5 Times the Government Forced Everyone to Unplug from Their Devices

5 All Radio Transmissions Had to Stop So We Could Listen for Martians

Every couple of years, the orbits of Earth and Mars line up so the planets wind up extra close to each other. In August 1924, the planets wound up extra extra close, so scientists figured that if Martians were ever going to contact us, now was the most likely time. Every hour, on the hour, for four days, all radio broadcasts had to stop for five minutes, in a shutdown enforced by the U.S. military. We spent those minutes listening to the heavens, hoping for a signal.

Given that the world would later have a very well-publicized program for listening for aliens, which requires no worldwide radio silence, you might question this shutdown’s necessity. But all skeptics soon had cause to shut up because radios that month really did pick up a signal. It repeated periodically, and when we converted it to light and recorded it on paper, people said it showed a face. The Martians were telling us what they looked like! 

Here's the signal, which people said looked like a face:

Wait, that’s not a face. Mars does have multiple formations that “look like faces” but were formed totally naturally, and even those all look more like faces than whatever that wave is. 

We never heard any Martian signal again, and you’ve never heard of this one before. You can safely assume then that this signal really had a terrestrial origin, from some brave person who violated the order. 

4 TV Turned Off Every Night, for the Children

In many countries, networks have to wait till night before broadcasting stuff considered inappropriate for children. In Britain, from 1946 to 1957, this separation between “family programming” and “adult programming” was more than a single cutoff time. Instead, it was an hourlong block from 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., during which networks were banned from broadcasting anything at all. 

People called this the Toddlers’ Truce. Besides providing a buffer before the dirty, dirty entertainment that we all associate with 1950s British television, this hour was designed so parents had a television-free break during which they could put the kids to bed. 

It took a decade for the country to realize that parents who put kids to bed will do so whenever they like. TV offers no large barrier to this, and we don’t need to revise everyone’s viewing options around the recommended schedules for young parents. 

3 All Lights in L.A. Switched Off, to Fool the Japanese

During the era right before the Toddlers’ Truce, TV didn’t broadcast in Britain at all, thanks to World War II. Not only did TVs go dark — whole cities went dark, to avoid offering targets to German bombers. In hindsight, these blackouts may have been unjustified, but Britain was hardly the only place in the world to try them. For example, Los Angeles ordered a citywide blackout on February 24, 1942, to avoid offering targets to Japanese bombers.

“But Japan never bombed Los Angeles,” you say, since you’d probably have heard about it if that had happened. That’s true. But when a weather balloon appeared in the sky that night, people thought it was an attacker from Japan. The Navy responded with antiaircraft fire, and these shots, lit up by their own searchlights, looked like even more aircraft. Reports now claimed a whole swarm of planes were attacking the city. The Navy fired over 1,400 rounds at the supposed attackers. 

Though no invaders really attacked the city, the “Battle of Los Angeles” is noted as killing five people. No, the bullets didn’t hit random Angelenos — the Navy were firing the guns, not the LAPD. But the blackout killed three people in car crashes. Two other people responded to the gunfire with fatal heart attacks. 

2 The Internet Goes Down Nationwide to Stop Cheaters

In 2016, school exams in Algeria leaked online ahead of time. This was a big deal over there. Half a million kids had to retake their exams, and police arrested dozens of people they linked to the leaks. 

The next year, the country installed jammers in schools during the exam period, to stop kids from accessing the internet and cheating. This didn’t appear to directly address the issue of the questions leaking ahead of time, and it also didn’t work as effectively as planned. So, the following year, the country went further. For an hour every day, during the exam period in June, they shut down the internet — not just in schools but throughout the entire country.

Airports lost internet access. Banks lost internet access. Everyone lost internet access, to accommodate children at desks answering quizzes. This apparently worked to the government’s satisfaction because they continued the policy every single June after that. 

Reasonable people have offered plenty of alternatives that make more sense than this, the simplest being just banning kids from carrying any electronic device during exams. Searching kids might not sound like anyone’s favorite option, but it’s better than silencing the entire country. It’s also not so hard to do. Elsewhere, schools make kids go through metal detectors every single day. 

1 The Phone Stopped, to Honor Alexander Graham Bell

Bell died on August 2, 1922. He was at this point no longer able to speak (a most undesirable end for the man whom we all associate with telephones). So, when his wife told him, “Don’t leave me,” he had to reply in sign language. “No,” he signed. Then he died. 

To mark Bell’s death, all telephone exchanges in the U.S. and Canada shut down for one minute at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of his funeral. It was a way to make everyone think of the inventor widely credited with (though not necessarily actual responsible for) devising the telephone. 

But was it a good way? If the phone was Bell’s whole deal, people not using it for one minute could be the exact thing he wouldn’t want. It’s like if Gandhi died, and the world said, “In his honor, let’s all spend one minute refraining from nonviolence.”

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