This YouTuber Uploaded a Video Through a Fishing Line

Abstraction is a funny thing. It helps us interact with our computers in a more intuitive and natural way, but it also lets us remain ignorant of those computers’ inner workings. The average user probably knows that computers understand 1s and 0s, but not what that actually means. If you want to get a good feel for that — at least as it relates to data storage and transmission—then look no further than Backwood’s video uploaded through a fishing line.

Backwood’s video was, as the headline states, uploaded through a fishing line. More accurately, the entire video was transmitted through a fishing line before then being uploaded to YouTube. That worked using exactly the same setup that you’ve seen in cartoons your whole life and that you may have even tried yourself at some point: the good ol’ tin can telephone.

Soundwaves are vibrations and can move through any physical medium. In the case of the tin can telephone, one can collects the soundwaves. They then move through the taught string and are forced into the air by the second can. In the standard elementary school science experiment, the tin can telephone is just transmitting the sound of a person’s voice. But sound can also carry data and that’s how Backwood achieved this feat.

If you ever put a phone to your ear in the ‘90s while someone was using dial-up internet in the home, you know that data can be transmitted through sound. At the most basic level, quiet might represent a zero and a loud sound might represent a one. Those bits can also be assigned to specific pitches and other encoding schemes are possible, too. In this case, Backwood used a simple scheme capable of transmitting a whopping five bytes per second.

That transmission is between two computers. One contains the original video file, but doesn’t have internet access. The second does have internet access, but can’t upload to YouTube until it receives the whole video file. The first computer talks to the second through a speaker pointed at a tin can microphone with a microphone at the other end connected to the second computer. Instead of literal tin cans and string, Backwood used paper cups and fishing line (the results were better with those).

As many people pointed out in the video’s comments, Backwood essentially reinvented an acoustic coupler — hardware that was popular in the days before dedicated modems became common. But instead of going through an electric phone line, this acoustic coupler goes through a fishing line.

In the end, it took Backwood five months to transmit the entire video file from the first computer to the second. If that doesn’t give you an appreciation for our modern technology with all of its abstraction, nothing will.