How the World Got Wired

Chapter 3 — Packets

In 1960, the United States Air Force gave an engineer named Paul Baran a strange and difficult problem to solve.

The problem was this. If the Soviet Union ever launched a nuclear attack on the United States — and almost everyone in the American government, at that time, thought this would happen sooner or later — then most of the country’s bombs and missiles would be destroyed in the first hour. So would most of its cities. So would most of its phone lines. And so, very probably, would the President.

But the American military wanted to be able to fight back, even after all of that. To fight back, the parts of the military that survived — a submarine under the Atlantic, a bomber over Canada, an officer in an underground bunker in Nebraska — would need to be able to talk to each other. They would need to send messages. They would need a network.

The problem the Air Force gave Paul Baran was: build us that network. Build us a network that still works, after the bombs.

This is an unpleasant problem to think about, and you might wonder why I’m telling you about it. I’m telling you about it because the way Paul Baran solved this problem is the reason your grandmother’s video can reach your phone.

The internet you use every day was, in its original design, a survival mechanism for nuclear war.

I want to be honest about that, because I think it’s important. Almost everything in this book has two stories sitting on top of each other. There’s the story of what people meant to build — a way to fight a war, a way to share a computer, a way to publish a physics paper. And there’s the story of what they actually built, which usually turns out to be different and bigger and more peaceful than what they had in mind. Paul Baran was trying to help America survive an apocalypse. He ended up helping your grandmother share a sunset.

So. Let me explain his problem, and his solution.

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