Book Review: How We Got to Now (part 1)

How We Got to Now : Six innovations that Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
(Also available as a PBS/BBC series with 6 episodes. Available on Amazon Prime for Free)

Steven looks at six innovations  - Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, Light.
And how in each case, there were unexpected knock-on effects. He calls this the hummingbird effect. Often there are unrelated things that come together or social change that comes about because of a major innovation or subsequent related innovations and ripples of change that can not be undone. 

One key concept is the idea of "the adjacent possible".  

"How do we explain this breakthrough? it's not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention because he or she is smarter than everyone else. And that's because ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas. We take the tools and metaphors and concepts and scientific understanding of our time, and we remix them into something  new. But if you don't have the right building blocks, you can't make the breakthrough , however brilliant you might be. The smartest mind in the world couldn't invent a refrigerator in the middle of the 17th century. It simply wasn't part of the adjacent possible at that moment. But by 1850, the pieces have come together ." p. 64

In many cases, this is evidenced by many different people inventing the same thing over and over again in the space of a few decades, in different places around the world. All the pieces are in place and the need is there. 

In addition to interesting stories and backstories about inventors and inventions, I found the social effects of inventions to be fascinating. Here are some random things I found interesting in the book - following the chapters Steven Johnson laid out. 

GLASS

The fall of Constantinople (1204) caused some Turkish glass-makers to settle in Venice, where they were relocated to an island because they kept setting fire to the wooden structures of the town. Living together there was cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques allowing higher quality lenses. 

Spectacles had up until then invented to help monks copying manuscripts. With the invention of the Gutenberg's printing press, suddenly lots of people across Europe realized they could not see well. The increased demand for glasses increased the precision of lenses again.  

Then someone tried putting 2 lenses end to end and eventually developed 1) the telescope, which changed our idea about the cosmos and threatened long-held beliefs, and 2) the microscope which also radically changed our understanding of disease and how to fight it. 

Finally glass allowed for the mirror, which transformed how painters saw the world. By looking at their subject in a mirror, they could see the perspective lines and that led to increased realism. Likewise, the mirror led to "self-consciousness, introspection" and the idea of self as opposed to community began to develop and become a major factor in western Civilization. 

COLD

In 1805 Frederic Tudor sailed a ship filled with ice carved out of New England lakes to the Caribbean with the idea of selling "cold" to the tropics. At first no one could figure out what it was for. And this problem persisted for decades, until he figured out how to keep it and store it (in ice houses lined with sawdust). By the 1820's he was shipping it all over the American south and by the 1830's to Rio and India. By 1860, 2 out of 3 American homes were supplied with daily Ice. 

Ice played a major factor in the growth of Chicago as a hub of shipping meat from Midwest. Previously, this was limited to sending live cattle in freight cars. But with Ice available along the route, they made ice cars that could carry butchered meat to the East Coast and Chicago became a major hub. 

The next step was artificial refrigeration which grew up in the 1840's by a desire to cool patients suffering from Malaria in Florida. Various devices were invented in this period but did not go far as the natural ice was abundant. Then the Civil War led to a blockade of the South, Without natural ice, they pushed on with artificial machines to produce ice.

Air Conditioning came about in public spaces between 1925 and 1940. And made radical changes in how we organize our society. It allowed for a boom in movie attendance in the summer, where it had been prohibitively hot before. 

After WWII, Wide-scale air-conditioning spread to homes and allowed for more and more people to settle in hotter climates. There were social effects: Northern Republicans moving into Southern Democrat strongholds. Florida, Texas and California gaining electoral votes. 

SOUND

Edison and Alexander Graham Bell both had important sound-related inventions: the phonograph and the telephone. But they misjudged the eventual use of their own inventions. Edison thought phonographs would be used to send messages through the mail that had been pre-recorded. Bell thought his invention would be a way to listen to music: with orchestras playing music on one end of the line and people listening on the other. In effect, they had the impact of their inventions switched. 

A side effect of the invention of the telephone was the rise of Bell Labs, which was a hotbed collaborative environment that led to countless developments. Due to an anti-trust agreement in the 1950's, Bell could keep its phone monopoly but had to share the fruits of its research department with other companies, allowing for American success in postwar electronics. 

The advent of the vacuum tube led to radio transmissions. It didn't take long before music was added to broadcasts. A surprising development was that due to static and poor transmission classical music did not sound good on the radio, but it lent it self well to jazz, which was then introduced to a wide audience. This made celebrities of African Americans, bringing them into living rooms and opening the door one day for the civil rights movement. 

Amplification of sound via microphones also had unexpected social effects. Up until this time, revolutions were spread my large crowds acting in mass. After the microphone, social movements could be fostered around individual who could speak to and mobilize larger and larger crowds. This was true for Hitler and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Finally, the invention of sonar. It was envisaged as a way to warn ships of danger. But had unexpected usage for good and evil. Its inventor could not imagine the health benefits we derive from the sonogram. Or that this same technology would be used in China to determine the sex of a baby in utero and lead to widespread abortions of female babies. 

That's all for now. 

Next time: Clean, Time and Light