Jamie Stokes: The Polish Invention that Made YouTube Possible

Karol Adamiecki was born in 1866 in Dąbrowie Górniczej. After completing his education in engineering in Moscow, he returned to Poland, grew a magnificent moustache, and invented something he called the harmonograf.

Where does YouTube come into the story? Well, the harmonograf is widely regarded as the first example of what we now call a progress bar. A progress bar, in case you haven't looked at a computer in the past 20 years, is an animated graphic that shows you how much of a task has been completed and how much remains to be done.

You see a progress bar pretty much whenever you ask a computer to do something that takes time, and they usually lie. This is not Karol Adamiecki's fault though. He invented the harmonograf as a way of keeping track of progress in a project. His method involved colouring in sections of a horizontal timeline as tasks were completed. Sounds incredibly obvious, like all the best ideas, but Adamiecki was the first to think of it.

In case the YouTube connection is still not obvious, click over to your favourite video of cats right now and look at the bottom of the player. You see that red bar that creeps along from left to right at the video plays? That's a progress bar, and, like all progress bars, it is the great-great-grandchild of Adamiecki's harmonograf.

Imagine how useless YouTube, or any other application that plays videos, would be without that progress bar. If you're as old as me, you won't have to imagine it because you will remember the days when the only videos you could watch at home were video cassettes. Today, if you want to go back and watch the part where the cat hilariously falls off a table halfway through the video, you simply click about halfway along the progress bar and the hilarity is instantly available. When I was a kid, you had to rewind the video cassette and try to guess how much rewinding time was equal to the amount of video time that had passes since you saw that scene with the naked breasts. It was very frustrating.

On those parts of the Internet frequented by people who like to talk about coding and the origins of Graphic User Interfaces, Adamiecki is a bit of a hero. The denizens of these esoteric forums ask question like: "Why do progress bars move from left to right?" (because they were invented by people who read and write from left to right), "Why are progress bars usually horizontal rather than vertical?" (because vertical progress bars are more often used to show battery charge, like a liquid filling a container), and "Why isn't Karol Adamiecki more famous?" (because an American engineer had the same idea a few years later and had the good fortune to publish it in English rather than Polish).

At least I can do a little to increase awareness of the genius of Adamiecki among his countrymen. Think of him next time you're watching a slightly interesting YouTube video and glance down at the progress bar to see if you can be bothered watching the rest.

* Jamie Stokes*