See part I here.
Continuing on in the six innovations that made the modern world:
CLEAN
The book includes a very interesting story about how they built sewers in Chicago in the mid 1800's. Chicago was too flat so there was no way to slope sewers down to the lake. But the burgeoning population had led to a real problem with waste. So Ellis Chesbrough had the idea of raising the entire city several feet using jackscrews and building sewers under the raised buildings and streets.
This worked marvelously but the unexpected consequence was too much waste flowing into the drinking supply and a resulting rise in diseases like cholera.
The solution to this problem was not evident until the rise of the germ theory of disease. Until the mid to late 1800's, people bathed rarely, thinking that opening up the pores by bathing would let disease in. They also believe that disease was caused by vapors and smells.
There were two innovations that helped uncover the true reason for disease. John Snow did "epidemiological detective work" mapping out deaths of a cholera epidemic in Soho, London and pointing out that all the deaths were centered around common water taps. He deduced that there must be "animalcules" in the water that caused the disease. Later further improvements in glass led to better microscopes which helped with the identification of the cholera bacterium. (p. 140-141)
John Leal was a New Jersey doctor who came up with the idea of using chlorine to treat the 7 billion gallons of drinking water in the river. He did this secretly and was even tried for what were seen as terrorist actions. Eventually vindicated, he allowed his idea to be used freely across the country, allowing a 43% drop in the mortality rate between 1900 and 1930, and a 74% drop in the infant mortality rate. (p. 142-148).
A knock-on effect of the chlorination was that public swimming pools became possible, which led in turn to a change in the sort of attire people wore when swimming, especially women.
Finally, CLEAN allows the fabrication of computers which must be done in totally clean environments. Those super clean environments are actually so clean that humans can not enter without special clothing. They use special super clean water that is so purified it will kill you if you drink it (leaching out minerals from your body).
TIME
Another key idea of Johnson's book is that increases in our ability to measure something always have an important effect. This is especially true in the realm of time. From the beginning of time until the middle ages, it was adequate to know the time to within a few hours. By medieval times, it was okay if you knew the time to the nearest hour. And that was all well and good because we couldn't measure it any more precisely than that that. Medieval mechanical clocks had to be reset DAILY to the sundial, losing as much as 20 minutes a day.
In 1583, a 19-year old Galileo noticed that hanging lamps in his church swung at an even rate - in equal times. This allowed him to make a clock that was much more accurate - to the minute.
This was highly sought after because it allowed the correct calculation of the longitude that was necessary for navigating ships very far out at see. You needed two clocks - one set to the correct time on land, and another set to the time at your location (gauged by the sun). This could tell you your longitude, but was not possible until Galileo's clock.
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| sketch of Galileo's pendulum clock |
Accurate clocks allowed for the industrial revolution. Clocks made shipping possible, which provided the raw materials for industry. Making timepieces increased skill in fine machinery, including the idea of making parts of uniform sizes. And the clock allowed for synchronizing the actions and schedules of workers on a large scale.
The introduction of the clock into the work world meant an enormous change in our culture, how we lived and worked.
"To be a Romantic at the turn of the nineteenth century was in part to break from the growing tyranny of clock time: to sleep late, ramble aimlessly through the city, refuse to live by the “statistical clocks” that governed economic life… The time discipline of the pendulum clock took the informal flow of experience and nailed it to a mathematical grid. If time is a river, the pendulum clock turned it into a canal of evenly spaced locks, engineered for the rhythms of industry. Once again, an increase in our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them." (p. 176)The first leap in time measure was when it went from being measured by astronomy (sun dial) to dynamics (pendulum). The next leap came with the invention of the quartz crystal in the 1880's, which vibrated at a remarkable stable frequency. This became the basis for watches in the 20th century as well as for science and the development of microprocessors which need highly accurate coordination of calculations. The quartz crystal also showed up fluctuations in solar days and years.
The next leap came with the atomic clock, using the vibration atomic particles. This precision allows for the international banking, air travel, GPS and more.
LIGHT
Artificial light was one of our first inventions (fire) and did not have a lot of advances through the ages - oil lamps and candles were fairly standard fare for centuries.
The first breakthrough came in the 1700s with the advent of whaling for sperm whales. Whale oil was taken from a cavity in its head - someone had to actually climb in there and scrape it out. This made exceptionally bright and longer lasting candles.
Less than a century later came the advent of kerosene which saved the whales and costs a lot less.
In fact, there are various measures of inflation or purchase power through the ages. One is the cost of light.
"If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages." (p. 205)
The story of invention the light bulb is one of those situations where factors came together and numerous people were inventing the light bulb over decades. There are over 20 patents from 1838 to 1879 for lightbulbs similar to what Edison finally produced. Johnson says that what was amazing abut Edison was the way he proceeded. He built a team of experts from various disciplines to work out the various aspects. He paid them in equity, rather than in cash - promising part of the eventual profits. And he had an excellent PR machine, built around hype.
Johnson proposes that "Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn't the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace." (p. 209). He also came up with an entire ecosystem to support his lightbulb - building meters to measure electricity consumption and wiring an entire neighborhood in New York to display it.
Flash Photography was another thing that came about as a matter of course. "You could have reasonably predicted that the problem of photographing in lo light would be 'solved' by 1900. What was unpredictable was how this was used by Jacob Riis to shed light (quite literally) on the problem of horrendous conditions in tenement houses in New York. He and others had written up reports and studies but could not raise interest because no one could SEE how bad it was. He tried sketches. Photographs didn't work because the buildings were so dark. But flash photography made it possible to get the images out there and affect social change.
Lasers were the stuff of science fiction and death rays until they were finally made practical. They allowed for the bar code scanner in the 1970s. Rather than killing of aliens, they had the effect of killing of mom and pop businesses. Large stores simply were not possible if you could not track the inventory. Adding bar code technology allowed this and benefited the bigger stores with no perceptible benefit to the smaller stores.
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Time Travelers
Johnson closes his book looking at Time Travelers. Up until now, the innovations he had shown always existed by people moving out into the "adjacent possible" gradually as it was advanced by more understanding. But occasionally there were people who would think up something centuries ahead of their time. An example is Davinci sketching helicopters and tanks and flying machines in the 1500s.
Another example was August Ada, the daughter of Lord Byron, who lived in the Victorian Age. She dabbled in the arts but loved mathematics and eventually worked with Charles Babbage. Babbage designed a truly programmable computer. His concept was right but he was limited by the technology of the day. Still it contained all the major elements, including the idea of code. And Ada wrote code for him. She somehow was able to see possible uses for the computer that he couldn't even imagine - for music or art. He simply saw it as a number cruncher.
What makes people "Time Travelers", able to see way beyond the horizon? Johnson posits that they are people who have very broad interests, with learning in many fields and hobbies in others. They worked at the intersection of many fields. The idea of a garage lab is one that fits into this - having space to tinker with projects laid out side by side for crossfertilization.
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I would highly recommend this book - or the PBS/BBC series of the same name. There are 6 episodes, one for each of the chapters. I've only seen one and there is some overlap in content but they are not identical.
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