Hi there. I'm Washington Post reporter Lillian Cunningham.

Stay tuned after the show to hear about my latest podcast, Moonrise.

It's the dark but true story of why we went to the moon and what we found there.

The full series is available now.

Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod.

A show about the past, rediscovered.

If you work in an office without offices, with just about everyone working in a large spare space

full of stylus desks, straight lines, paper stored in a credenza, then you have met Florence

Noel Bassett. She is the godmother of the open office plan. As New York Times architecture

critic Paul Goldberger put it, Noel Bassett probably did more than any other single figure to create the modern,

sleek, post-war American office.

Out went to heavy desks and draperies and hulking file cabinets that had cluttered offices

for years.

In came spare, straight-edge desks and furnishings,

and a devotion to aesthetic simplicity.

Uncluttered office space, she thought, led to uncluttered mines.

Every detail mattered, from the layout of the space to the materials on the furniture.

Noel Bassett's own designs launched trends in office decor still seen today,

including an oval-shaped desk with a thin sheet of marble or wood floating atop a simple chrome pedestal.

In the first dozen years after the table was introduced in 1961, more than three million

were sold.

Noel Bassett was born on May 24, 1917, in Saginaw, Michigan. Her father ran a family baking company, but both of her

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