Found in the Machine

Found in the Machine is a narrative podcast about the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world. If you've ever wondered who actually made the technology you use every day, and why you've never heard their name before, you'll feel at home here. This show is for the curious, not the credentialed. You don't need a technical background to follow along. You just need to be the kind of person who pulls on threads. New episodes unearth human stories from computing history every other week.

Found in the Machine is a history podcast hosted by Daina Bouquin, with 21 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Daina Bouquin hosts Found in the Machine, a history show with 21 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #19

  With Heart: Emoji Interpreters

  Sep 29, 202615 minS1

  In 1995, a tiny pixelated heart on a Japanese pager became the most important thing on the screen. When it disappeared, young people left. One man never forgot and went on to draw the original 176 emoji. In this episode: Pocket Bells and goroawase: how Japanese teenagers turned numbers on pagers into a language of their own The heart: the small symbol on NTT Docomo's Pocket Bell, and what happened when a new business model took it away Shigetaka Kurita: the former pager salesman with no design training who was given five weeks to draw the original 12x12 pixel emoji for i-mode Unicode and HEAVY BLACK HEART: how emoji became part of a shared standard in 2010, and why the red heart carries such a strange formal name The Museum of Modern Art: how Kurita's designs became part of MoMA's collection, and why an emoji means whatever we make it mean Episode Music: Jay Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0 Possibility Freedom to Speak Bones Additional Reading: McLaughlin, A. (2018, May 2). Emoji: Documenting design history’s accidental masterpiece . Design Week. https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/30-april-6-may-2018/emoji-documenting-design-history-accidental-masterpiece/ McCurry, J. (2016, October 27). The inventor of emoji on his famous creations and his all-time favorite. The Guardian . https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/27/emoji-inventor-shigetaka-kurita-moma-new-york-text Museum of Modern Art. (2016). Inbox: The original emoji, by Shigetaka Kurita . MoMA exhibition page. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3639 Museum of Modern Art. (2025). Shigetaka Kurita: Emoji. 1998–99 . MoMA collection entry. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/196070 Okada, Y. (2018, December 3). ポケベル全盛期、わたしは女子高生だった [I was a high school girl during the pager boom]. ITmedia NEWS . ITmedia article. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/news/article/1812/03/1181203094/ The Unicode Consortium. (2026). Unicode emoji (Unicode Technical Standard No. 51, Version 18.0). https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/ Support the show This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon . Patreon members get access to "Found in the Margins" bonus episodes and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee . If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

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  Episode #16

  Cry Wolf: Camera Traps, Waiting, and Seeing

  Aug 18, 202619 minS1

  Since the 1890s, we've been building machines that wait in our place, in the dark, for something to move. This is the story of how a thread across a trail became a sensor that can feel heat, and what we learn when we really look. In this Episode George Shiras : the Michigan naturalist and early wildlife photographer who rigged the first trip-wire camera traps in the 1890s Pyroelectricity : the physical property that lets a crystal generate a faint electrical charge when its temperature changes The Fresnel lens : how a design borrowed from 19th-century lighthouses now focuses invisible infrared light onto motion sensors in camera traps, driveway floodlights, and burglar alarms The Haíɫzaqv Nation's coastal wolfs : How a camera trap on the coast caught a wolf doing something scientists didn't know wild wolves were capable of Machine learning classifiers : how citizen scientists trains algorithms to sort real animal sightings from the false alarms Colorado's gray wolf reintroduction : the closely monitored 2023 reintroduction effort and recent events Episode Music James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0 Hands Clasped at the End of the World The Murky Deep You Saw the Signs But Never Acknowledged Them Additional Reading Cecco, L. (2025, November 20). Raiders of the lobster pot: Wily wolves learn to haul in Canadian crab traps. The Guardian . https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/20/canadia-british-coumbia-sea-wolves-learn-to-loot-crab-traps-for-bait Davenport, J. (2025, August 31). Wolf encounters & insights: 2025 newsletter . Churchill Wild. https://churchillwild.com/wolf-encounters-insights-2025-newsletter-by-jad-davenport/ Keller, H. J. (2000, May 11). 30 years of passive infrared motion detectors: A technology review [Paper presentation]. OPTO/IRS2, Erfurt, Germany. https://jvs.de/Carclo_Fresnel/pdf_content/2000-05_irs2paper_Hans_j_Keller.pdf Longwell, A. (2025, July 17). WATCH: Colorado Parks and Wildlife shares first footage of state's newest wolf pups. Vail Daily. https://www.vaildaily.com/news/colorado-wolf-pup-video-routt-county/ Ross, T. (2026, August 10). Colorado hunter thought wolf shot and killed in January was a coyote. The Colorado Sun . https://coloradosun.com/2026/08/10/colorado-hunter-kills-wolf-thinking-it-coyote/ Shiras, G., III. (1906, July). Photographing wild game with flashlight and camera. The National Geographic Magazine , 17 (7), 367–423. Shiras, G., III. (1908, June). One season's game-bag with the camera. The National Geographic Magazine , 19 (6). Shiras, G., III. (1935). Hunting wild life with camera and flashlight: A record of sixty-five years' visits to the woods and waters of North America (Vols. 1–2). National Geographic Society. https://archive.org/details/HuntingWildLifeWithCameraAndFlashlight.Volume121935Copy Slade, R. (2026, June 4). The outdoorsman who made wildlife photography a big deal for National Geographic. National Geographic . https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/george-shiras-iii-wildlife-photography Support the show This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon . Patreon members get additional content and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee . If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

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  Found in the Machine

  Humans of Mortal Kombat

  Aug 18, 20267 minS1

  Found in the Margins is a series of mini bonus episodes that will be available to Patreon members every other week alternating with the main show. This first episode is being shared here for all Found in the Machine listeners. Join the Patreon if you'd like to continue hearing these bonus stories. This episode explores the creation of Mortal Kombat , the strange reality of early video game digitization, and the landmark 1990s lawsuit that decided who legally owns a human body once it becomes pixels. Episode Music James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0 Tricks Failures of Infinity Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat) by The Immortals via Luminous Ambition Additional Reading Pesina v. Midway Mfg. Co. , 948 F. Supp. 40 (N.D. Ill. 1996). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/948/40/2098879/ Strata. (1994, July). [Advertisement for the arcade game BloodStorm]. EGM 2 . Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Daniel-Pesina-who-starred-as-Johnny-Cage-in-Mortal-Kombat-has-switched-to_fig11_357487546 C-SPAN. (2013, November 27). 1993 Senate committee hearings on video game violence [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhwM3ZMTCR0 Support the show This show is independently produced. You can support the show by joining the show's Patreon . Patreon members get additional content and help make the show possible. You can also donate via Buy Me a Coffee . If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . And don't forget to sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode.

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  Episode #15

  Tidal Forces: Calculating D-Day

  Aug 4, 202616 minS1

  In 1944 the Allies needed to know exactly what the water would do on a coast called "Position Z." So a deaf mathematician and six young women in a basement near Liverpool calculated the future. In this episode Arthur Doodson: the deaf mathematician at the Liverpool Tidal Institute, the world's leading authority on tides, who guessed he was predicting a Normandy landing and said nothing Six women working as Computers: hired for their diligence, skill with numbers, and neat handwriting, they ran the harmonic analysis and operated the tide-predicting machines The tide predicting machines: the Bidston Kelvin machine and the Roberts Légé machine, analogue computers made of brass, gears, and pulleys. D-Day: The largest seaborne invasion in history Episode Music James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0 House of Skies pt2 Are You Happy Burnt Fields Toska Archival Audio / Sounds BBC Primary History KS2: WW2 Clips. An air-raid in progress Additional Notes For the group photo of the women who calculated the tides after the war, and for what didn’t make it into this episode, visit notes.foundinthemachine.com . Special thank you to Angelina at the Bidston Observatory who responded to my inquiries as I looked for the Computers' names. Bidston Observatory has been converted into an artistic research centre and more information about it can be found here . Additional Reading Bidston Lighthouse. (2017, March 8). Women in the workplace . http://www.bidstonlighthouse.org.uk/women-in-the-workplace/ Carlsson-Hyslop, A. E. (2010). An anatomy of storm surge science at Liverpool Tidal Institute 1919-1959: Forecasting, practices of calculation and patronage [Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester]. NERC Open Research Archive. https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/14623/ Friends of Bidston Hill. (n.d.). Bidston Observatory . http://www.bidstonhill.org.uk/heritage/trail08/ Parker, B. B. (2011). The tide predictions for D-Day. Physics Today, 64 (9), 35-40. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.1257 Scoffield, J. (2016, November 9). My early life at Bidston Observatory . Bidston Observatory in Retrospect. http://www.bidstonobservatory.org.uk/early-life/ Woodworth, P. L. (2020). Tide prediction machines at the Liverpool Tidal Institute. History of Geo- and Space Sciences, 11 (1), 15-29. https://doi.org/10.5194/hgss-11-15-2020 Woodworth, P. L. (2015, December). Bidston Observatory and its tide prediction machines . Bidston Observatory in Retrospect. http://www.bidstonobservatory.org.uk/tide-prediction-machines/ Support the show This show is independently produced. If you would like to help cover the costs associated with research, production, and hosting you can Buy Me a Coffee . If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode. S upport the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show’s bookshop .

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  Episode #14

  Entropy Hunters: Random Numbers and Chaos Machines

  Jul 21, 202617 minS1

  This is the story of how we learned to fake the most natural thing in the world. What it cost us. And the strange places we still go, even now, to steal a little of the real thing back. In this Episode Bernice Brown: the RAND statistician whose job was to hunt for a pattern inside a million digits and sign her name only when she could not find one The electronic roulette wheel: RAND's random number making machine and why its raw output drifted into bias Stanisław Ulam: the mathematician whose card game in a hospital bed became the Monte Carlo method, and the reason anyone needed randomness by the millions in the first place John von Neumann: the middle square method, and the resulting "state of sin" Episode Music James Opie / Nihilore, CC BY 4.0 Warmth Sounds Computer History Museum Sounds of the 1960s: The IBM 1410 CuriousMarc 1964 IBM 029 keypunch card punching demonstration Additional Reading Brown, B. (1948). Some tests of the randomness of a million digits (Paper No. P-44). RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P44.pdf Iowa State College Statistical Laboratory. (1935). Annual report of the statistical laboratory: July 1, 1933 to June 30, 1934 . Iowa State College. https://isuu00001library102stg.blob.core.windows.net/digital-objects/statsannualreports/pdf/statsannualreports3414.pdf Markoff, J. (1995, September 19). Security flaw is discovered in software used in shopping. The New York Times, p. A1. https://archive.ph/Hz0pX Mercator, V. (2023, October 1). The middle squares method: The first PRNG . VM's Numbers Station. https://vm70.neocities.org/posts/2023-10-01-middle-squares/ RAND Corporation. (2001). A million random digits with 100,000 normal deviates (MR-1418-RC). https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html Summerscales, O. (2023, November 1). Hitting the jackpot: The birth of the Monte Carlo method. Actinide Research Quarterly . https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/actinide-research-quarterly/1123-hitting-the-jackpot-the-birth-of-the-monte-carlo-method Support the show Found in the Machine is a narrative podcast about the forgotten people, decisions, and accidents that quietly shaped the digital world. New episodes unearth stories from computing history every other week. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify . You can also sign up to receive Notes from the Machine with each episode. You can support the show and independent booksellers by purchasing from the show's bookshop at bookshop.org/shop/foundinthemachine .

  ListenShow Notes

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