[RADIOLAB INTRO]

TIM HOWARD: Okay. Hello, hello?

ALEXANDER GAMME: Hello!

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, hello!

ALEXANDER GAMME: Hooray! How are you? [laughs]

JAD: We are super, super excited to talk with you.

ALEXANDER GAMME: Oh, well same with me. I'm sorry about the delay. And so ...

JAD: Oh, it's fine. No, it's ...

ALEXANDER GAMME: Quite a busy day.

JAD: Life is crazy.

ALEXANDER GAMME: Life is crazy.

JAD: Yeah, I know.

ALEXANDER GAMME: But you were so enthusiastic. So I need to talk to these guys. They really mean it!

JAD: This is Alex.

ALEXANDER GAMME: Alexander Gamme.

JAD: Gamme?

ALEXANDER GAMME: Gamme.

JAD: Are you Norwegian all the way back?

ALEXANDER GAMME: Yeah, typical Norwegian.

JAD: You know, if "typical" includes things like ...

ALEXANDER GAMME: Biking in Sahara, and climbing Everest and things like that.

JAD: He's kind of a professional adventurer.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Hmm.

JAD: And we got him at the studio because he made a video last year on one of his trips ...

JAD: Gotta tell you, this video? It's maybe the most amazing internet video I have ever seen. [laughs]

TIM: I think so, too.

JAD: So let me just set the scene for you.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: What you see in the video is this guy, Alex, kind of moving along this—he's on skis—this snowy snowscape.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: He's filming himself. He's got the camera in his right hand.

ROBERT: Where is he, exactly?

JAD: Antarctica.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: He's on a three-month trek to the South Pole and back by himself. And what he'd been doing is every couple of days on his trip, you know, every 200 kilometers or so, he would bury stuff in the snow.

ALEXANDER GAMME: Some—some fuel, and sometimes a little bit of gear that I didn't use.

JAD: Was that just to lighten your load?

ALEXANDER GAMME: Yeah.

JAD: You know, because every ounce of unneeded weight has to go.

ROBERT: Sure.

JAD: So in this video, it's day 86.

ALEXANDER GAMME: Almost three months since I left.

JAD: That's three months of walking 10 hours a day.

ALEXANDER GAMME: And I lost almost 25 kilos.

JAD: 55 pounds. He's exhausted.

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Oh!]

JAD: He's come upon his last cache.

ALEXANDER GAMME: So on the last cache, where this video is captured ...

JAD: What you see is Alex kneel in the snow, start to dig.

ALEXANDER GAMME: I'm telling that I'm quite hungry.

JAD: Whatever's in this last cache in the snow, it's been three months since he buried it.

ALEXANDER GAMME: So I didn't really recall what was there.

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [speaking Norwegian]]

JAD: He hopes it's something good. So he digs up this bag of stuff, starts rifling through it.

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [speaking Norwegian]]

JAD: Some Vaseline, some zinc ointment.

ALEXANDER GAMME: It's just a mess.

JAD: Nothing.

ALEXANDER GAMME: It's pretty much old trash.

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [speaking Norwegian]]

JAD: But then ...

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!]

ROBERT: What is it?

JAD: He holds up a double bag of Cheez Doodles.

ROBERT: [laughs]

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Yeah!]

JAD: And he throws it up in the air.

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Yeah!]

JAD: And then—this is my favorite part. He just freezes, and he's staring off into the distance almost like, did that happen?

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: I mean ...]

ALEXANDER GAMME: Is it real?

JAD: So he starts to dig some more. And then ...

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Oh, ha ha! Yeah! Oh!]

ROBERT: What's it this time?

ALEXANDER GAMME: A huge chocolate bar. It's milk chocolate. And then it's just like ...

JAD: He finds some Mentos.

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: Mentos!]

ALEXANDER GAMME: I find more and more and more.

ROBERT: [laughs]

[YOUTUBE CLIP, Alexander Gamme: [laughs]]

JAD: Have you ever been that happy in your life?

ALEXANDER GAMME: Well, I've been thinking about that. When did you shout last time you were so happy?

JAD: I think that's why we've been watching this video over and over again, because none of us can remember.

ALEXANDER GAMME: [laughs]

JAD: It's like, what stands between you and that feeling is a really interesting question.

ALEXANDER GAMME: Yeah, it's three months with hunger.

JAD: Actually, I think the reason I like this video so much is not just because he's happy, it's that he somehow stumbled into this moment of perfection.

ALEXANDER GAMME: It's just like a perfect situation.

JAD: By being so tired and so hungry, and finding such a stash of candy that he had forgotten that he left, he created a moment of just absolute complete bliss.

ROBERT: In this hour on Radiolab we're gonna be searching for moments like Alex had happen in Antarctica. We're gonna be searching for ...

ALEXANDER GAMME: Bliss. [laughs]

JAD: Bliss of all different sorts. Perfect moments.

ROBERT: Perfect worlds.

JAD: The kind of bliss that slips right through your fingers.

ROBERT: And the kind of bliss that just might last.

JAD: And last.

ROBERT: And last.

JAD: All right. We're gonna begin with a story that kind of inspired this show. We would've never done a show about the word "bliss" were it not for the following story, which is about a Bliss.

ROBERT: A? What do you mean a bliss?

JAD: That'll—that'll make sense in just a second. Story comes from our producer Tim Howard, and it begins with a box of tapes.

TIM: All right. So check it out. This is ...

JAD: All right. We're in my office, and you've got the rectangular package here. What is it?

TIM: It is a very old-looking box. Doesn't look like much. It's just about, like, 15 cassettes. "Tape number six: Singing and playing to friends in America."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]

TIM: Okay, so this is Charles.

RICHARD URE: Charles Kasiel Bliss. An amazing character.

TIM: And that's Richard.

RICHARD URE: Richard Ure.

TIM: He's the fellow who gave me the cassettes. He was a friend of Charles.

RICHARD URE: Yeah.

JAD: So these were just, like, sitting in his attic or something?

TIM: Garage, I think.

RICHARD URE: He looked like, I suppose, a little gnome, a little leprechaun, almost.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]

RICHARD URE: He was short, bald and laughter the whole time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]

RICHARD URE: He was a lovable character. Simple as that.

TIM: This is my favorite one.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, cassette tape: [singing]]

JAD: Wait a second. Just explain why we're talking about this guy.

TIM: Sure. Because these tapes tell an amazing story about a guy who really embodied his name. And he tried to save the world, but ultimately just tried too hard.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: The turning point in my life came in 1908.]

TIM: We can start the story here. This is from a lecture that he gave decades later. So the story goes, it's 1908, and he's a little kid living in what's now the Ukraine.

JAD: Okay.

TIM: And his name is Karl Blitz.

JAD: Not Charles Bliss?

TIM: Not Charles Bliss. Karl Blitz. B-L-I-T-Z. That's his original name. And little Karl ...

ARIKA OKRENT: ... was fascinated by tales of discovery and adventure. My name is Arika Okrent.

TIM: Arika wrote about Charles Bliss in this great book called ...

ARIKA OKRENT: In the Land of Invented Languages.

TIM: Getting back to the story. One day, she says, when Karl was 11 ...

ARIKA OKRENT: A lecture came through town about some ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Polar expedition.]

ARIKA OKRENT: Polar expedition.

TIM: ... two explorers ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Showing slides.]

TIM: ... talking about their Trek across the North Pole. And he was so inspired by what he saw and heard at that lecture that even decades later, he couldn't talk about it ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: It took me to this—excuse me ...]

TIM: ... without getting choked up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: My father took me to this lecture, and there I saw men who left their warm homes, their secure existence, and went out into the Arctic into the icy snow in almost certain death. For what? For what? For in search of knowledge, for an idea.]

TIM: As he tells it on those tapes, that was the beginning of his big idea that was gonna change the world. Fast forward a few years ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: When I came to Vienna after the First World War ...]

ARIKA OKRENT: He did end up going to the Technical University of Vienna.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I was suddenly discovered to be the best mandolin player in Austria, and one time I played with a full opera orchestra under the direction of the composer Franceca. Ah, those were the days.]

TIM: And then everything changed. In 1938 ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: [speaking German]]

[NEWS CLIP: German troops swarm across the Austrian border on the historic ...]

TIM: The Nazis came to town.

ARIKA OKRENT: Nazis came to town. He was sent to Dachau and then Buchenwald.

TIM: You know, the concentration camps.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: One—one feeling, one reassuring desire to end my life.]

TIM: All around him, people were being worked to death or outright exterminated. But his wife Claire was a German Catholic with connections.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And Claire, my good wife, smuggled my mandolin and my guitar into the concentration camp. I became so famous as an artist. And for instance, our block fuhrer of would come into our barrack and said "Blitz, we must have the mandolin! I want twice a week!"]

TIM: And you could say that it was here in Buchenwald that Karl started to develop his ideas about language, about the ways that you can manipulate words. For instance, there was this one song that all the prisoners sang.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: The Buchenwald Kleid, one of the saddest songs I can ever meant.]

TIM: Had the saddest lyrics in the world. At a certain point, Karl started to play around with this song. You know, he'd swap out some of the sad lyrics for some jokes, sing it for his fellow prisoners.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And they laughed and laughed and laughed, and forgot for a few minutes that they are in the darkest and the most terrible house on Earth.]

TIM: And on the flip side, every evening, the guards would march all the prisoners outside, force them to stand there in the cold in front of these loudspeakers. Make them listen to these speeches. Speeches of Hitler and Goebbels screaming Nazi slogans. Like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: Deutschland über alles!]

TIM: Which means "Germany above all."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Adolf Hitler: [speaking German]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: There are certain words which make you mad, which drive you mad.]

TIM: But after about a year ...

ARIKA OKRENT: His wife somehow wrangled a British visa for him, and he ...

TIM: ... gets out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Thank heavens those dreadful times are gone, and now I can play here for you an improvisation as it comes into my mind.]

ARIKA OKRENT: In 1939, he went to Britain ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And got a job as a manager of a factory.]

TIM: But he arrived in England just as The Blitz begins. The Germans start to bomb every major city in England.

[NEWS CLIP: The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air raid siren.]

TIM: And every time he'd introduce himself to somebody new, they'd shudder.

TIM: That can't be your name.

ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah.

TIM: Because of, like, "Blitzkrieg?" It had that association?

ARIKA OKRENT: Yes. [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: "You can't go around here in Great Britain with a name like 'Blitz!'" So I changed from the warlike "Blitz" to the peaceful "Bliss."]

TIM: That was how he became Charles Bliss.

ARIKA OKRENT: Bliss has all the right associations, so he went forward with the feeling of—that he was now Bliss and would bring happiness to the world.

TIM: And a year later, he and his wife end up in China, in Shanghai, where there was a big population of exiled Jews.

ARIKA OKRENT: Shanghai was the only place that would take them at that time.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And there in China—and there in China, I got the opportunity of my lifetime.]

TIM: And now we come to his big idea.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I realized what I did not know, that the Chinese have a different way of writing.]

ARIKA OKRENT: He became enraptured by the Chinese writing that he saw.

TIM: The Chinese use symbols, and each symbol is a word. And he writes about having this epiphany when he saw the Chinese symbol for "man."

ARIKA OKRENT: He saw that the Chinese written form of "man" sort of looks like a man.

TIM: It looks like a stick-figure man. And it means "man." He doesn't even know what the Chinese word for "man" is. He doesn't know how to say "man," but that doesn't matter. He is skipping the word and going directly into the meaning.

ARIKA OKRENT: So here was a way of getting beyond language. You could think the word in any language if you see it in the symbol.

TIM: And that was a revelation.

JAD: Why?

TIM: Well I mean, think back to the concentration camps. When they were outside in front of those loudspeakers listening to Hitler saying stuff like "Deutschland über alles." You know, "Germany above all." And that phrase?

JAD: Mm-hmm.?

TIM: Charles knew that it actually predated the Nazis.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: That was coined a hundred years earlier in 1848.]

TIM: And originally, it was meant as a rallying cry to bring together all of these separate principalities ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: The Kingdom of Bavaria and the Kingdom of Saxonia, the Kingdom of ...]

TIM: ... that spoke German, but these were not one country. So when they said "Deutschland Über Alles," it meant unification.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: A unified Germany.]

TIM: A nation above the states.

JAD: Oh, so it wasn't necessarily an aggressive thing.

TIM: No. But ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: But Hitler turned this around.]

TIM: Hitler changed the meaning. Instead of the nation above all states, he changed it to the nation ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Everything, above all the countries of the world.]

TIM: ... above all other nations.

JAD: Oh!

TIM: So you see what happened. This phrase that started meaning one thing: unification ...

JAD: Yeah. Became the opposite.

TIM: Yeah. This is what the Nazis did.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Those words? Lies.]

TIM: They would bend words to obscure the truth of what they were doing. Extermination? They would call it "solution." By doing that, as he saw it, they were able to convince good, sane people—his neighbors—to go along with the genocide.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And I realized that something must be done to make language more truer to nature.]

ARIKA OKRENT: Words were the problem. Words made people do cruel things to each other.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They tear our society apart.]

ARIKA OKRENT: Words were dangerous instruments.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They cause violence, they cause wars.]

TIM: So when he saw the Chinese symbol for "man," he thought this might be the answer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And the idea came up to me that I should invent symbols.]

TIM: Like the Chinese symbols, but even clearer.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Which are so simple and pictorial that even children can read them.]

ARIKA OKRENT: If he could sit down and work it out, you would look at the symbol and know what it meant instantly, regardless of what language you spoke.

TIM: You wouldn't even need words, which he felt ...

ARIKA OKRENT: Could be manipulated.

TIM: You could just have the symbol ...

ARIKA OKRENT: ... and get straight to the truth of the matter.

TIM: And the way he saw it, right off the bat you'd have all of these benefits.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Frenchmen and Finns, Englishmen and Estonians.]

TIM: Language barriers would be out the window.

ARIKA OKRENT: Everything from traffic accidents to health problems ...

TIM: ... could be avoided, he thought ...

ARIKA OKRENT: ... if his symbol system would just be adopted.

RICHARD URE: He had this vision that high-level political and commercial negotiations would be done in symbols.

TIM: Did he say anything as grand as, like, "War wouldn't happen?"

ARIKA OKRENT: Constantly.

TIM: And even, of course ...

RICHARD URE: He reckoned Hitler wouldn't have happened, basically. That if the German people had understood these symbols, they wouldn't have copped Goebbels's propaganda. That's a pretty tall order, but it did seem to be what he thought.

ARIKA OKRENT: Everything could be cured by this system.

TIM: He's the biggest dreamer ever.

ARIKA OKRENT: Yeah.

TIM: How did he go about doing this?

ARIKA OKRENT: He started working out what the basic lines and shapes would be. He also wanted to make sure you could produce it with a typewriter, so it had to be a limited set of shapes out of which everything could be created.

TIM: Okay, so he works on it for seven years.

JAD: Seven years?

TIM: And he comes up with [book slams on table] that.

JAD: Wow! That is a big one.

TIM: This massive book called ...

ARIKA OKRENT: "Blissymbolics"

TIM: "Semantology: A Logical Writing for an Illogical World."

JAD: That says it all.

TIM: Where he explains the logic of his system. For example, here? Here's a symbol for "sword," which looks exactly like a sword. And then sword plus a forward arrow means "attack."

JAD: I buy it.

TIM: And then if you see a symbol for sword and another symbol for sword and they're crossed, that means "war."

JAD: So that's the idea, that you take these basic elemental symbols and combine them?

TIM: Exactly. All right, here's another one. This symbol here is like the top half of a circle.

JAD: Like a little rainbow, but just one line.

TIM: That means "mind."

JAD: "Mind."

TIM: It looks like the top of a skull.

JAD: Ah.

TIM: Now if I were to take that symbol for "mind," and I were to go like this, I were to put inside it a question mark, that means ...

JAD: I'm—I don't know? Or I ...

TIM: "Doubt."

JAD: "Doubt."

TIM: And there are also, you know, ways to indicate verbs and adjectives and first person, second person, the past, the future. But kind of the one thing that it did that no other language or symbol system or anything has attempted to do—at least as far as I know—is that it would make clear when something was what he called a "human evaluation." You know, basically an opinion.

JAD: Hmm.

TIM: And what you would do is you'd put this little—this little "V" symbol, and you'd put it above the symbol.

JAD: And why—why "V?"

TIM: Well, because, you know, a "V" is balanced on a point and it's unstable, it wobbles. To him, that represents opinions, human evaluations, anything that comes out of the mind.

JAD: Hmm.

TIM: Or take metaphors.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: If you say something which is in the 'taphor ...]

TIM: The "'taphor," as he says.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: You must put up the metaphor sign.]

TIM: To alert the reader: do not take this literally.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Stop. Metaphor ahead.]

JAD: Not exactly bulletproof, but I can—I can see the thinking there.

TIM: I actually think it's pretty impressive. And ...

JAD: Okay. So what happens next?

TIM: Well, after he finishes this, and he and his wife are living in Australia at the time ...

ARIKA OKRENT: They spent all their savings on producing this book, and sent it out to ...

TIM: ... professors, government officials ...

ARIKA OKRENT: ... heads of state.

TIM: Something like 6,000 people.

ARIKA OKRENT: And they waited for the orders to start rolling in.

TIM: And no response from anybody.

ARIKA OKRENT: And then they had nothing.

JAD: Can't say I didn't see that coming.

TIM: Yeah.

ARIKA OKRENT: And with great disappointment, Charles went to work as a welder in a factory.

RICHARD URE: At General Motors Holland, he was working on the production line almost as a robot.

TIM: And a year later his wife died.

ARIKA OKRENT: You know, he had fought in World War I, he had been in a concentration camp, he had lived in exile, but he says this was the lowest point of his life.

TIM: Until one day, 1971.

ARIKA OKRENT: This—as he said, this letter floated onto his desk with this picture of this beautiful, dimpled child proudly using his symbols.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, it was a poster.

TIM: A poster.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: A poster.

TIM: This is Shirley.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Shirley McNaughton.

TIM: And at the time, she was a nurse at a place called the OCCC.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The Ontario Crippled Children's Centre, a name that we were very happy to leave behind us.

TIM: They've since changed the name.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: I started there in 1968.

TIM: And Shirley was part of this group of teachers and nurses who worked with these kids who suffered from cerebral palsy.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: If you have cerebral palsy, it's the motor control from the brain that's been affected.

TIM: Which meant that they had trouble moving their arms or legs. And even in some cases ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: They couldn't speak.

TIM: They couldn't form words. And in a film that was made of this class, you see these young kids ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Children from five to seven.

TIM: ... all sitting in wheelchairs, and they're watching the teacher. She talks to them, and you hear them try to talk to her. But they can't.

ARIKA OKRENT: These kids had no way to communicate.

TIM: Couldn't they learn how to read?

ARIKA OKRENT: They could, if you knew what they were understanding. And they have no way to communicate that to you.

TIM: The only thing all these kids had were pictures that they could point at.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: They had a picture of a toilet, picture of food, picture of a drink, a picture of a bed. They were limited to that kind of communication. But I knew they were bright.

TIM: But if they couldn't move and they couldn't speak, how would you know?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: My insight on that was the twinkle in their eyes.

TIM: But, she says, a lot of doctors and nurses at the time ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Thought I was crazy.

TIM: Thought there really wasn't much going on inside these kids' heads.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: You know, they thought I was projecting into the children.

TIM: What she needed, she said, was a way to get through to them.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And ...

TIM: So one day she was at the library with a colleague, and they come across this dusty old volume that had never been checked out called—you guessed it ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Blissymbolics.

TIM: And what did you first think when you saw it?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Oh, boy! Can I get back to the group? How fast can I get back to the group with this?

TIM: Really?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: This is exactly what we need.

TIM: So do you remember what the first symbols were?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: I think it was "I" and "You."

TIM: "I" looks kind of like a standing person.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: An upright line.

TIM: A small horizontal line at the base.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.

TIM: Next to it ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The number one.

TIM: Which means "First person." "You" is the same symbol, but with the number two for "Second person."

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And then they had to have a verb, and it was love.

TIM: Heart with an arrow through it.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: So now they've got a sentence: I love you. One of our mothers said it's the happiest moment she's ever had with her child was when her child came home and said "I love you," you know? So ...

TIM: Shirley and her staff started to add more symbols.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: [laughs] They caught on.

TIM: And pretty soon, they'd created this giant laminated chart.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: It had "I" and "You." And "He," "She," "We" and "They." Then it had "Mother," "Father," "Grandma," "Grandpa," "Doctor," "Nurse," "Teacher," "Therapist," "Postman," "Fireman," "Librarian," "Dentist."

TIM: Eventually, they added adjectives.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Happy," "Sad" and "Frustrated." All the verbs. You had "Love" and "Like" and "Hate." "Want" and "Need." "Understand."

TIM: Pretty soon ...

ARIKA OKRENT: The kids started to do amazing things with symbol combinations.

TIM: They started to improvise. Shirley remembers asking one kid ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Terry Martin, what did he want to be for Halloween?

TIM: Terry pointed first at the symbol for "Creature."

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: A creature, not a person.

TIM: Then he pointed at the symbol for ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Drinks."

TIM: Then ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Blood."

TIM: And then ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: "Night."

JAD: A creature who drinks blood at night.

TIM: Right.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He wanted to be a vampire.

JAD: Ah.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He spelled a new word.

TIM: It sounds like an explosion with these kids.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: It was. It was.

TIM: For the first time, she says, she could actually talk to them, like, know who they were.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah, you got to know who the leaders were in the classroom, those who wanted to help others, those who copied others.

TIM: And it was around then that she and the other teachers decided to send Charles Bliss that letter.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: We were sharing our excitement for this gift he'd given to the children. You know, he was in Australia. He was an elderly man. We had no thought that he would come and visit us. You know, it didn't enter our mind.

TIM: But Charles Bliss?

RICHARD URE: He was delighted!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: [singing]]

RICHARD URE: He had battled for so long for recognition, and now he had it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: [singing]]

ARIKA OKRENT: He mortgages his house and flies over.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And I was so happy there, and I played my mandolin and told them jokes.]

ARIKA OKRENT: He dances around and kisses everybody effusively.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: And they laughed and laughed and laughed their heads off.]

TIM: He had long conversations with the kids ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: ... in symbols. He was very happy about the children.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: [singing] Joy, joy, joy!]

TIM: But somewhere along the way, he notices something. Shirley—Shirley and the teachers had begun to augment the system. They'd begun to add their own symbols, such as ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The opposite-meaning symbol.

TIM: This allowed the kids to take one of Bliss's standard symbols and just invert the meaning.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Opposite of happy? Sad. Opposite of up? Down. Opposite of in? Out.

TIM: To her, this would effectively ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Double the number of adjectives.

TIM: Which would be great for the kids.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And we developed rules ...

TIM: ... for how to combine symbols, for how to be more precise with the symbols.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yeah.

TIM: She threw in some new pronouns that were missing.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The difference between "He" and "Him" and "His."

TIM: In short ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: I would make the adaptations I needed to make. From the very beginning, we were using it to meet the children's needs.

TIM: Their specific needs.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And of course, that is not what he had in his mind.

TIM: He wanted a system that was universal. Every change that she made created, like, a separate dialect.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He would get very emotional about it.

TIM: So when he got back to Australia, he started ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Writing all these letters.

TIM: Basically taking issue with her changes, and her failure to understand how his system works. Meanwhile thanks to Shirley, word about Bliss's symbols had spread way beyond Canada, to Hungary, France, Sweden, Israel, Zimbabwe.

JAD: Zimbabwe?

TIM: Yeah. And then Argentina, Brazil, Finland, Iceland, Italy, Bermuda, Guam, Japan, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Venezuela, Madagascar, Yugoslavia.

JAD: It spread to all these places?

TIM: Yeah. And in each place, the symbols would inevitably get tweaked to suit that country. For example, in Israel, because the writing goes from right to left ...

JAD: Yeah?

TIM: ... the Blissymbols went from right to left.

JAD: Ah.

TIM: But what really pained him the most, what really got him, was that these teachers were using his symbols ...

ARIKA OKRENT: As a step toward English.

TIM: Or French or German or Hebrew or whatever. It was just a way to get the kids to their native languages.

ARIKA OKRENT: The teachers always saw it ...

TIM: The way they saw it, you start the kids on Bliss ...

ARIKA OKRENT: ... and then you introduce reading and letters, and eventually they're fully literate.

TIM: At which point, you don't need the Blissymbols.

JAD: Oh!

TIM: This was the ultimate insult to him. They were using his system to bring these kids back to the very thing that he was trying to get everyone away from.

JAD: Evil words.

TIM: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I tried to explain it to them. They don't want to listen to me. They look through me. What should I do? What should I do? I don't know. I don't know.]

TIM: And it's right about at this point in the story that you start to hear a different Charles Bliss.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: This Shirley McNaughton has perverted my work, has perverted and perverted and perverted.]

JAD: Is he saying "Perverted?"

TIM: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: She smiles, she beguiles and she lies.]

TIM: He kept sending Shirley and the other teachers letters, and the letters got angrier and angrier.

ARIKA OKRENT: "This was not what the language was for. This was a universal language that had nothing to do with spoken language. You are ruining my system. You are abusing it."

TIM: And eventually, he decided to take matters into his own hands and he traveled back to Canada.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And he started going to the various centers ...

TIM: ... where the kids were using his symbols.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And saying horrible things about me, and getting them very upset. That's when I got upset. I got upset when he got them upset.

TIM: Not long after, Shirley receives a summons.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I have taken to court, the OCCC.]

JAD: Wait, he sued them?

TIM: Yeah.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: I added two more defendants. Mrs. Shirley McNaughton ...]

TIM: On the tapes he even suggests that he's gonna have Shirley put away.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Her whole life.]

TIM: For life.

JAD: Wow! Why was he so upset with her in particular?

TIM: Well, because by this time, she'd started ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: The international organization BCI.

TIM: Blissymbol Communications International.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And ...

TIM: ... she felt like this was a totally unique and powerful tool which could and should transform lives around the world, and more teachers needed to adopt it.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Definitely.

TIM: What was he asking for? Did he ...

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: He wanted us to use the symbols in his way.

TIM: So in 1975, the BCI won a license agreement to use the symbols in the workbooks for the kids, but Charles Bliss ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They should all be pulped!]

TIM: ... didn't give up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: They should all be pulped!]

TIM: He published endless tirades and sent them out to anybody who would listen.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Charles Bliss: Please unite in helping to eradicate all falsifications of the Blissymbol system.]

TIM: All in all, this went on for over a decade.

ARIKA OKRENT: And the administration of the program where Shirley was working was desperate to make him go away. He had basically destroyed the program.

TIM: And so in 1982, he and the BCI finally come to an agreement.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: It was a financial settlement that satisfied him.

TIM: What was the financial settlement?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: $160,000.

TIM: Wow.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: You know, we were a little program in the basement of the Ontario Crippled Children's Centre. We were, you know, just a classroom.

JAD: Wow. So a guy who wanted to save the world ends up robbing a bunch of disabled kids? I mean, that's kind of put it crudely, but that's how it feels.

TIM: Basically, that's the—yeah.

JAD: And did the symbols ever go anywhere?

ARIKA OKRENT: Well, there was a lot of excitement about it in the beginning, but it never spread very far. It's used now at a few schools in Canada and Sweden, a couple other places, but it never went very far because he was constantly taking it down at every turn.

TIM: But here's what I find most surprising: when I—when I talked to Shirley, she didn't have any bitterness toward him, not even in the worst moments.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: When we were having the final legal action, we'd go through that in the morning, and as the lawyers were packing up their papers, Charles Bliss would reach across the table and he'd say, "Shirley, will you help me?" And ...

TIM: So she'd go to lunch with him, sit with him.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: And then he asked me if I would come to his hotel that night and put the ear drops in his ears. And I did that every night he was involved with this thing. That's just the way it was.

TIM: And it wasn't just that she takes care of people for a living. You know, she felt—and still feels—that Charles Bliss had created something really new in the world. She even told me that when she uses Blissymbols, she actually thinks differently.

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Yes. Definitely.

TIM: Really?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Definitely.

TIM: What's different?

SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Oh, I just think so much more about what a word means. And it's like poetry in its purest form. I've been playing with stained glass down here in my retirement. And you can—you know, you can just take the symbols and put them into one composite, and they say things that only art can say. It's beautiful. They transmit a meaning that is beyond any words.

JAD: Thanks to producer Tim Howard and Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages. We'll be right back.

[LIVVIE: Bliss is having friends and family you can rely on. My name is Livvie Graham, and I am calling from the side of the road in Dallas, Texas, awaiting rescue.]

[GINGER: This is Ginger, a socially awkward introvert from Cabot, Arkansas. Bliss is one day in which I do not have to interact with another human being.]

[MAHMOUD: Bliss is political ignorance. This is Mahmoud from Montreal.]

[WOMAN: Bliss is your baby sleeping in your arms.]

[ARIKA OKRENT: Hi, this is Arika Okrent.]

[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Uh, just a minute here.]

[ARIKA OKRENT: Radiolab is supported in part ...]

[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation ...]

[ARIKA OKRENT: ... and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world.]

[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: More information about Sloan can be found at www.sloan ...]

[ARIKA OKRENT: ... .org. Radiolab is produced by ...]

[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: ... by WNYC ...]

[ARIKA OKRENT: ... and distributed ...]

[SHIRLEY MCNAUGHTON: ... by NPR.]

[ARIKA OKRENT: Hope that works for you. Thanks.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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