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Google Learned How to Make Its Internet Balloons By Studying Condoms

"Doritos bags, sausage casings, condoms: They're all important things to not have leak for different reasons"
Screengrab: Google I/O

Google X, the company's "moonshot" development arm, dedicated to dreaming up wacky things like driverless cars and wearable face computers, had a problem. Its stratospheric, internet-providing balloons kept leaking and falling down after a couple months. And so, the company looked into a product that definitely can't leak without serious implications: condoms.

For the last four years, Google has been researching how to create free-floating balloons that can constantly persist in the stratosphere in order to beam down wireless internet to developing nations, in much the same way Facebook wants to do with drones. The project is called Loon, and it's been one of Google X's more public projects, in part because the balloons are often reported as UFOs. They also behave quite unpredictably, often blowing off course and ending up off their plotted course by a country or two.

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As you might expect, it's quite difficult to learn how to control these things, and, soon after Google finally managed to create balloons that didn't immediately burst in the stratosphere, it ran into another problem: The balloons were slowly leaking, meaning they could only stay aloft for a week at a time or so.

"It'd come down and we'd capture it in Southern Chile where we would need to pick it up. We needed to fail faster, to accelerate the real world," Astro Teller, Google X's director, said at the company's I/O conference. "So we built something called the leak squad to create, detect, and fix the leaks we were having."

"So we studied a lot of other things in the world where people care about having very fine things not leak: Doritos bags, sausage casings, condoms," he added. "They're all important not to leak for somewhat different reasons."

Google's engineers traced the problem to a manufacturing flaw in which people would have to stand on the "house-sized" balloons to hold them down while they were being made. Teller went on to discuss an absurd-sounding testing process in which Google engineers stood on the balloons wearing ultra-fuzzy socks and did line dances on them, meaning that the Silicon Valley parody of Google X sounds pretty spot on.

Anyway, Teller said that Google's balloons can now stay in the air for six months at a time and can be sailed around the world to within 600 yards of wherever Google wants them to go, which sounds like an improvement.

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Teller didn't say when Google would actually be offering any sort of balloon-internet to the masses. But he did give interesting—if not groundbreaking—insight into the way the secretive Google X lab works. It does sound very much like the lab's experiments are, at times, very much cobbled together. Teller noted that the driverless cars Google has been working on have been working just fine on Mountain View's roads, so Google has designed a track specifically to try to get them to crash.

"We've tried thousands of examples to stress our cars. We throw beach balls at it, we've gone to the Halloween store and bought big birds to have them swing near the car," he said. "We've had people hide in canvas bags and had them pop out in the middle of the road to see what the car would do."

That immediately raises the question: Who are these bag people, and how much is Google paying them? He also said that on take your children to work day, Google simply parked its driverless cars and had them watch.

"We had the cars parked but the sensors running and had the [kids] play around so we could get the computer used to watching kids move," he said.

It's hard to say how many of Google X's projects will ultimately succeed, and who knows if we'll ever actually see them in the wild—the future of Google Glass, for instance, is very much in doubt at the moment. But, not to sound too breathless, it's pretty cool the company is giving some of these things a shot.