SCOTT SIMON, host:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.
Families who took vacations this summer might have used portable technology to keep the kids quiet, like iPods or back-of-the-seat DVD players. License plate game, after all, can get just a little old after a while. But there's a reliable distraction that's been around for decades: the Yes and Know books - that's know as in K-N-O-W.
Paul Collins, WEEKEND EDITION's literary detective, joins us from the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Paul, thanks very much for being back with us.
Mr. PAUL COLLINS (Literary Detective): Oh, it's good to be here.
SIMON: Now, remind us what the Yes and Know book is.
Mr. COLLINS: Well, these are the invisible ink books that you find in gift shops at airports or train stations. And they come with a little decoder pen, and they have invisible ink games on them that you then apply the pen to develop the page. So you can play Tic-Tac-Toe or Hang Man.
SIMON: What's the invisible ink?
Mr. COLLINS: At its most basic level, it's kind of like litmus paper. You basically have a treated ink that is invisible on the paper but is then developed by a chemical developer in the pen.
SIMON: How long have these been around?
Mr. COLLINS: Well, these first started in the early '70s. And in fact, it was brought about by a guy named Leon Lenkoff, and he patented this idea back in 1974. You know, like many parents, this summer I bought one of these because we had a trip coming up and I needed to keep my kids occupied. And after getting it, I kind of got intrigued. I wanted to know where it came from.
SIMON: Now, do I understand this correctly, that B.F. Skinner has if not exactly something to do with these books, something to do with the concept?
Mr. COLLINS: Yeah, that was one of the things that surprised me. When I started digging into this - about where these books came from - I tracked it down to Leon Lenkoff. And looking at his patent application, he sited a previous patent by a guy named Burrhus Franklin Skinner. And it took a moment for that to sink in. I looked at it and I went, B.F. Skinner. And sure enough, there was a previous patent from 1968 that B.F. Skinner filed, where his idea was basically having self-correcting worksheets in the classroom.
For example, for teaching handwriting, you could have people staying within the lines by having the paper treated so that if they went outside the lines as they were practicing their letters, the paper might turn, you know, red, for example.
Skinner was really fascinated by this idea of kind of automating learning and having teaching machines, and so this idea actually fit into that. And Lenkoff's kind of intuitive leap was to look at this kind of odd and obscure teaching technology that Skinner was developing and to think, huh, I bet you play Tic-Tac-Toe using this.
SIMON: Now, has this - I hate to refer to this as technology. It's...
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIMON: ...so fundamental. But has it been used in other dimensions?
Mr. COLLINS: Well, it has. That's the strange thing about it, is these Yes and Know books are so sort of retro in appearance. They haven't changed the artwork in them in decades, and so they're very kind of charming in that way. But in fact, they've turned up in a really kind of unexpected place lately, which is for securing ballots in elections.
Specifically, there's a group being led by a cryptographer named David Chaum. He's the guy that was one of the pioneers of electronic cash. And he's now been leading this group into developing a system called Scantegrity. Basically, it's using these decoder pens - the exact, same kind you use in these games. And you use them on your ballot to fill in like an optical scanner bubble. And when you do that, not only does it develop the bubble to indicate your choice, it also shows a confirmation code inside the bubble, like, say, an alphanumeric code or just a couple letters that you can then write on a detachable stub, and then later on use to confirm that your vote was counted.
SIMON: Oh, my gosh.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIMON: So this same technology that keeps indolent children from getting bored can one day keep the Supreme Court from having to settle an election.
Mr. COLLINS: You know, the strange thing too, I mean it's such an unexpected way to be using this, but you know, this actually started as a chemistry professor back in the '50s trying to do these chemistry quizzes for students filling in bubbles on these forms. So it's kind of come full circle in that sense.
You know, this has actually been tested out in a mock election in Takoma Park, Maryland, back in April. And they're actually going use it in their municipal elections in November. And one of the curious things about this is, it might have been kind of a hard sell to their board of elections, this new and untested technology, except that everybody actually recognized it from their own childhoods.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIMON: So you had to trust it because...
Mr. COLLINS: The Yes and Know pad.
SIMON: ...Yes and Know pad. Yeah.
Well, Paul Collins, our own yes and know man, our literary detective here on WEEKEND EDITION. Paul, very nice to talk to you.
Mr. COLLINS: Oh, good talking with you.
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