This year marks the 80th anniversary of ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer. The computer was built during World War II to speed up ballistics calculations, but its contributions to computing extend well beyond military applications.

Two of ENIAC’s key architects—John W. Mauchly, its co-inventor, and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, one of the six original programmers—married a few years after its completion and raised seven children together. Mauchly and McNulty’s grandchild Naomi Most delivered a talk as part of a celebration in honor of ENIAC’s anniversary on 15 February, which was held online and in-person at the American Helicopter Museum in West Chester, Pa. The following is adapted from that presentation.

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There was a library at my grandparents’ farmhouse that felt like it went on forever. September light through the windows, beech leaves rustling outside on the stone porch, the sounds of cousins and aunts and uncles somewhere in the house. And in the corner of that library, an IBM personal computer.

When I spent summers there as a child, I didn’t yet know that the computer was closely tied to my family’s story.

My grandparents are known for their contributions to creating the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. But both were interested in more than just crunching numbers: My grandfather wanted to predict the weather. My grandmother wanted to be a good storyteller.

In Irish, the first language my grandmother Kathleen “Kay” McNulty ever spoke, a word existed to describe both of these impulses: ríomh.

I began to learn the Irish language myself five years ago, and I was struck by how certain words and phrases had multiple meanings. According to renowned Irish cultural historian Manchán Magan—from whom I took lessons—the word ríomh has at different times been used to mean to compute, but also to weave, to narrate, or to compose a poem. That one word that can tell the story of ENIAC, a machine with wires woven like thread that was built to compute, make predictions, and search for a signal in the noise.

John Mauchly’s Weather-Prediction Ambitions

Before working on ENIAC, John Mauchly spent years collecting rainfall data across the United States. His favorite pastime was meteorology, and he wanted to find patterns in storm systems to predict the weather.

The Army, however, funded ENIAC to make simpler predictions: calculating ballistic trajectory tables. Start there, co-inventors J. Presper Eckert and Mauchly realized, and perhaps the weather would soon be computable.

Co-inventors John Mauchly [left] and J. Presper Eckert look at a portion of ENIAC on 25 November 1966. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Weather is a system unfolding through time, and a model of a storm is a story about how that system might unfold. There’s an old Irish saying related to this idea: Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir. Literally, “weather is a good storyteller.” But aimsir also means time. So the usual translation of this phrase into English becomes “time will tell.”

Mauchly wanted to ríomh an aimsire—to weave the weather into pattern, to compute the storm, to narrate the chaos. He realized that complex systems don’t reveal their full purpose at conception. They reveal it through aimsir—through weather, through time, through use.

ENIAC’s First Programmers Were Weavers

Kathleen “Kay” McNulty was born on 12 February 1921, in Creeslough, Ireland, on the night her father—an IRA training officer—was arrested and imprisoned in Derry Gaol.

Family oral history holds that her people were weavers. She spoke only Irish until her family reached Philadelphia when she was 4 years old, entering American school the following year knowing virtually no English. She graduated in 1942 from Chestnut Hill College with a mathematics degree, was recruited to compute artillery firing tables by hand for the U.S. Army, and was then selected—along with five other women—to program ENIAC.

They had no manual. They had only blueprints.

McNulty and her colleagues learned ENIAC and its quirks the way you learn a loom: by touch, by memory, by routing threads of electricity into patterns. They developed embodied knowledge the designers could only approximate. They could narrow a malfunction to a specific failed vacuum tube before any technician could locate it.

McNulty and Mauchly are also credited with conceiving the subroutine, the sequence of instructions that can be repeatedly recalled to perform a task, now essential in any programming. The subroutine was not in ENIAC’s blueprints, nor in the funding proposal. The concept emerged as highly determined people extended their imagination into the machine’s affordances.

The engineers designed the loom. Weavers discovered its true capabilities.

In 1950, four years after ENIAC was switched on, Mauchly’s dream was realized as it was used in the world’s first computer-assisted weather forecast. That was made possible after Klara von Neumann and Nick Metropolis reassembled and upgraded the ENIAC with a small amount of digital program memory. The programmers who transformed the math into operational code for the ENIAC were Norma Gilbarg, Ellen-Kristine Eliassen, and Margaret Smagorinsky. Their names are not as well-known as they should be.

Before programming ENIAC, Kay McNulty [left] was recruited by the U.S. Army to compute artillery firing tables. Here, she and two other women, Alyse Snyder [center] and Sis Stump, operate a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations in the basement of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering.University of Pennsylvania

Kay McNulty, Family Storyteller

Kay married John Mauchly in 1948, describing him as “the greatest delight of my life. He was so intelligent and had so many ideas.... He was not only lovable, he was loving.” She spent the rest of her life ensuring he, Eckert, and the ENIAC programmers would be recognized.

When she died in 2006, I came to her funeral in shock, not fully knowing what I’d lost. As she drifted away, it was said, she had been reciting her prayers in Irish. This understanding made it quickly over to Creeslough, in County Donegal, and awaited me when I visited to honor her memory with the dedication of a plaque right there in the center of town.

In her own memoir, she wrote: “If I am remembered at all, I would like to be remembered as my family storyteller.”

In Irish, the word for computer is ríomhaire. One who ríomhs. One who weaves, computes, and tells. My grandfather wanted to tell the story of the weather through computing. My grandmother wanted to be remembered as a storyteller. The language of her childhood already had a word that contained both of those ambitions.

Computers as Narrative Engines

When it was built, ENIAC looked like the back room of a textile production house. Panels. Switchboards. A room full of wires. Thread.

Thread does not tell you what it will become. We tend to think of computing as calculation—discrete and deterministic. But a model is a structured story about how something behaves.

Weather models, ballistic tables, economic forecasts, neural networks: These are all narrative engines, systems that take raw inputs and produce accounts of how the world might unfold. In complex systems, when parts are woven together through use, new structures arise that no one specified in advance.

Like ENIAC, the machines we are building now—the large models, the autonomous systems—are not merely calculators. They are looms.

Their most important properties will not be specified in advance. They will emerge through use, through the people who learn how to weave with them.

Through imagination.

Through aimsir.

In late-stage testing of a distributed AI platform, engineers sometimes encounter a perplexing situation: Every monitoring dashboard reads “healthy,” yet users report that the system’s decisions are slowly becoming wrong.

Engineers are trained to recognize failure in familiar ways: a service crashes, a sensor stops responding, a constraint violation triggers a shutdown. Something breaks, and the system tells you. But a growing class of software failures looks very different. The system keeps running, logs appear normal, and monitoring dashboards stay green. Yet the system’s behavior quietly drifts away from what it was designed to do.

This pattern is becoming more common as autonomy spreads across software systems. Quiet failure is emerging as one of the defining engineering challenges of autonomous systems because correctness now depends on coordination, timing, and feedback across entire systems.

When Systems Fail Without Breaking

Consider a hypothetical enterprise AI assistant designed to summarize regulatory updates for financial analysts. The system retrieves documents from internal repositories, synthesizes them using a language model, and distributes summaries across internal channels.

Technically, everything works. The system retrieves valid documents, generates coherent summaries, and delivers them without issue.

But over time, something slips. Maybe an updated document repository isn’t added to the retrieval pipeline. The assistant keeps producing summaries that are coherent and internally consistent, but they’re increasingly based on obsolete information. Nothing crashes, no alerts fire, every component behaves as designed. The problem is that the overall result is wrong.

From the outside, the system looks operational. From the perspective of the organization relying on it, the system is quietly failing.

The Limits of Traditional Observability

One reason quiet failures are difficult to detect is that traditional systems measure the wrong signals. Operational dashboards track uptime, latency, and error rates, the core elements of modern observability. These metrics are well-suited for transactional applications where requests are processed independently, and correctness can often be verified immediately.

Autonomous systems behave differently. Many AI-driven systems operate through continuous reasoning loops, where each decision influences subsequent actions. Correctness emerges not from a single computation but from sequences of interactions across components and over time. A retrieval system may return contextually inappropriate and technically valid information. A planning agent may generate steps that are locally reasonable but globally unsafe. A distributed decision system may execute correct actions in the wrong order.

None of these conditions necessarily produces errors. From the perspective of conventional observability, the system appears healthy. From the perspective of its intended purpose, it may already be failing.

Why Autonomy Changes Failure

The deeper issue is architectural. Traditional software systems were built around discrete operations: a request arrives, the system processes it, and the result is returned. Control is episodic and externally initiated by a user, scheduler, or external trigger.

Autonomous systems change that structure. Instead of responding to individual requests, they observe, reason, and act continuously. AI agents maintain context across interactions. Infrastructure systems adjust resources in real time. Automated workflows trigger additional actions without human input.

In these systems, correctness depends less on whether any single component works and more on coordination across time.

Distributed-systems engineers have long wrestled with issues of coordination. But this is coordination of a new kind. It’s no longer about things like keeping data consistent across services. It’s about ensuring that a stream of decisions—made by models, reasoning engines, planning algorithms, and tools, all operating with partial context—adds up to the right outcome.

A modern AI system may evaluate thousands of signals, generate candidate actions, and execute them across a distributed infrastructure. Each action changes the environment in which the next decision is made. Under these conditions, small mistakes can compound. A step that is locally reasonable can still push the system further off course.

Engineers are beginning to confront what might be called behavioral reliability: whether an autonomous system’s actions remain aligned with its intended purpose over time.

The Missing Layer: Behavioral Control

When organizations encounter quiet failures, the initial instinct is to improve monitoring: deeper logs, better tracing, more analytics. Observability is essential, but it only shows that the behavior has already diverged—it doesn’t correct it.

Quiet failures require something different: the ability to shape system behavior while it is still unfolding. In other words, autonomous systems increasingly need control architectures, not just monitoring.

Engineers in industrial domains have long relied on supervisory control systems. These are software layers that continuously evaluate a system’s status and intervene when behavior drifts outside safe bounds. Aircraft flight-control systems, power-grid operations, and large manufacturing plants all rely on such supervisory loops. Software systems historically avoided them because most applications didn’t need them. Autonomous systems increasingly do.

Behavioral monitoring in AI systems focuses on whether actions remain aligned with intended purpose, not just whether components are functioning. Instead of relying only on metrics such as latency or error rates, engineers look for signs of behavior drift: shifts in outputs, inconsistent handling of similar inputs, or changes in how multistep tasks are carried out. An AI assistant that begins citing outdated sources, or an automated system that takes corrective actions more often than expected, may signal that the system is no longer using the right information to make decisions. In practice, this means tracking outcomes and patterns of behavior over time.

Supervisory control builds on these signals by intervening while the system is running. A supervisory layer checks whether ongoing actions remain within acceptable bounds and can respond by delaying or blocking actions, limiting the system to safer operating modes, or routing decisions for review. In more advanced setups, it can adjust behavior in real time—for example, by restricting data access, tightening constraints on outputs, or requiring extra confirmation for high-impact actions.

Together, these approaches turn reliability into an active process. Systems don’t just run, they are continuously checked and steered. Quiet failures may still occur, but they can be detected earlier and corrected while the system is operating.

A Shift in Engineering Thinking

Preventing quiet failures requires a shift in how engineers think about reliability: from ensuring components work correctly to ensuring system behavior stays aligned over time. Rather than assuming that correct behavior will emerge automatically from component design, engineers must increasingly treat behavior as something that needs active supervision.

As AI systems become more autonomous, this shift will likely spread across many domains of computing, including cloud infrastructure, robotics, and large-scale decision systems. The hardest engineering challenge may no longer be building systems that work, but ensuring that they continue to do the right thing over time.

By many estimates, quantum computers will need millions of qubits to realize their potential applications in cybersecurity, drug development, and other industries. The problem is, anyone who has wanted to simultaneously control millions of a certain kind of qubit has run into the problem of trying to control millions of laser beams.

That’s exactly the challenge that was faced by scientists working on the MITRE Quantum Moonshot project, which brought together scientists from MITRE, MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Sandia National Laboratories. The solution they developed came in the form of an image projection technology that they realized could also be the fix for a host of other challenges in augmented reality, biomedical imaging, and elsewhere. The device is a 1-square-millimeter photonic chip capable of projecting the Mona Lisa onto an area smaller than the size of two human egg cells.

“When we started, we certainly never would have anticipated that we would be making a technology that might revolutionize imaging,” says Matt Eichenfield, one of the leaders of the Quantum Moonshot project, a collaborative research effort focused on developing a scalable, diamond-based quantum computer, and a professor of quantum engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Each second, their chip is capable of projecting 68.6 million individual spots of light—called scannable pixels—to differentiate them from physical pixels. That’s more than 50 times the capability of previous technology, such as micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) micromirror arrays.

“We have now made a scannable pixel that is at the absolute limit of what diffraction allows,” says Henry Wen, a visiting researcher at MIT and a photonics engineer at QuEra Computing.

The chip’s distinguishing feature is an array of tiny microscale cantilevers, which curve away from the plane of the chip in response to voltage and act as miniature “ski jumps” for light. Light is channeled along the length of each cantilever via a waveguide and exits at its tip. The cantilevers contain a thin layer of aluminum nitride, a piezoelectric that expands or contracts under voltage, thus moving the micromachine up and down and enabling the array to scan beams of light over a two-dimensional area.

Despite the magnitude of the team’s achievement, Eichenfield says that the process of engineering the cantilevers was “pretty smooth.” Each cantilever is composed of a stack of several submicrometer layers of material and curls approximately 90 degrees out of the plane at rest. To achieve such a high curvature, the team took advantage of differences in the contraction and expansion of individual layers caused by physical stresses in the material resulting from the fabrication process. The materials are first deposited flat onto the chip. Then, a layer in the chip below the cantilever is removed, allowing the material stresses to take effect, releasing the cantilever from the chip and allowing it to curl out. The top layer of each cantilever also features a series of silicon dioxide bars running perpendicular to the waveguide, which keep the cantilever from curling along its width while also improving its lengthwise curvature.

A micro-cantilever wiggles and waggles to project light in the right place.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.

What was more of a challenge than engineering the chip itself was figuring out the details of actually making the chip project images and videos. Working out the process of synchronizing and timing the cantilevers’ motion and light beams to generate the right colors at the right time was a substantial effort, according to Andy Greenspon, a researcher at MITRE who also worked on the project. Now, the team has successfully projected a variety of videos from a single cantilever, including clips from the movie A Charlie Brown Christmas.

The chip projected a roughly 125-micrometer image of the Mona Lisa.Matt Saha, Y. Henry Wen, et al.

Because the chip can project so many more spots in any given time interval than any previous beam scanners, it could also be used to control many more qubits in quantum computers. The Quantum Moonshot program’s mission is to build a quantum computer that can be scaled to millions of qubits. So clearly, it needs a scalable way of controlling each one, explains Wen. Instead of using one laser per qubit, the team realized that not every qubit needed to be controlled at every given moment. The chip’s ability to move light beams over a two-dimensional area would allow them to control all of the qubits with many fewer lasers.

Another process that Wen thinks the chip could improve is scanning objects for 3D printing. Today, that typically involves using a single laser to scan over the entire surface of an object. The new chip, however, could potentially employ thousands of laser beams. “I think now you can take a process that would have taken hours and maybe bring it down to minutes,” says Wen.

Wen is also excited to explore the potential of different cantilever shapes. By changing the orientations of the bars perpendicular to the waveguide, the team has been able to make the cantilevers curl into helixes. Wen says that such unusual shapes could be useful in making a lab-on-a-chip for cell biology or drug development. “A lot of this stuff is imaging, scanning a laser across something, either to image it or to stimulate some response. And so we could have one of these ski jumps curl not just up, but actually curl back around, and then move around and scan over a sample,” Wen explains. “If you can imagine a structure that will be useful for you, we should try it.”

Scott Imbrie vividly remembers the first time he used a robotic arm to shake someone’s hand and felt the robotic limb as if it were his own. “I still get goosebumps when I think about that initial contact,” he says. “It’s just unexplainable.” The moment came courtesy of a brain implant: an array of electrodes that let him control a robotic arm and receive tactile sensations back to the brain.

Getting there took decades. In 1985, Imbrie had woken up in the hospital after a car accident with a broken neck and a doctor telling him he’d never use his hands or legs again. His response was an expletive, he says—and a decision. “I’m not going to allow someone to tell me what I can and can’t do.” With the determination of a head-strong 22-year-old, Imbrie gradually regained the ability to walk and some limited arm movement. Aware of how unusual his recovery was, the Illinois-native wanted to help others in similar situations and began looking for research projects related to spinal cord injuries. For decades, though, he wasn’t the right fit, until in 2020 he was finally accepted into a University of Chicago trial.

Scott Imbrie has shaken hands with a robotic arm controlled by a brain implant. The electrodes record neural signals that enable him to move the device and receive tactile feedback. Top: 60 Minutes/CBS News; Bottom: University of Chicago

Imbrie is part of a rarefied group: More people have gone to space than have received advanced brain-computer interfaces (BCI) like his. But a growing number of companies are now attempting to move the devices out of neuroscience labs and into mainstream medical care, where they could help millions of people with paralysis and other neurological conditions. Some companies even hope that BCIs will eventually become a consumer technology.

None of that will be possible without people like Imbrie. He’s a member of the BCI Pioneers Coalition, an advocacy group founded in 2018 by Ian Burkhart, the first quadriplegic to regain hand movement using a brain implant.

That life-changing experience convinced Burkhart that BCIs will make the leap from lab to real world only if users help shape the technology by sharing their perspectives on what works, what doesn’t, and how the devices fit into daily life. The coalition aims to ensure that companies, clinicians, and regulators hear directly from trial participants.

Ian Burkhart founded the BCI Pioneers Coalition to ensure that companies developing brain implants hear directly from the people using them. Left: Andrew Spear/Redux; Right: Ian Burkhart

The group also serves as a peer-support network for trial participants. That’s crucial, because despite the steady drumbeat of miraculous results from BCI trials, receiving a brain implant comes with significant risks. Surgical complications, such as bleeding or infection in the brain, are possible. Even more concerning is the potential psychological toll if the implant fails to work as expected or if life-changing improvements are eventually withdrawn.

Researchers spell this out upfront, and many are put off, says John Downey, an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the University of Chicago and the lead on Imbrie’s clinical trial. “I would say, the number of people I talk to about doing it is probably 10 to 20 times the number of people that actually end up doing it,” he says.

What Happens in a BCI Trial?

BCI pioneers arrive at their unique status via a number of paths, including spinal cord injuries, stroke-induced paralysis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The implants they receive come from Blackrock Neurotech, Neuralink, Synchron, and other companies, and are being tested for restoring limb function, controlling computers and robotic arms, and even restoring speech.

Many of the implants record signals from the motor cortex—the part of the brain that controls voluntary movements—to move external devices. Some others target the somatosensory cortex, which processes sensory signals from the body, including touch, pain, temperature, and limb position, to re-create tactile sensation.

BCI Designs Used by Today’s Pioneers

Ease of use depends heavily on the application. Restoring function to a user’s own limbs or controlling robotic arms involves the most difficult learning curve. In early sessions, participants watch a virtual arm reach for objects while they imagine or attempt the same movement. Researchers record related brain signals and use them to train “decoder” software, which translates neural activity into control signals for a robotic arm or stimulation patterns for the user’s nerves or muscles.

Paralyzed in a 2010 swimming accident, Burkhart took part in a trial conducted by Battelle Memorial Institute and Ohio State University from 2014 to 2021. His implant recorded signals from his motor cortex as he attempted to move his hand, and the system relayed those commands to electrodes in his arm that stimulated the muscles controlling his fingers.

Ian Burkhart, who is paralyzed from the chest down, received a brain implant that routed neural signals through a computer to his paralyzed muscles, enabling him to play a video game. Battelle

Getting the system to work seamlessly took time, says Burkhart, and initially required intense concentration. Eventually, he could shift his focus from each individual finger movement to the overall task, allowing him to swipe a credit card, pour from a bottle, and even play Guitar Hero.

Training a decoder is also not a one-and-done process. Systems must be regularly recalibrated to account for “neural drift”—the gradual shift in a person’s neural activity patterns over time. For complex tasks like robotic arm control, researchers may have to essentially train an entirely new decoder before each session, which can take up to an hour.

Austin Beggin says that testing a BCI is hard work, but he adds that moments like petting his dog make it all worth it. Daniel Lozada/The New York Times/Redux

Even after the system is ready, using the device can be taxing, says Austin Beggin, who was paralyzed in a swimming accident in 2015 and now participates in a Case Western Reserve University trial aimed at restoring hand movement. “The mental work of just trying to do something like shaking hands or feeding yourself is 100-fold versus you guys that don’t even think about it,” he says.

It’s also a serious time commitment. Beggin travels more than 2 hours from his home in Lima, Ohio, to Cleveland for two weeks every month to take part in experiments. All the equipment is set up in the house he stays in, and he typically works with the researchers for 3 to 4 hours a day. The majority of the experiments are not actually task-focused, he says, and instead are aimed at adjusting the control software or better understanding his neural responses to different stimuli.

But the BCI users say the hard work is worth it. Beyond the hope of restoring lost function, many feel a strong moral obligation to advance a technology that could help others. Beggin compares the pioneers to the early astronauts who laid the groundwork for the lunar landings. “We’re some of the first astronauts just to get shot up for a couple of hours and come back down to earth,” he says.

The Emotional Impact of BCIs

Speak to BCI early adopters and a pattern emerges: The biggest benefits are often more emotional than practical. Using a robotic arm to feed oneself or control a computer is clearly useful, but many pioneers say the most meaningful moments are the ones the experiment wasn’t even trying to produce. Beggin counts shaking his parents’ hands for the first time since his injury and stroking his pet dachshund as among his favorite moments. “That stuff is absolutely incredible,” he says.

Neuralink participant Alex Conley, who broke his neck in a car accident in 2021, uses his implant to control both a robotic arm and computers, enabling him to open doors, feed himself, and handle a smartphone. But he says the biggest boost has come from using computer-aided design software.

A former mechanic, Conley began using the software within days of receiving his implant to design parts that could be fabricated on a 3D printer. He has designed everything from replacement parts for his uncle’s power tools to bumpers for his brother-in-law’s truck. “I was a very big problem solver before my accident, I was able to fix people’s things,” he says. “This gives me that same little burst of joy.”

BCI user Nathan Copeland used a robotic arm to get a fist bump from then-President Barack Obama in 2016. Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

The outside world often underestimates those little wins, says Nathan Copeland, who holds the record for the longest functional brain implant. After breaking his neck in a car accident in 2004, he joined a University of Pittsburgh BCI trial in 2015 and has since used the device to control both computers and a robotic arm.

After he uploaded a video to Reddit of himself playing Final Fantasy XIV, one commenter criticized him for not using his device for more practical tasks. Copeland says people don’t understand that those lighthearted activities also matter. “A lot of tasks that people think are mundane or frivolous are probably the tasks that have the most impact on someone that can’t do them,” he says. “Agency and freedom of expression, I think, are the things that impact a person’s life the most.”

Nathan Copeland plays Final Fantasy XIV using his brain implant to control the game character.

When Brain Implants Become Life-Changing

This perspective resonates with Neuralink’s first user, Noland Arbaugh—paralyzed from the neck down after a swimming accident in 2016. After receiving his implant in January 2024, he was able to control a cursor within minutes of the device being switched on. A few days later, the engineers let him play the video game Civilisation VI, and the technology’s potential suddenly felt real. “I played it for 8 hours or 12 hours straight,” he says. “It made me feel so independent and so free.”

Before receiving his Neuralink implant, Noland Arbaugh used mouth-operated devices to control a computer. He says the BCI is more reliable and enables him to do many more things on his own. Rebecca Noble/The New York Times/Redux

But the technology is also providing more practical benefits. Before his implant, Arbaugh relied on a mouth-held typing stick and a mouth-controlled joystick called a quadstick, which uses sip-or-puff sensors to issue commands. But the fiddliness of this equipment required constant caregiver support. The Neuralink implant has dramatically increased the number of things he can do independently. He says he finds great value in not needing his family “to come in and help me 100 times a day.”

For Casey Harrell, the technology has been even more transformative. Diagnosed with ALS in 2020, the climate activist had just welcomed a baby daughter and was in the midst of a major campaign, pressuring a financial firm to divest from companies that had poor environmental records.

Casey Harrell was able to communicate again within 30 minutes of his BCI being switched on. The device translates his neural signals quickly enough for him to hold conversations. Ian Bates/The New York Times/Redux

“Every morning we’d wake up and there’d be a new thing he couldn’t do, a new part of his body that didn’t work,” says his wife, Levana Saxon. Most alarming was his rapid loss of speech, which, among other things, left him unable to indicate when he was in pain. Then a relative alerted him to a clinical trial at the University of California, Davis, using BCIs to restore speech. He immediately signed up.

The device, implanted in July 2023, records from the brain region that controls muscles involved in talking and translates these signals into instructions for a voice synthesizer. Within 30 minutes of it being switched on, Harrell could communicate again. “I was absolutely overwhelmed with the thought of how this would impact my life and allow me to talk to my family and friends and better interact with my daughter,” he says. “It just was so overwhelming that I began to cry.”

While earlier assistive technology limited him to short, direct commands, Harrell says the BCI is fast enough that he can hold a proper conversation, and he’s been able to resume work part-time.

What’s Holding BCI Technology Back?

BCI technology still has limits. Most trial participants using Blackrock Neurotech implants can operate their devices only in the lab because the systems rely on wired connections and racks of computer hardware. Some users, including Copeland and Harrell, have had the equipment installed at home, but they still can’t leave the house with it. “That would be a big unlock if I was able to do so,” says Harrell.

The academic nature of many trials creates additional constraints. Pressure to publish and secure funding pushes researchers to demonstrate peak performance on narrow tasks rather than build more versatile and reliable systems, says Mariska Vansteensel, who runs BCI studies at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands. She says that investigating the technology’s limits or repeating an experiment in new patients is “less rewarded in terms of funding.”

In a clinical trial, Scott Imbrie uses a BCI to control a robotic arm, using signals from his motor cortex to make it move a block. University of Chicago

One of Imbrie’s biggest frustrations is the rapid turnover in experiments. Just as he begins to get proficient at one task, he’s asked to switch to the next task. Study designs also mean that much of the users’ time is spent on mundane tasks required to fine-tune the system.

Perhaps the biggest issue is that trials are often time-limited. That’s partly because scar tissue from the body’s immune response to the implant can gradually degrade signal quality. But constraints on funding and researcher availability can also make it impossible for users to keep using their BCIs after their trials end, even when the technology is still functional.

Ian Burkhart’s BCI enables him to grasp objects, pour from a bottle, and swipe a credit card.

Burkhart has firsthand experience. His trial was extended, but the implant was eventually removed after he got an infection. He always knew the trial would end, but it was nonetheless challenging. “It was a little bit of a tease where I got to see the capability of the restoration of function,” he says. “Now I’m just back to where I was.”

The Push to Commercialize BCIs

Progress is being made in transitioning the technology from experimental research devices to fully-fledged medical products that could help users in their everyday lives. Most academic BCI research has relied on Blackrock Neurotech’s Utah Arrays, which typically feature 96 needlelike electrodes that penetrate the brain’s surface. The implant is connected to a skull-mounted pedestal that’s wired to external hardware. But some of the newer devices are sleeker and less invasive.

Neuralink’s implant houses its electronics and rechargeable battery in a coin-size unit connected to flexible electrode threads inserted into the brain by a robotic “sewing machine.” The implant, which is roughly the size of a quarter or a euro, is mounted in a hole cut into the skull and charges and transfers data wirelessly. Synchron takes a different approach, threading a stent-like implant through blood vessels into the motor cortex. This “stentrode” connects by wire to a unit in the chest that powers the implant and transmits data wirelessly.

Rodney Gorham can use his Synchron implant to control not just a computer, but also smart devices in his home like an air conditioner, fan, and smart speaker. Rodney Decker

Neuralink’s decoder runs on a laptop, while Synchron deploys a smartphone-size signal processing unit as a wireless bridge to the user’s devices, which allows them to use their implants at home and on the move. The companies have also developed adaptive decoders that use machine learning to adjust to neural drift on the fly, reducing the need for recalibration.

Making these devices truly user-friendly will require technology that can interpret user context, says Kurt Haggstrom, Synchron’s chief commercial officer—including mood, attention levels, and environmental factors like background noise and location. This approach will require AI that analyzes neural signals alongside other data streams such as audio and visual input.

Last year, Synchron took a first step by pairing its implant with an Apple Vision Pro headset. When trial participant Rodney Gorham looked at devices such as a fan, a smart speaker, and an air conditioner, the headset overlaid a menu that enabled him to adjust the device’s settings using his implant.

Rodney Gorham uses his Synchron implant to turn on music, feed his dog, and more. Synchron BCI

Another way to reduce cognitive load is to detect high-order signals of intent in neural data rather than low-level motor commands, says Florian Solzbacher, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Blackrock Neurotech. For instance, rather than manually navigating to an email app and typing, the user could simply think about sending an email and the system would then open it with content already prepopulated, he says.

Durability may prove a thornier problem to solve, UChicago’s Downey says. Current implants last around a decade—well short of a lifelong solution. And with limited real estate in the brain, replacement is only possible once or twice, he says.

Rapid technological progress also raises difficult decisions about whether to get a BCI implant now or wait for a more advanced device. This was a major concern for Gorham’s wife, Caroline. “I was hesitant. I didn’t want him to go on the trial but maybe a future one,” she says. “It was my fear of missing out on future upgrades.”

Will Brain Implants Ever Become Consumer Tech?

Some executives have raised the prospect of BCIs eventually becoming consumer devices. Neuralink founder Elon Musk has been particularly vocal, suggesting that the company’s implants could replace smartphones, let people save and replay memories, or even achieve “symbiosis” with AI.

This kind of talk inspires mixed feelings in users. The hype brings visibility and funding, says Beggin, but could divert attention from medical users’ needs. Copeland worries that consumer branding could strip the devices of insurance coverage and that rising demand may make it harder to access qualified surgeons.

Noland Arbaugh, the first recipient of Neuralink’s BCI, says that using the implant to control a computer made him feel independent and free. Steve Craft/Guardian/eyevine/Redux

There are also concerns about how data collected by BCI companies will be handled if the devices go mainstream. As a trial participant, Arbaugh says he’s comfortable signing away his data rights to advance the technology, but he thinks stronger legal protections will be needed in the future. “Does that data still belong to Neuralink? Does it belong to each person? And can that data be sold?” he asks.

Blackrock’s Solzbacher says the company remains focused on the medical applications of the technology. But he also believes it is building a “universal interface to any kind of a computerized system” that may have broader applications in the future. And he says the company owes it to users not to limit them to a bare-bones assistive technology. “Why would somebody who’s got a medical condition want to get less than something that somebody who’s able-bodied would possibly also take?” says Solzbacher.

The ever-optimistic Imbrie heartily agrees. Medical devices are invariably expensive, he says, but targeting consumer applications could push companies to keep devices simple and affordable while continuing to add features. “I truly believe that making it a consumer-available product will just enhance the product’s capabilities for the medical field,” he says.

Imbrie is on a mission to refocus the conversation around BCIs on the positives. While concerns about risks are valid, he worries that the alarming language often used to describe brain implants discourages people from volunteering for trials that could help them.

“I remember laying there in the bed and not being able to move,” he says, “and it was really dehumanizing having to ask someone to do everything for you. As humans, we want to be independent.”

This article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “Life With an Experimental Brain Implant.”

On 8 January 2026, the Iranian government imposed a near-total communications shutdown. It was the country’s first full information blackout: For weeks, the internet was off across all provinces while services including the government-run intranet, VPNs, text messaging, mobile calls, and even landlines were severely throttled. It was an unprecedented lockdown that left more than 90 million people cut off not only from the world, but from one another.

Since then, connectivity has never fully returned. Following U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in late February, Iran again imposed near-total restrictions, and people inside the country again saw global information flows dry up.

The original January shutdown came amid nationwide protests over the deepening economic crisis and political repression, in which millions of people chanted antigovernment slogans in the streets. While Iranian protests have become frequent in recent years, this was one of the most significant uprisings since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The government responded quickly and brutally. One report put the death toll at more than 7,000 confirmed deaths and more than 11,000 under investigation. Many sources believe the death toll could exceed 30,000.

Thirteen days into the January shutdown, we at NetFreedom Pioneers (NFP) turned to a system we had built for exactly this kind of moment—one that sends files over ordinary satellite TV signals. During the national information vacuum, our technology, called Toosheh, delivered real-time updates into Iran, offering a lifeline to millions starved of trusted information.

How Iran Censors the Internet

I joined NetFreedom Pioneers, a nonprofit focused on anticensorship technology, in 2014. Censorship in Iran was a defining feature of my youth in the 1990s. After the Islamic Revolution, most Iranians began to lead double lives—one at home, where they could drink, dance, and choose their clothing, and another in public, where everyone had to comply with stifling government laws.

Iran’s internet infrastructure is more centralized than in other parts of the world, making it easier for the government to restrict the flow of information. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

My first experience with secret communications was when I was five and living in the small city of Fasa in southern Iran. My uncle brought home a satellite dish—dangerously illegal at the time—that allowed us to tune into 12 satellite channels. My favorite was Cartoon Network. Then, during my teenage years, this same uncle introduced me to the internet through dial-up modems. I remember using Yahoo Mail with its 4 megabytes of storage, reading news from around the world, and learning about the Chandra X-ray telescope from NASA’s website.

That openness didn’t last. As internet use spread in the early 2000s, the Iranian government began reshaping the network itself. Unlike the highly distributed networks in the United States or Europe, where thousands of providers exchange traffic across many independent routes, Iran’s connection to the global internet is relatively centralized. Most international traffic passes through a small number of gateways controlled by state-linked telecom operators. That architecture gives authorities unusual leverage: By restricting or withdrawing those connections, they can sharply reduce the country’s access to the outside world.

Over the past decade, Iran has expanded this control through what it calls the National Information Network, a domestically routed system designed to keep data inside the country whenever possible. Many government services, banking systems, and local platforms are hosted on this internal network. During periods of unrest, access to the global internet can be throttled or cut off while portions of this domestic network continue to function.

The government began its censorship campaign by redirecting or blocking websites. As internet use grew, it adopted more sophisticated approaches. For example, the Telecommunication Company of Iran uses a technique called deep packet inspection to analyze the content of data packets in real time. This method enables it to identify and block specific types of traffic, such as VPN connections, messaging apps, social media platforms, and banned websites.

The Stealth of Satellite Transmissions

Toosheh’s communication workaround builds on a history of satellite TV adoption in Middle Eastern and North African countries. By the early 2000s, satellite dishes were common in Iran; today the majority of households in Iran have access to satellite TV despite its official prohibition.

Unlike subscription services such as DirecTV and Dish Network, “free-to-air” satellite TV broadcasts are unencrypted and can be received by anyone with a dish and receiver—no subscription required. Because the signals are open, users can also capture and store the data they carry, rather than simply watching it live. Tech-savvy people learned that they could use a digital video broadcasting (DVB) card—a piece of hardware that connects to a computer and tunes into satellite frequencies—to transform a personal computer into a satellite receiver. This way, they could watch and store media locally as well as download data from dedicated channels.

Many Iranian citizens have free-to-air satellite dishes, like the ones on this apartment building in Tehran, and can thus download Toosheh transmissions, giving them a lifeline during internet blackouts.Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Toosheh, a Persian word that translates to “knapsack,” is the brainchild of Mehdi Yahyanejad, an Iranian-American technologist and entrepreneur. Yahyanejad cofounded NetFreedom Pioneers in 2012. He proposed that the satellite-computer connections enabled by a DVB card could be re-created in software, eliminating the need for specialized hardware. He added a simple digital interface to the software to make it easy for anyone to use. The next breakthrough came when the NFP team developed a new transfer protocol that tricks ordinary satellite receivers into downloading data alongside audio and video content. Thus, Toosheh was born.

Satellite TV uses a file system called an MPEG transport stream that allows multiple audio, video, or data layers to be packaged into a single stream file. When you tune in to a satellite channel and select an audio option or closed captions, you’re accessing data stored in different parts of this stream. The NFP team’s insight was that, by piggybacking on one of these layers, Toosheh could send an MPEG stream that included documents, videos, and more.

HOW TOOSHEH WORKS: At NetFreedom Pioneers, content curators pull together files—news articles, videos, audio, and software [1]. Toosheh’s encoder software [2] compresses the files into a bundle, in .ts format, creating an MPEG transport stream [3]. From there, it’s uploaded to a server for transmission [4] via a free-to-air TV channel on a Yahsat satellite that’s positioned over the Middle East to provide regional coverage [5]. Satellite receivers [6] directly capture the data streams, which are downloaded to computers, smartphones, and other devices, and decoded by Toosheh software [8].Chris Philpot

A satellite receiver can’t tell the difference between our data and normal satellite audio and video data since it only “sees” the MPEG streams, not what’s encoded on them. This means the data can be downloaded and read, watched, and saved on local devices such as computers, smartphones, or storage devices. What’s more, the system is entirely private: No one can detect whether someone has received data through Toosheh; there are no traceable logs of user activity.

Toosheh doesn’t provide internet access, but rather delivers curated data through satellite technology. The fundamental distinction lies in the way users interact with the system. Unlike traditional internet services, where you type a request into your browser and receive data in response, Toosheh operates more like a combination of radio and television, presenting information in a magazine-like format. Users don’t make requests; instead, they receive 1 to 5 gigabytes of prepackaged, carefully selected data.

Access to information is not only about news or politics, but about exposure to possibilities.

During this year’s internet blackout, we distributed official statements from Iranian opposition leader Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi and the U.S. government. We provided first-aid tutorials for medics and injured protesters. We sent uncensored news reports from BBC Persian, Iran International, IranWire, VOA Farsi, and others. We also shared critical software packages including anticensorship and antisurveillance tools, along with how-to guides to help people securely connect to Starlink satellite terminals, allowing them to stay protected and anonymous as they sent their own communications.

How to Combat Signal Interference

Because Toosheh relies on one-way satellite broadcasts, it evades the usual tactics governments use to block internet access. However, it remains vulnerable to satellite signal jamming.

The Iranian government is notorious for deploying signal jamming, especially in larger cities. In 2009, the government used uplink interference, which attacks the satellite in orbit by beaming strong noise in the frequency of the satellite’s receiver. This makes it impossible for the satellite to distinguish the information it’s supposed to receive. However, because this type of attack temporarily disables the entire satellite, Iran was threatened with international sanctions and in 2012 stopped using the method .

A graph of network connectivity in Iran shows that on 9 January 2026, internet access dropped from nearly 100 percent to 0. Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The current method, called terrestrial jamming, uses antennas installed at higher elevations than the surrounding buildings to beam strong noise over a specific area in the frequency range of household receivers. This attack is effective in keeping some of the packets from arriving and damaging others, effectively jamming the transmission. But it’s short-range and requires significant power, so it’s impossible to implement nationwide. There are always people somewhere who can still watch TV, download from Toosheh, or tune into a satellite radio despite the jamming. Even so, we wanted a workaround that would keep our transmissions broadly accessible.

NFP’s solution was to add redundancy, similar in principle to a data-storage technique called RAID (redundant array of independent disks). Instead of sending each piece of data once, we send extra information that allows missing or corrupted packets to be reconstructed. Under normal circumstances, we often use 5 percent of our bandwidth for this redundancy. During periods of active jamming, we increase that to as much as 25 to 30 percent, improving the chances that users can recover complete files despite interference.

From Crisis Response to Public Access

Toosheh initially came online in 2015 in Iran and Afghanistan. Its full potential, however, was first realized during the 2019 protests in Iran, which saw the most widespread internet shutdown prior to the blackout this year. Wired called the 2019 shutdown “the most severe disconnection” tracked by NetBlocks in any country in terms of its “technical complexity and breadth.” Our technology helped thousands of people stay informed. We sent crucial local updates, legal-aid guides, digital security tools, and independent news to satellite receivers all over the country, seeing a sixfold increase in our user base.

When that wave of protests subsided, the government allowed some communication services to return. People were again able to access the free internet using VPNs and other antifilter software that allowed them to bypass restrictions. Toosheh then became a public access point for news, educational material, and entertainment beyond government filtering.

Toosheh’s impact is often personal. A traveling teacher in western Iran told NFP that he regularly distributed Toosheh files to students in remote villages. One package included footage of female athletes competing in the Olympic Games, something never broadcast in Iran. For one young girl, it was the first time she realized women could compete professionally in sports. That moment underscores a broader truth: Access to information is not only about news or politics, but about exposure to possibilities.

The Cost of Toosheh

Unlike internet-based systems, Toosheh’s operational cost remains constant regardless of the number of users. A single TV satellite in geostationary earth orbit, deployed and maintained by an international company such as Eutelsat, can broadcast to an entire continent with no increase in cost to audiences. What’s more, the startup cost for users isn’t high: A satellite dish and receiver in Iran costs less than US $50, which is affordable to many. And it costs nothing for people to use Toosheh’s service and receive its files.

We aim not just to build a tool for censorship circumvention, but to redefine access itself.

However, operating the service is costly: NetFreedom Pioneers pays tens of thousands of dollars a month for satellite bandwidth. We had received funding from the U.S. State Department, but in August of 2025, that funding ended, forcing us to suspend services in Iran.

Then the December protests happened, and broadcasting to Iran became an urgent priority. To turn Toosheh back on, we needed roughly $50,000 a month. With the support of a handful of private donors, we were able to meet these costs and sustain operations in Iran for a few months, though our future there and elsewhere is uncertain.

Satellites Against Censorship

Toosheh’s revival in Iran came alongside NFP’s ongoing support for deployments of Starlink, a satellite internet service that allows users to connect directly to satellites rather than relying on domestic networks, which the government can shut down. Unlike Toosheh’s one-way broadcasts, Starlink provides full two-way internet access, enabling users to send messages, upload videos, and communicate with the outside world.

In 2022, we started gathering donations to buy Starlink terminals for Iran. We have delivered more than 300 of the roughly 50,000 there, enabling citizens to send encrypted updates and videos to us from inside the country. Because the technology is banned by the government, access remains limited and carries risk; Iranian authorities have recently arrested Starlink users and sellers. And unlike Toosheh’s receive-only broadcasts, Starlink terminals transmit signals back to orbit, creating a radio footprint that can potentially be detected.

The internet shutdown in Iran continued after the attacks by Israel and the United States began in late February, preventing Iranians from communicating with the outside world and with one another.Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu/Getty Images

Looking ahead, we envision Toosheh becoming a foundational part of global digital resilience. It is uncensored, untraceable, and resistant to government shutdowns. Because Toosheh is downlink only, it can sometimes feel hard to explain the value of this technology to those living in the free world, those accustomed to open internet access. Yet, people living under censorship have few other choices when there’s a digital blackout.

Currently, NFP is developing new features like intelligent content curation and automatically prioritizing data packages based on geographic or situational needs. And we’re experimenting with local sharing tools that allow users who receive Toosheh broadcasts to redistribute those files via Wi-Fi hotspots or other offline networks, which could extend the system’s reach to disaster zones, conflict areas, and climate-impacted regions where infrastructure may be destroyed.

We’re also looking at other use cases. Following the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, NetFreedom Pioneers designed a satellite-based system to deliver educational materials. Our goal is to enable private, large-scale distribution of coursework to anyone—including the girls who are banned from Afghanistan’s schools. The system is technically ready but has yet to secure funding for deployment.

We aim not just to build a tool for censorship circumvention, but to redefine access itself. Whether in an Iranian city under surveillance, a Guatemalan village without internet, or a refugee camp in East Africa, Toosheh offers a powerful and practical model for delivering vital information without relying on vulnerable or expensive networks.

Toosheh is a reminder that innovation doesn’t have to mean complexity. Sometimes, the most transformative ideas are the simplest, like delivering data through the sky, quietly and affordably, into the hands of those who need it most.

This article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “The Stealth Signals Bypassing Iran’s Internet Blackout.”

Why does a chocolatier build a railroad? For Milton S. Hershey, it was a logical response to a sugar shortage brought on by World War I. The Hershey Chocolate Co. was by then a chocolate-making powerhouse, having refined the automation and mass production of its products, including the eponymous Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar and the bite-size Hershey’s Kiss. To satisfy its many customers, the company needed a steady supply of sugar. Plus, it wanted a way to circumvent the American Sugar Refining Co., also known as the Sugar Trust, which had a virtual monopoly on sugar processing in the United States.

Why Did Hershey Build an Electric Railroad in Cuba?

Beginning in 1916, Hershey looked to Cuba to secure his sugar supply. According to historian Thomas R. Winpenny, the chocolate magnate had a “personal infatuation” with the lush, beautiful island. What’s more, U.S. business interests there were protected by a treaty known as the Platt Amendment, which made Cuba a satellite state of the United States.

Like many industrialists of the day, Hershey believed in vertical integration, and the company’s Cuban operation eventually expanded to include five sugar plantations, five modern sugar mills, a refinery, several company towns, and an oil-fired power plant with three substations to run it all.

A 1943 rail pass entitled the holder to travel on all ordinary passenger trains of the Hershey Electric Railway. Hershey Community Archives

The company also built a railroad. To maximize the sugar yield, the cane needed to be ground promptly after being cut, and the rail system offered an efficient means of transporting the cane to the mills, and ensured that the mills operated around the clock during the harvest. By 1920, one of Hershey’s three main sites was processing 135,000 tonnes of cane, yielding 14.4 million kilograms of sugar.

Initially, the Hershey Cuban Railway consisted of a single 56-kilometer-long standard gauge track on which ran seven steam locomotives that burned coal or oil. But due to the high cost of the imported fuel and the inefficiency of the locomotives, Hershey began electrifying the line in 1920. Although it was the first electrified train in Cuba, rail lines in Europe and the United States were already being electrified.

In addition to powering the various Hershey entities, the generating station supplied Matanzas and the smaller towns with electricity. F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department published a detailed account of the system in the April 1920 General Electric Review.

Hershey’s Company Towns

The company town of Central Hershey became the headquarters for Hershey’s Cuba operations. (“Central” is the Cuban term for a mill and the surrounding settlement.) It sat on a plateau overlooking the port of Santa Cruz del Norte, about halfway between Havana and Matanzas in the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane region.

Hershey imported the industrial utopian model he had established in Hershey, Penn., which was itself inspired by Richard and George Cadbury’s Bournville Village outside Birmingham, England.

The chocolate magnate Milton S. Hershey had a “personal infatuation” with Cuba.Underwood Archives/Getty Images

In Cuba as in Pennsylvania, Hershey’s factory complex was complemented by comfortable homes for his workers and their families, as well as swimming pools, baseball fields, and affordable medical clinics staffed with doctors, nurses, and dentists. Managers had access to a golf course and country club in Central Hershey. Schools provided free education for workers’ children.

Milton Hershey himself had very little formal education, and so in 1909 he and his wife, Catherine, established the Hershey Industrial School in Hershey, Penn. There, white, male orphans received an education until they were 18 years old. Now known as the Milton Hershey School, the school has broadened its admission criteria considerably over the years.

Hershey duplicated this concept in the Cuban company town of Central Rosario, founding the Hershey Agricultural School. The first students were children whose parents had died in a horrific 1923 train accident on the Hershey Electric Railway. The high-speed, head-on collision between two trains killed 25 people and injured 50 more.

Milton Hershey was a generous philanthropist, and by most accounts he truly cared for his employees and their welfare, and yet his early 20th-century paternalism was not without fault. He was a fierce opponent of union activity, and any hard-won pay increases for workers often came at the expense of profit-sharing benefits. Like other U.S. businessmen in Cuba, Hershey employed migrant seasonal labor from neighboring Caribbean islands, undercutting the wages of local workers. Historians are still wrangling with how to capture the long-lasting effects of U.S. economic imperialism on Cuba.

Can the Hershey Electric Railway Be Revived?

Hershey continued to acquire new sugar plantations in Cuba throughout the 1920s, eventually owning about 24,300 hectares and leasing another 12,000 hectares. In 1946, a year after Milton Hershey’s death and amid growing political uncertainty on the island, the company sold its Cuban interests to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Co. In addition to Hershey’s sugar operations, the sale included a peanut oil plant, four electric plants, and 404 km of railroad track plus locomotives and train cars.

Service on the Hershey Electric Railway in Cuba continued into at least the 2010s but became increasingly sporadic, with aging equipment like this car at the Central Hershey station. Hershey Community Archives

The Central Hershey sugar refinery continued to operate even after the Cuban Revolution but eventually closed in 2002. Passenger service, meanwhile, continued on the Hershey Electric Railway, albeit sporadically: By 2012, there were only two trips a day between Havana and Matanzas. This video, from 2013, gives a good sense of the route:

A colleague of mine who studies Cuban history told me that in his travels to the country over almost 30 years, he has never been able to ride the Hershey electric train. It was always out of service or had restricted service due to the island’s chronic electricity shortages, which have only gotten worse in recent years. I’ve been trying to find out if any part of the line is still operating. If you happen to know, please add a comment below.

Cuba’s frequent power outages make it difficult to operate the Hershey Electric Railway. In this 2009 photo, passengers await the restoration of electricity so they can continue their journey.Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images

A 2024 analysis of the economic potential and challenges of reactivating Cuba’s Hershey Electric Railway noted that an electric railway could be a hedge against climate change and geopolitical factors. But it also acknowledged that frequent power outages and damaged infrastructure argue against reactivating the electrified railway, and it favored the diesel engines used on most of Cuba’s rail network.

Cuba has been mostly off-limits to U.S. tourists for my entire life, but it was one of my grandmother’s favorite vacation spots. I would love to imagine a future where political ties are restored, the power grid is stabilized, and the Hershey Electric Railway is reopened to the Cuban public and to curious visitors like me.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the May 2026 print issue as “This Chocolate Empire Ran on Electric Rails.”

References

In April 1920, F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department wrote a detailed account called “Electrification of the Hershey Cuban Railway” in the General Electric Review, which was later abstracted in Scientific American Monthly to reach a broader audience.

Thomas R. Winpenny’s article “Milton S. Hershey Ventures into Cuban Sugar” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Fall 1995, provided background to the business side of Hershey’s Cuba enterprise.

Florian Wondratschek’s 2024 article “Between Investment Risk and Economic Benefit: Potential Analysis for the Reactivation of the Hershey Railway in Cuba” in Transactions on Transport Sciences brought the story up to the present.

And if you’re interested in a visual take on the Hershey operation on Cuba, check out the documentary Milton Hershey’s Cuba by Ric Morris, a professor of Spanish and linguistics at Middle Tennessee State University.