPresent blog post on the technology. A small motor inside each cartridge pulls the tape across an audio head inside the player, which reads the magnetic patterns and translates them into sound. Each tape had a metal sensing strip that notified a solenoid coil located in the player when a song had ended or if a person pressed the button to switch to the next song, according to an Autodesk Instribules blog post. The coil created a magnetic field when electricity passed through it—which rotated the spindle on which the audio head was mounted to move to the next track on the tape. Each tape could hold about eight songs. Negishi added a microphone amplifier to the player’s top panel, as well as a mixing circuit. The user could adjust the volume of the music and the microphone. He also recorded 20 of his favorite songs onto the tapes and printed out the lyrics on cardstock. He tested the machine by singing a popular ballad, “Mujo no Yume” (“The Heartless Dream”). “It works! That’s all I was thinking,” Negishi told reporter Matt Alt years later, when asked what his thoughts were the first time he tested the Music Box. Alt wrote Pure Invention: How Japan Made the Modern World. In 1969 engineers at Tokyo-based trading company Kokusai Shohin added a coin acceptor to the machine, renaming the Music Box the Sparko Box.Dr. Tomohiro Hase The fees to file a patent were too expensive, according to the ETHW entry, so in 1967 Negishi sold the rights to the machine to Mitsuyoshi Hamasu, a salesman at Kokusai Shohin. The Tokyo-based trading company began selling and leasing the machines by the end of the year. In 1969 engineers at Kokusai Shohin added a coin acceptor to the machine. The company renamed the Music Box the Sparko Box. In six years, about 8,000 units were sold, Hamasu said in an interview about the rise of karaoke. Karaoke became so popular that in the 1980s, venues and bars specializing in soundproofed rooms known as karaoke boxes emerged. Groups could rent the rooms by the hour. Negishi’s family owns the first Music Box he made. It still works. The Milestone plaque recognizing the karaoke machine is on display in front of the former headquarters of Nichiden Kogyo, which Negishi turned into a tobacco shop after he retired. The shop is now owned by his daughter. The plaque reads: “The first karaoke machine was created in 1967 by mixing live vocals with prerecorded accompaniment for public entertainment, leading to its worldwide popularity. Created by Shigeichi Negishi of Nichiden Kogyo, and originally called Music Box (later Sparko Box), it included a mixer, microphone, and 8-track tape player, with a coin payment system to charge the singer. An early operational machine has been displayed at the original company site in Tokyo.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Tokyo Section sponsored the nomination.

The last time I used a dial-up modem came sometime around 2001. Within just a few years, dial-up had exited my life, never to return. I haven’t even had a telephone line in my house for most of my adult life. But I still feel a strong tinge of sadness to know that AOL is finally retiring the ol’ hobbyhorse. At the end of September, it’s gone. The timeline is almost on-the-nose fitting: The widespread access to the Internet AOL’s service brought in the 1990s is associated with a digital phenomenon called the Eternal September. Before AOL allowed broad access to Usenet—a precursor to today’s online discussion forums—most new users appeared each September, when new college students frequently joined the platform. Thanks to AOL, they began showing up daily starting around September 1993. The fact that AOL’s dial-up is still active in the first place highlights a truism of technology: Sometimes, the important stuff sticks around well after it’s obsolete. Why AOL is ditching dial-up now It’s no surprise that dial-up has lingered for close to a quarter-century. Despite not having needed a dial-up modem myself since the summer of 2001, I was once so passionate about dial-up that I begged to get a modem for my 13th birthday. Modems are hard to shake, and not just because we fondly remember waiting so long for them to do their thing. Originally, the telephone modem was a hack. It was pushed into public consciousness partly by Deaf users who worked around the phone industry’s monopolistic regulations to develop the teletypewriter, a system to communicate over phone lines via text. Along the way, the community invented technologies like the acoustic coupler. To make that hack function, modems had to do multiple conversions in real time—from data to audio and back again, in two directions. As I put it in a piece that compared the modem to the telegraph: The modem, at least in its telephone-based forms, represents a dance between sound and data. By translating information into an aural signal, then into current, then back into an aural signal, then back into data once again, the modulation and demodulation going on is very similar to the process used with the original telegraph, albeit done manually. Modems like this one from U.S. Robotics work by converting data to audio and back again. Jphill19/Wikimedia Commons With telegraphs, the information was input by a person, translated into electric pulses, and received by another person. Modems work the same way, just without human translators. The result of all this back and forth was that modems had to give up a hell of a lot of speed to make this all work. The need to connect over a medium built for audio meant that data was at risk of getting lost over the line. (This is why error correction was an essential part of the modem’s evolution; often data needed to be shared more than once to ensure it got through. Without error correction, dial-up modems would be even slower.) Remember that sound? It marked many users’ first experience getting online.AdventuresinHD/YouTube Telephone lines were a hugely inefficient system for data because they were built for voice and heavily compressed audio. Voices are still clear and recognizable after being compressed, but audio compression can wreak havoc on data connections. Plus, there was the problem of line access. With a call, you could not easily share a connection. That meant you couldn’t make phone calls while using dial-up, leading to some homes getting a second line. And at the Internet Service Provider level, having multiple lines got very complex, very fast. The phone industry knew this, but its initial solution, ISDN, did not take off among mainstream consumers. (A later one, DSL, had better uptake, and is likely one of the few Internet options rural users currently have.) In some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option—the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. So the industry moved to other solutions to get consumers Internet—coaxial cable, which was already widespread because of cable TV, and fiber, which wasn’t. The problem is, coax never reached quite as far as telephone wires did, in part because cable television wasn’t technically a utility in the way electricity or water were. In recent years, many attempts have been made to classify Internet access as a public utility, though the most recent one was struck down by an appeals court earlier this year. The public utility regulation is important. The telephone had struggled to reach rural communities in the 1930s, and only did so after a series of regulations, including one that led to the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, were put into effect. So too did electricity, which needed a dedicated law to expand its reach. But the reach of broadband is frustratingly incomplete, as highlighted by the fact that many areas of the country are not properly covered by cellular signals. And getting new wires hung can be an immensely difficult task, in part because companies that sell fiber, like Verizon and Google, often stop investing due to the high costs. (Though, to Google’s credit, it started expanding again in 2022 after a six-year rollback.) So, in some areas of the United States, dial-up remains the best option—the result of decades of poor investment in Internet infrastructure. This, for years, has propped up companies like AOL, which has evolved numerous times since it foolishly merged with Time Warner a quarter-century ago. The first PC-based client called America Online appeared on the graphical operating system GeoWorks. This screenshot shows the DOS AOL client that was distributed with GeoWorks 2.01.Ernie Smith But AOL is not the company it was. After multiple acquisitions and spin-outs, it is now a mere subsidiary of Yahoo, and it long ago transitioned into a Web-first property. Oh, it still has subscriptions, but they’re effectively fancy analogues for unnecessary security software. And their email client, while having been defeated by the likes of Gmail years ago, still has its fans. When I posted the AOL news on social media, about 90 percent of the responses were jokes or genuine notes of respect. But there was a small contingent, maybe 5 percent, that talked about how much this was going to screw over far-flung communities. I don’t think it’s AOL’s responsibility to keep this model going forever. Instead, it looks like the job is going to fall to two companies: Microsoft, whose MSN Dial-Up Internet Access costs US $179.95 per year, and the company United Online, which still operates the longtime dial-up players Juno and NetZero. Satellite Internet is also an option, with older services like HughesNet and newer ones like Starlink picking up the slack. It’s not AOL’s fault. But AOL is the face of this failing. AOL dropping dial-up is part of a long fade-out As technologies go, the dial-up modem has not lasted quite as long as the telegram, which has been active in one form or another for 181 years. But the modem, which was first used in 1958 as part of an air-defense system, has stuck around for a good 67 years. That makes it one of the oldest pieces of computer-related technology still in modern use. To give you an idea of how old that is: 1958 is also the year that the integrated circuit, an essential building block of any modern computer, was invented. The disk platter, which became the modern hard drive, was invented a year earlier. The floppy disk came a decade later. (It should be noted that the modem itself is not dying—your smartphone has one—but the connection your landline has to your modem, the really loud one, has seen better days.) The news that AOL is dropping its service might be seen as the end of the line for dial-up, but the story of the telegram hints that this may not be the case. In 2006, much hay was made about Western Union sending its final telegram. But Western Union was never the only company sending telegrams, and another company picked up the business. You can still send a telegram via International Telegram in 2025. (It’s not cheap: A single message, sent the same day, is $34, plus 75 cents per word.) In many ways, AOL dropping the service is a sign that this already niche use case is going to get more niche. But niche use cases have a way of staying relevant, given the right audience. It’s sort of like why doctors continue to use pagers. As a Planet Money episode from two years ago noted, the additional friction of using pagers worked well with the way doctors functioned, because it ensured that they knew the messages they were getting didn’t compete with anything else. Dial-up is likely never going to totally die, unless the landline phone system itself gets knocked offline, which AT&T has admittedly been itching to do. It remains one of the cheapest options to get online, outside of drinking a single coffee at a Panera and logging onto the wifi. But AOL? While dial-up may have been the company’s primary business earlier in its life, it hasn’t really been its focus in quite a long time. AOL is now a highly diversified company, whose primary focus over the past 15 years has been advertising. It still sells subscriptions, but those subscriptions are about to lose their most important legacy feature. AOL is simply too weak to support the next generation of Internet service themselves. Their inroad to broadband was supposed to be Time Warner Cable; that didn’t work out, so they pivoted to something else, but kept around the legacy business while it was still profitable. It’s likely that emerging technologies, like Microsoft’s Airband Initiative, which relies on distributing broadband over unused “white spaces” on the television dial, stand a better shot. 5G connectivity will also likely improve over time (T-Mobile already promotes its 5G home Internet as a rural option), and perhaps more satellite-based options will emerge. Technologies don’t die. They just slowly become so irrelevant that they might as well be dead. The monoculture of the AOL login experience When I posted the announcement, hidden in an obscure link on the AOL website sent to me by a colleague, it immediately went viral on Bluesky and Mastodon. That meant I got to see a lot of people react to this news in real time. Most had the same comment: I didn’t even know it was still around. Others made modem jokes, or talked about AOL’s famously terrible customer service. What was interesting was that most people said roughly the same thing about the service. That is not the case with most online experiences, which usually reflect myriad points of views. I think it speaks to the fact that while the Internet was the ultimate monoculture killer, the experience of getting online for the first time was largely monocultural. Usually, it started with a modem connecting to a phone number and dropping us into a single familiar place. We have lost a lot of Internet Service Providers over the years. Few spark the passion and memories of America Online, a network that somehow beat out more innovative and more established players to become the onramp to the Information Superhighway, for all the good and bad that represents. AOL must be embarrassed of that history. It barely even announced its closure.

CT scanning, streaming videos, and sending images over the Internet wouldn’t be possible without the Fast Fourier transform. Commonly known as FFT, the computer algorithm designed by researchers at Princeton University and IBM is found in just about every electronic device, according to an entry in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. Demonstrated for the first time in 1964 by IEEE Fellows John Tukey and James W. Cooley, the algorithm breaks down a signal—a series of values over time—and converts it into frequencies. FFT was 100 times faster than the existing discrete Fourier transform. The DFT also requires more memory than the FFT because it saves intermediate results while processing. The FFT has become an important tool for manipulating and analyzing signals in many areas including audio processing, telecommunications, digital broadcasting, and image analysis. It helps filter, compress, eliminate noise from, and otherwise modify signals. The 60-year-old ubiquitous computer code also has applications in today’s cutting-edge technologies such as AI, quantum computing, self-driving cars, and 5G communication systems. The FFT was commemorated with an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony held in May at Princeton University. “The Cooley-Tukey algorithm significantly accelerated the calculation of DFTs,” 2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin said at the ceremony. “Prior methods required significantly more computations, making FFT a revolutionary breakthrough. By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” A new mathematical tool In 1963 Tukey, a professor of mathematics and statistics at Princeton, participated in a meeting of U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s Science Advisory Committee to discuss ways to detect underground nuclear tests, according to the ETHW entry. Also attending that meeting was Richard Garwin, a physicist and engineer at IBM who played a key role in designing the first hydrogen bomb. He died in May. Read about his fascinating life in this month’s In Memoriam. Tukey told Garwin he was working on speeding up the computation of an existing method—the Fourier transform—thinking it might help with the detection. His algorithm mathematically converted a signal from its original domain, such as time or space, to a frequency domain. Garwin recognized its potential and asked IBM to select a mathematical analyst to collaborate with Tukey. That person was Cooley, a research staff member working on numerical analysis and computation projects. If the Fourier transform could be made faster, Garwin said, seismometers could be planted in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union to detect nuclear explosions from atomic bomb tests, because the Soviets wouldn’t allow on-site tests, according to Cooley’s oral history in the Engineering and Technology History Wiki. A seismometer measures ground vibrations, which are converted into electrical signals and recorded as seismograms. To design sensors for underground nuclear tests, however, “you would have to process all the seismic signals, and a large part of the processing could be done by Fourier transforms,” Cooley said in his oral history. But “the computing power at the time was not enough to process all of the signals you’d need to do this.” The FFT could calculate a seismic sensor’s frequency and produce images, IEEE Life Fellow Harold S. Stone said at the Milestone event. He is an image processing researcher and Fellow emeritus at the NEC Laboratories America, in Princeton, and a former IBM researcher. Tukey and Cooley led the team that wrote the computer code that demonstrated the FFT’s power. “The demonstration of the Coley-Tukey algorithm showed that it was 100 times faster,” Stone said. “It was so fast that it could keep up with the seismic data.” Sensors using the algorithm were planted, and they detected nuclear explosions within a 15-kilometer radius from where they were detonated, according to the ETHW entry. “By leveraging algebraic properties and periodicities, the FFT reduced the number of the operations, making it particularly and practically feasible for everyday tasks, replacing the less efficient analog methods.” —2024 IEEE President Tom Coughlin In 1965 Cooley and Tukey published “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series,” describing the FFT process. The seminal paper spurred development of digital signal processing technologies. For his work, Tukey was awarded a U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. He also received the 1982 IEEE Medal of Honor for “contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform algorithm.” Cooley, who received the 2002 IEEE Kilby Signal Processing Medal for pioneering the FFT, was a leading figure in the field of digital signal processing. Through his involvement with the IEEE Digital Signal Processing Committee (today known as the IEEE Signal Processing Society), he helped establish terminology and suggested research directions. Although not one of the inventors, Garwin is credited with recognizing that the algorithm had wider applications, especially in scientific and engineering fields. “In today’s lingo, Garwin helped the FFT ‘go viral’ by getting Cooley and Tukey together,” Stone said. “Garwin and Tukey sought better information to forestall and prevent wars,” added Frank Anscombe, Tukey’s nephew. “The Cooley-Tukey FFT swiftly advanced this cause by giving a practical, simplifying solution for wavy data. Thanks to the FFT, a technological rubicon began to be crossed: analog-to-digital machines.” A spirit of collaboration between academia and industry Like so many innovations, the FFT came out of a collaboration between industry and academia, and it should be recognized for that, IEEE Fellow Andrea Goldsmith said at the ceremony. She explained that she regularly works with FFT in her research projects. At the time of the event, she was Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. This month she started her new position as president of Stony Brook University, in New York. “Taking the ideas we have from basic research in our university labs, talking to people in industry, and understanding how the research problems we work on can benefit industry either tomorrow or in five years or 20 years from now, is incredibly important,” she said. “Some people think of engineering as boring and dry and something that only nerds do, but there is such beauty and creativity in a lot of the innovations that we have developed, and I think the FFT is a perfect example of that.” The FFT joins more than 270 other IEEE Milestones. They are more than a marker of achievement, said IEEE Life Senior Member Bala S. Prasanna, director of IEEE Region 1. “They are a testament to human ingenuity, perseverance, and the spirit of collaboration,” Prasanna said. “These Milestones were more than just breakthroughs; they became catalysts for innovation, enabling progress in ways once thought impossible. Each one ensures that the story behind these innovations is preserved, not just as history but as inspiration for future generations.” Another ceremony was held on 11 June at the IBM Watson Research Center. Milestone plaques recognizing the FFT are on display in the lobby of Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science and in the main lobby at the entrance of the IBM research center. They read: “In 1964 a computer program implementing a highly efficient Fourier analysis algorithm was demonstrated at IBM Research. Jointly developed by Princeton University and IBM collaborators, the Cooley-Tukey technique calculated discrete Fourier transforms orders of magnitude faster than had been previously demonstrated. Known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), its speed impacted numerous applications including computerized tomography, audio and video compression, signal processing, and real-time data streaming.” Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world. The IEEE Princeton Central Jersey Section sponsored the nomination.

On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. Over the next year and a half, U.S. President Harry S. Truman resurrected the Office of Civilian Defense (which had been abolished at the end of World War II) and signed into law the Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950, which mobilized government agencies to plan for the aftermath of a global nuclear war. With the Cold War underway, that act kicked off a decades-long effort to ensure that at least some Americans survived nuclear armageddon. As the largest civilian federal agency with a presence throughout the country, the U.S. Post Office Department was in a unique position to monitor local radiation levels and shelter residents. By the end of 1964, approximately 1,500 postal buildings had been designated as fallout shelters, providing space and emergency supplies for 1.3 million people. Occupants were expected to remain in the shelters until the radioactivity outside was deemed safe. By 1968, about 6,000 postal employees had been trained to use radiological equipment, such as the CD V-700 pictured at top, to monitor beta and gamma radiation. And a group of postal employees organized a volunteer ham radio network to help with communications should the regular networks go down. What was civil defense in the Cold War? The basic premise of civil defense was that many people would die immediately in cities directly targeted by nuclear attacks. (Check out Alex Wellerstein’s interactive Nukemap for an estimate of casualties and impact should your hometown—or any location of your choosing—be hit.) It was the residents of other cities, suburbs, and rural communities outside the blast area that would most benefit from civil defense preparations. With enough warning, they could shelter in a shielded site and wait for the worst of the fallout to decay. Anywhere from a day or two to a few weeks after the attack, they could emerge and aid any survivors in the harder-hit areas. In 1957, a committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization drafted the report Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age, for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Better known as the Gaither Report, it called for the creation of a nationwide network of fallout shelters to protect civilians. Government publications such as The Family Fallout Shelter encouraged Americans who had the space, the resources, and the will to construct shelters for their homes. City dwellers in apartment buildings warranted only half a page in the booklet, with the suggestion to head to the basement and cooperate with other residents. This model fallout shelter from 1960 was designed for four to six people. Bettmann/Getty Images Ultimately, very few homeowners actually built a fallout shelter. But Rod Serling, creator of the television series “The Twilight Zone,” saw an opportunity for pointed social commentary. Aired in the fall of 1961, the episode “The Shelter” showed how quickly civilization (epitomized by a suburban middle-class family and their friends) broke down over decisions about who would be saved and who would not. Meanwhile, President John F. Kennedy had started to shift the national strategy from individual shelters to community shelters. At his instruction, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began surveying existing buildings suitable for public shelters. Post offices, especially ones with basements capable of housing at least 50 people, were a natural fit. Each postmaster general was designated as the local shelter manager and granted complete authority to operate the shelter, including determining who would be admitted or excluded. The Handbook for Fallout Shelter Management gave guidance for everything from sleeping arrangements to sanitation standards. Shelters were stocked with food and water, medicine, and, of course, radiological survey instruments. What to do in case of a nuclear attack These community fallout shelters were issued a standard kit for radiation detection. The kit came in a cardboard box that contained two radiation monitors, the CD V-700 (a Geiger counter, pictured at top) and the CD V-715 (a simple ion chamber survey meter); two cigar-size CD V-742 dosimeters, to measure a person’s total exposure while wearing the device; and a charger for the dosimeters. Also included was the Handbook for Radiological Monitors, which provided instructions on how to use the equipment and report the results. Post office fallout shelters were issued standard kits for measuring radioactivity after a nuclear attack.National Postal Museum/Smithsonian Institution The shelter radiation kit included two radiation monitors, two cigar-size dosimeters, and a charger for the dosimeters. Photoquest/Getty Images In the event of an attack, the operator would take readings with the CD V-715 at selected locations in the shelter. Then, within three minutes of finishing the indoor measurements, he would go outside and take a reading at least 25 feet (7.6 meters) from the building. If the radiation level outside was high, there were procedures for decontamination upon returning to the shelter. The “protection factor” of the shelter was calculated by dividing the outside reading by the inside reading. (Today the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, recommends a PF of at least 40 for a fallout shelter.) Operators were directed to retake the measurements and recalculate the protective factor at least once every 24 hours, or more frequently if the radiation levels changed rapidly. The CD V-700 was intended for detecting beta and gamma radiation during cleanup and decontamination operations, and also for detecting any radioactive contamination of food, water, and personnel. RELATED: DIY Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy With a Raspberry Pi Pico Each station would report their dose rates to a regional control center, so that the civil defense organization could determine when people could leave their shelter, where they could go, what routes to take, and what facilities needed decontamination. But if you’ve lived through a natural or manmade disaster, you’ll know that in the immediate aftermath, communications don’t always work so well. Indeed, the Handbook for Radiological Monitors acknowledged that a nuclear attack might disrupt communications. Luckily, the U.S. Post Office Department had a backup plan. In May 1958, Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield made an appeal to all postal employees who happened to be licensed amateur radio operators, to form an informal network that would provide emergency communications in the event of the collapse of telephone and telegraph networks and commercial broadcasting. The result was Post Office Net (PON), a voluntary group of ham radio operators; by 1962, about 1,500 postal employees in 43 states had signed on. That year, PON was opened up to nonemployees who had the necessary license. RELATED: The Uncertain Future of Ham Radio Although PON was never activated due to a nuclear threat, it did transmit messages during other emergencies. For example, in January 1967, after an epic blizzard blanketed Illinois and Michigan with heavy snow, the Michigan PON went into action, setting up liaisons with county weather services and relaying emergency requests, such as rescuing people stranded in vehicles on Interstate 94. A 1954 civil defense fair featured a display of amateur radios. The U.S. Post Office recruited about 1,500 employees to operate a ham radio network in the event that regular communications went down. National Archives The post office retired the network on 30 June 1974 as part of its shift away from civil defense preparedness. (A volunteer civil emergency-response ham radio network still exists, under the auspices of the American Radio Relay League.) And by 1977, laboratory tests indicated that most of the food and medicine stockpiled in post office basements was no longer fit for human consumption. In 1972 the Office of Civil Defense was replaced by the Defense Civil Preparedness Agency, which was eventually folded into FEMA. And with the end of the Cold War, the civil defense program officially ended in 1994, fortunately without ever being needed for a nuclear attack. Do we still need civil defense? The idea for this column came to me last fall, when I was doing research at the Linda Hall Library, in Kansas City, Mo., and I kept coming across articles about civil defense in magazines and journals from the 1950s and ’60s. I knew that the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, in Washington, D.C., had several civil defense artifacts (including the CD V-700 and a great “In Time of Emergency” public service announcement record album). As a child of the late Cold War, I remember being worried by the prospect of nuclear war. But then the Cold War ended, and so did my fears. I envisioned this month’s column capturing the intriguing history of civil defense and the earnest preparations of the era. That chapter of history, I assumed, was closed. Little did I imagine that by the time I began to write this, the prospect of a nuclear attack, if not an all-out war, would suddenly become much more real. These days, I understand the complexities and nuances of nuclear weapons much better than when I was a child. But I’m just as concerned that a nuclear conflict is imminent. Here’s hoping that history repeats itself, and it does not come to that. Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology. An abridged version of this article appears in the August 2025 print issue. References The November 1951 issue of Electrical Engineering summarized a civil defense conference held at the General Electric Co.’s Electronics Park in Syracuse, N.Y., earlier that year. Two hundred eighty federal, state, county, and city officials from across the United States and Canada attended, which got me thinking about the topic. Many of the government’s civil defense handbooks are available through the Internet Archive. The U.S. Postal Bulletins have also been digitized, and the USPS historian’s office wrote a great account, “The Postal Service’s Role in Civil Defense During the Cold War.” Although I’ve highlighted artifacts from the National Postal Museum, the Smithsonian Institution has many other objects across multiple museums. Eric Green has been collecting civil defense material since 1978 and has made much of it available through his virtual Civil Defense Museum. Alex Wellerstein, a historian of nuclear technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology, writes the Substack newsletter Doomsday Machines, where he gives thoughtful commentary on how we think about the end of times, in both fiction and reality. His interactive Nukemap is informative and scary.