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How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
From the New York Times –bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life , a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas.
In this illustrated history, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes—from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—How We Got to Now investigates the secret history behind the everyday objects of contemporary life.
In his trademark style, Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species—to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix, which would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water made it possible to manufacture computer chips. Accompanied by a major six-part television series on PBS, How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, written in the provocative, informative, and engaging style that has earned Johnson fans around the globe.
In this illustrated history, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes—from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth—How We Got to Now investigates the secret history behind the everyday objects of contemporary life.
In his trademark style, Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species—to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix, which would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water made it possible to manufacture computer chips. Accompanied by a major six-part television series on PBS, How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, written in the provocative, informative, and engaging style that has earned Johnson fans around the globe.
293 pages, Hardcover
First published September 25, 2014
About the author
Steven Johnson
58 books1,796 followersSteven Johnson is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Wonderland, How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You.
He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.
He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,546 reviews
June 4, 2017
I'm a sucker for books that incorporate interdisciplinary thinking and then weave them into a narrative about history. It was fun to see the way innovations in one area could set off subsequent innovations that seem totally unrelated. The unpredictable consequences of new discoveries is interesting and explaining it through history made it resonate much more, it really humanized the people being talked about. I really appreciate the author's discussion about what actually helps people make these leaps and ideas that revolutionize everything because it's one that even though I see acknowledged more often now isn't as widely believed. Which is awful because it holds people back from doing amazing things because they have a faulty view of how progress really works. I really enjoyed the book though, if you liked Freakonomics you'd probably like reading this one also, it utilizes the same out of the box thinking.
February 7, 2016
I picked this book up on holidays on the north coast right in the middle of one of the worst cold's I have ever had. So this review comes with a drugged up warning. Lots and lots of psuedoephidrine.
The title's promise of "Six innovations that made the modern world" was probably stamped by some marketing schlep rather than the author. The book rather consists of six technological avenues that shaped how we live. These are divided by chapter and consist of concepts like 'cold', 'light', 'clean' and 'sound'. Yes, by the title, sound was an innovation that made the modern world. Ugh.
Anyway the stories inside each chapter are somewhat fascinating and full of intrigue. The author develops several ideas throughout: that some technological developments are inevitable, and some are way out of left-field. Kinda what we know anyway, but it's great to hear these examples.
So I'd say a good, light holiday read for anyone who is fascinated by the history of technology. He is a good writer and I'll check out his other stuff. But for me it could have delved a bit deeper into his premise and still been a great, light holiday read.
The title's promise of "Six innovations that made the modern world" was probably stamped by some marketing schlep rather than the author. The book rather consists of six technological avenues that shaped how we live. These are divided by chapter and consist of concepts like 'cold', 'light', 'clean' and 'sound'. Yes, by the title, sound was an innovation that made the modern world. Ugh.
Anyway the stories inside each chapter are somewhat fascinating and full of intrigue. The author develops several ideas throughout: that some technological developments are inevitable, and some are way out of left-field. Kinda what we know anyway, but it's great to hear these examples.
So I'd say a good, light holiday read for anyone who is fascinated by the history of technology. He is a good writer and I'll check out his other stuff. But for me it could have delved a bit deeper into his premise and still been a great, light holiday read.
January 2, 2016
Johnson's long view of how innovations in 6 different fields shaped our civilization takes traces them from their original uses & discoveries through their current uses. It's an often amazing journey as he points out huge changes made possible by them & the odd consequences in other portions of our lives that we normally wouldn't associate with them.
The Wall Street Journal did a good review here:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-revi...
1. GLASS - from King Tut's jewelry to dishes to lenses, glass has certainly been one of our oldest & most important arts. Lenses meshing with the printing press for glasses eventually led to the microscope & telescope, expanding our views immeasurably. Its use as building & communication materials is even more astonishing.
2. COLD - is even more interesting in the way it blossomed in just the past couple of centuries & has caused huge shifts in economics & populations through food storage & habitability. Birdseye & Carrier transformed our food & living spaces.
3. SOUND - told me that the cave paintings might have been more for marking spots for the best sound than for art. Turns out even dabs of color in the Lascaux caves in France were mapped to the best echo spots, so it has a much older heritage than I'd previously thought. Even so, things really got hopping in the last century or two as we turned it into electric.
A recurring theme is that inventions & innovations are generally not light bulb moments of geniuses, but built on the thoughts & tech of the times with a lot of hard work, odd consequences, & failure. Sound illustrates this very well. Martinville's phonoautograph in 1857 set the stage for Edison's phonograph 2o years later & wasn't used the way he imagined at all. Sonar was developed prior to WWI, spurred by the loss of the Titanic, but Langevin couldn't get anyone interested & it wasn't used even though it could have saved thousands from U boats far more cheaply than any other method. Certainly he never thought it would be used for sonograms.
Unintended consequences: ...By the end of the decade, the sex ratio at birth in hospitals throughout China was almost 110 boys to every 100 girls, with some provinces reporting ratios as high as 118:100. This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology...
The normal ratio is 105:100 in the US which makes the statistic a little less tragic. Scientists don't really know what drives the difference in the sex ratio in most cases, although China's is a fact. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/...
4. CLEAN - the past was filthy & now we've gotten to the point where we can make things too clean. The clean up of cities was amazing. I read The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, also by Johnson, so knew some of this section. I hadn't realized the entire city of Chicago was jacked up, though. That 3 billion people still live in squalor is ridiculous.
5. TIME - was interesting, although I've read about it before, especially the difficulties in navigation before the first clocks let us figure out longitude & now we use a similar method with GPS (time difference between 3 satellites). More interesting was the need for time accuracy in our daily lives as we industrialized & communicated faster. His examples of train schedules was excellent as were the explanations of how it got more accurate as technology progressed.
He also made a great example of how Edison was not a genius inventor on his own. He was one of the pioneers of having a team in various disciplines. Many others had the idea of the light bulb for decades, but his team came up with the best filament first & he was excellent at marketing.
6. LIGHT - was very expensive before the electric light. I was shocked by how expensive & what a difference it has made in our lives especially when coupled with other inventions. It was a byproduct of fire, our first great discovery, & yet didn't change much for 100,000 years. Not much more than a century ago, we were hunting sperm whales to mine their heads for oil. Now we're using lasers in an attempt to create a sun.
I highly recommend this. It was very well read & would be an excellent read for any SF author. Johnson even engages in some what-if scenarios. There are a lot ideas here that show just how amazing & odd our history is, especially in the past couple of centuries. Indeed, we've come a long way, baby!
The Wall Street Journal did a good review here:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-revi...
1. GLASS - from King Tut's jewelry to dishes to lenses, glass has certainly been one of our oldest & most important arts. Lenses meshing with the printing press for glasses eventually led to the microscope & telescope, expanding our views immeasurably. Its use as building & communication materials is even more astonishing.
2. COLD - is even more interesting in the way it blossomed in just the past couple of centuries & has caused huge shifts in economics & populations through food storage & habitability. Birdseye & Carrier transformed our food & living spaces.
3. SOUND - told me that the cave paintings might have been more for marking spots for the best sound than for art. Turns out even dabs of color in the Lascaux caves in France were mapped to the best echo spots, so it has a much older heritage than I'd previously thought. Even so, things really got hopping in the last century or two as we turned it into electric.
A recurring theme is that inventions & innovations are generally not light bulb moments of geniuses, but built on the thoughts & tech of the times with a lot of hard work, odd consequences, & failure. Sound illustrates this very well. Martinville's phonoautograph in 1857 set the stage for Edison's phonograph 2o years later & wasn't used the way he imagined at all. Sonar was developed prior to WWI, spurred by the loss of the Titanic, but Langevin couldn't get anyone interested & it wasn't used even though it could have saved thousands from U boats far more cheaply than any other method. Certainly he never thought it would be used for sonograms.
Unintended consequences: ...By the end of the decade, the sex ratio at birth in hospitals throughout China was almost 110 boys to every 100 girls, with some provinces reporting ratios as high as 118:100. This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology...
The normal ratio is 105:100 in the US which makes the statistic a little less tragic. Scientists don't really know what drives the difference in the sex ratio in most cases, although China's is a fact. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/...
4. CLEAN - the past was filthy & now we've gotten to the point where we can make things too clean. The clean up of cities was amazing. I read The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, also by Johnson, so knew some of this section. I hadn't realized the entire city of Chicago was jacked up, though. That 3 billion people still live in squalor is ridiculous.
5. TIME - was interesting, although I've read about it before, especially the difficulties in navigation before the first clocks let us figure out longitude & now we use a similar method with GPS (time difference between 3 satellites). More interesting was the need for time accuracy in our daily lives as we industrialized & communicated faster. His examples of train schedules was excellent as were the explanations of how it got more accurate as technology progressed.
He also made a great example of how Edison was not a genius inventor on his own. He was one of the pioneers of having a team in various disciplines. Many others had the idea of the light bulb for decades, but his team came up with the best filament first & he was excellent at marketing.
6. LIGHT - was very expensive before the electric light. I was shocked by how expensive & what a difference it has made in our lives especially when coupled with other inventions. It was a byproduct of fire, our first great discovery, & yet didn't change much for 100,000 years. Not much more than a century ago, we were hunting sperm whales to mine their heads for oil. Now we're using lasers in an attempt to create a sun.
I highly recommend this. It was very well read & would be an excellent read for any SF author. Johnson even engages in some what-if scenarios. There are a lot ideas here that show just how amazing & odd our history is, especially in the past couple of centuries. Indeed, we've come a long way, baby!
November 6, 2021
الاختراعات أفكار راودت عقول أصحابها. كلّ فكرة من تلك الأفكار هي نقطة في شبكة ممتدة، شبكات-لو تتبعتها- فإنها تقودك إلى أطراف بعيدة وغريبة ومثيرة للتأمّل والإعجاب. وكلّ فكرة جديدة تكتشفها تمثّل بدورها مركزًا لشبكة وحدودًا لشبكة أخرى.
هذا الكتاب البديع هو استعراض بالمثال لهذا المجاز، لستّة أفكار أو اكتشافات نتجت عنها مئات الاختراعات، والكثير الكثير من التغيرات الاجتماعية. فمن الصوت والضوء إلى التبريد ومفاهيم النظافة، ومن الزجاج إلى الوقت علاقات وترابطات مذهلة، وقصص كثيرة، وآثار اجتماعية مثيرة.
عظمة هذا الكتاب لا بما جمعه وهو رائع، بل بما يمكن أن يريك لو استخدمت أسلوبه في التقصي عن أي شيء حولك، أي شيء! أشياء مادية ملموسة كشاشة الهاتف الذي بين يديك، أو أشياء ذهنية افتراضية محضة كأساليب الاحتفال الحديثة بإعلان جنس الجنين، أو التقاضي بسبب مقولة كتابة على الفيس بوك.
دمج الكاتب في أسلوبه ما بين سرد المعلومة ورواية القصة وطرح الأفكار عن الإبداع بشكلٍ سلس وجميل. وفي الكتاب ثنائيات ومفارقات ختم بها "ستيفين جونسون" فصول الكتاب بأسلوب أدبي ذكي وممتع.
الترجمة ممتازة، إلا أنّ أخطاءً شنيعة تكرّرت في كتابة التاريخ! ففي عدة مواضع ورد التاريخ خطأً. وأثار انتباهي تناقضه المنطقي، فعدت إلى نسخة إلكترونية من الأصل الإنجليزي لأتأكد من خطأ التاريخ في النسخة العربية.
ملاحظة أخيرة، تمنيت لو حرصت دار النشر على درجة أعلى من وضوح الصور في الكتاب، إن لم يكن في المستطاع جعلها ملونة. فالصور في النسخة الإنجليزية جميلة وواضحة.
هذا الكتاب البديع هو استعراض بالمثال لهذا المجاز، لستّة أفكار أو اكتشافات نتجت عنها مئات الاختراعات، والكثير الكثير من التغيرات الاجتماعية. فمن الصوت والضوء إلى التبريد ومفاهيم النظافة، ومن الزجاج إلى الوقت علاقات وترابطات مذهلة، وقصص كثيرة، وآثار اجتماعية مثيرة.
عظمة هذا الكتاب لا بما جمعه وهو رائع، بل بما يمكن أن يريك لو استخدمت أسلوبه في التقصي عن أي شيء حولك، أي شيء! أشياء مادية ملموسة كشاشة الهاتف الذي بين يديك، أو أشياء ذهنية افتراضية محضة كأساليب الاحتفال الحديثة بإعلان جنس الجنين، أو التقاضي بسبب مقولة كتابة على الفيس بوك.
دمج الكاتب في أسلوبه ما بين سرد المعلومة ورواية القصة وطرح الأفكار عن الإبداع بشكلٍ سلس وجميل. وفي الكتاب ثنائيات ومفارقات ختم بها "ستيفين جونسون" فصول الكتاب بأسلوب أدبي ذكي وممتع.
الترجمة ممتازة، إلا أنّ أخطاءً شنيعة تكرّرت في كتابة التاريخ! ففي عدة مواضع ورد التاريخ خطأً. وأثار انتباهي تناقضه المنطقي، فعدت إلى نسخة إلكترونية من الأصل الإنجليزي لأتأكد من خطأ التاريخ في النسخة العربية.
ملاحظة أخيرة، تمنيت لو حرصت دار النشر على درجة أعلى من وضوح الصور في الكتاب، إن لم يكن في المستطاع جعلها ملونة. فالصور في النسخة الإنجليزية جميلة وواضحة.
March 17, 2015
In this book Steven Johnson considers six innovation that the modern world really cannot live without. These are cold, glass, sound, light, time and clean. Slightly obscure you might think, but these six objects have given us so many things like air conditioning, microscopes, clean water, time zones, lasers and the telephone.
As he writes about each subject, he reminds you of life before these inventions, with no artificial light, drinking water that could kill you in 48 hours and food that spot quickly in the summer. He tells about the characters that put their reputations and money on the line to get these things off the ground. Others then saw the potential of the ideas and the spinoff ideas from the initial one have been phenomenal. For example before Gutenberg, it was only a handful of monks that needed glasses for near sighted work. After the first books appeared, people realised that they couldn't see the text and the market for reading glasses, using the newly developed lenses took off. The most fascinating was the way that the entire city of Chicago was jacked up to allow space underneath to install a sewerage system.
Johnson has a way of conveying ideas and concepts that make this a pleasure to read, well worth reading.
As he writes about each subject, he reminds you of life before these inventions, with no artificial light, drinking water that could kill you in 48 hours and food that spot quickly in the summer. He tells about the characters that put their reputations and money on the line to get these things off the ground. Others then saw the potential of the ideas and the spinoff ideas from the initial one have been phenomenal. For example before Gutenberg, it was only a handful of monks that needed glasses for near sighted work. After the first books appeared, people realised that they couldn't see the text and the market for reading glasses, using the newly developed lenses took off. The most fascinating was the way that the entire city of Chicago was jacked up to allow space underneath to install a sewerage system.
Johnson has a way of conveying ideas and concepts that make this a pleasure to read, well worth reading.
January 22, 2015
History is most frequently told from the perspective of hero protagonist or the victorious civilization or as if everything was part of an inexorable and clear plan of progress. History writing is by definition hindsight, and we are wont to weave all details into one clear narrative. The genius of this book is to show the chaos of history and juxtapose it next to the inevitability of basic chemistry and physics. Steven Johnson succeeds exceptionally well in this enjoyable and delightful read about invention and the making of modern society.
December 10, 2016
ดีมากๆ โดยเฉพาะบทสรุป จอห์นสันตั้งข้อสังเกตที่ดีมากว่า เรามักเชื่อกันว่านวัตกรรมใหม่ๆ รวมถึงการคิดค้นสิ่งที่ 'มาก่อนกาล' ล้วนแต่เป็นผลผลิตของอัจฉริยะ แต่จริงๆ แล้ว ปัจจัยที่สำคัญกว่าบุคคลที่อัจฉริยะก็คือ 'เงื่อนไขความเป็นไปได้' จากสภาพแวดล้อมและเครือข่ายความสัมพันธ์ที่ห้อมล้อมพวกเข��อยู่ อันก่อให้เกิดความคิดที่แปลกใหม่ต่างๆ เพื่อตอบโจทย์อะไรบางอย่าง แม้เป็นโจทย์เล็กๆ น้อยๆ ก็ตาม
จุดร่วมที่คนเหล่านี้มักมีร่วมกันอีกอย่างคือพวกเขาทำงานในชายขอบขององค์ความรู้ซึ่งเกี่ยวพันกับสาขาวิชาและความรู้ที่หลากหลายกว่าที่เข้าใจกันในช่วงเวลานั้นๆ พวกเขาผลักเพดานความเป็นไปได้ให้สูงขึ้น แม้นั่นจะเป็นการกระทำที่เสี��ยงอันตราย โดยเฉพาะในสายตาของผู้ที่ยึดมั่นถือมั่นในความศักดิ์สิทธิ์ของสาขาความรู้ของตัวเอง
แน่นอน จอห์นสันบอกว่าการทำงานเฉพาะสาขาของตัวเองไปมีข้อดีแน่ๆ ในแง่ที่มันทำให้เราโฟกัสและค่อยพัฒนาขึ้นได้ง่ายกว่าและเป็นตามลำดับ แต่สาขาวิชาเองกลับเป็นกับดักที่ทำให้เรามองไม่เห็นความเป็นไปได้อื่นๆ ของความรู้ การก้าวข้ามพรมแดนจึงสำคัญมากต่อการสร้างสิ่งใหม่
ในห้องที่เพดานแข็งแรง การศึกษาอย่างสงบภายในห้องยากจะทำให้เราไปพ้นเพดานนั้นได้ การเดินตามครูบาอาจารย์ต้อยๆ ไม่มีทางทำให้เราไปไกลกว่า กลับกัน การพยายามทุบทลายเพดานเดิมเพื่อหวังขยายความเป็นไปได้ให้กว้างออกไปนั้นเจ็บปวด ยากลำบาก เป็นการสร้างศัตรู และไม่บ่อยนักที่จะสำเร็จ แต่ก็อาจคุ้มที่จะเสี่ยง
จุดร่วมที่คนเหล่านี้มักมีร่วมกันอีกอย่างคือพวกเขาทำงานในชายขอบขององค์ความรู้ซึ่งเกี่ยวพันกับสาขาวิชาและความรู้ที่หลากหลายกว่าที่เข้าใจกันในช่วงเวลานั้นๆ พวกเขาผลักเพดานความเป็นไปได้ให้สูงขึ้น แม้นั่นจะเป็นการกระทำที่เสี��ยงอันตราย โดยเฉพาะในสายตาของผู้ที่ยึดมั่นถือมั่นในความศักดิ์สิทธิ์ของสาขาความรู้ของตัวเอง
แน่นอน จอห์นสันบอกว่าการทำงานเฉพาะสาขาของตัวเองไปมีข้อดีแน่ๆ ในแง่ที่มันทำให้เราโฟกัสและค่อยพัฒนาขึ้นได้ง่ายกว่าและเป็นตามลำดับ แต่สาขาวิชาเองกลับเป็นกับดักที่ทำให้เรามองไม่เห็นความเป็นไปได้อื่นๆ ของความรู้ การก้าวข้ามพรมแดนจึงสำคัญมากต่อการสร้างสิ่งใหม่
ในห้องที่เพดานแข็งแรง การศึกษาอย่างสงบภายในห้องยากจะทำให้เราไปพ้นเพดานนั้นได้ การเดินตามครูบาอาจารย์ต้อยๆ ไม่มีทางทำให้เราไปไกลกว่า กลับกัน การพยายามทุบทลายเพดานเดิมเพื่อหวังขยายความเป็นไปได้ให้กว้างออกไปนั้นเจ็บปวด ยากลำบาก เป็นการสร้างศัตรู และไม่บ่อยนักที่จะสำเร็จ แต่ก็อาจคุ้มที่จะเสี่ยง
February 19, 2015
When reading nonfiction, I have two set rules:
(1) Did I learn something new?
and
(2) Did I enjoy the writing (and/or material)?
Steven Johnson's "How We Got to Now..." led me to strong YES responses for both.
In this book (which isn't short, but feels very short because you want to race right through it), Johnson tracks how some of our most important inventions (glass, water treatment, electricity) changed the world in both predictable and unpredictable ways. The writing is quick and entertaining; the tidbits of knowledge are non-stop.
For example, did you know that the phrase "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" originated as a Listerine ad for the ladies? (I did not!)
The closest parallel I can think to this book is the work of Malcolm Gladwell. However, as Gladwell treads in my research domain, I often know when he's exaggerating, twisting, or taking credit for others' ideas. Here, there's none of the latter (he speaks of others genius and rarely hints at his own ideas) but I can't speak to the world of physics and hard science. That being said, I have no reason to doubt his historical accuracy.
I strongly recommend the book and only wish it lasted longer. (My kindle ended it at about 60% because of all of the end notes, so it felt especially quick!)
(1) Did I learn something new?
and
(2) Did I enjoy the writing (and/or material)?
Steven Johnson's "How We Got to Now..." led me to strong YES responses for both.
In this book (which isn't short, but feels very short because you want to race right through it), Johnson tracks how some of our most important inventions (glass, water treatment, electricity) changed the world in both predictable and unpredictable ways. The writing is quick and entertaining; the tidbits of knowledge are non-stop.
For example, did you know that the phrase "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" originated as a Listerine ad for the ladies? (I did not!)
The closest parallel I can think to this book is the work of Malcolm Gladwell. However, as Gladwell treads in my research domain, I often know when he's exaggerating, twisting, or taking credit for others' ideas. Here, there's none of the latter (he speaks of others genius and rarely hints at his own ideas) but I can't speak to the world of physics and hard science. That being said, I have no reason to doubt his historical accuracy.
I strongly recommend the book and only wish it lasted longer. (My kindle ended it at about 60% because of all of the end notes, so it felt especially quick!)
August 1, 2016
I find it interesting to read the history of trends and technology that have impacted our lives, enjoy it even more when it is delivered in energetic and amusing fashion. Beyond the "butterfly effect" wherein the interaction of the air of the flap of wings of a butterfly in California, say, leads to the formation of a storm in the Atlantic. While this is an interesting aspect of chaos theory, the author prefers the "hummingbird effect" where the changes in on thing can be directly linked to another like the role of pollen on hummingbird flight patterns and wing development. This effect the author puts to use to describe "strange chains of influence" where "innovation or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether." An example is the development of printing by Gutenberg leads to the availability of books which leads to an awareness of a need for spectacles to see small items clearly which leads to the development of artisans working glass and the development of specialized lenses which leads to microscopes and telescopes which leads to advancements in science and health which reverberate today. Johnson analyses 6 major areas of development glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light. The book is full of interesting anecdotes - the New Englander who thought he could make a fortune delivering ice to the tropics only to find once he got there that no one wanted it. Or the Frenchman who invented a method of recording sound long before Edison's phonograph and who would be honored today but for one problem - he forgot about playback! The author posits that most inventions tend to arise in clusters based on where current practice and technology exist in the "adjacent possible". But he also notes that some "time travelers" are able to develop ideas long before they can be put to practical use a la Babbage and his analytical engine and Ada Lovelace's designs for computer programming, DaVinci and his helicopters, etc. The book is well illustrated, moves at a rapid clip and is an amusing and educational read.
June 2, 2015
Bookclub pick by: Good Mythical Morning book club.
The most important thing with nonfiction books like this one is to learn something new, and that's what happened after reading this book.
This book takes a different approach, as Johnson calls it "The Hummingbird effect" which is different from the butterfly effect, as in he looks at inventions that had their effect on other innovations in completely different fields, in an almost not intentional or intentional way.
He also talks about some of the non-standard inventions like glass and time and clean, or approaches some well-established inventions in a new way that is new and refreshing like light and sound and cold.
Of course, the book as it says in the introduction looks solely on the way these innovations affected and came about in the US and Europe. so the "we" in the title is actually more about how Americans and Europeans innovated these ideas or made any progress with them. The only drawback is that he doesn't mention how some of the innovations came to being first in some other places like Asia or some Arabian country.
I enjoyed this book, the info and little pictures that came with it, and Johnson's style is really smooth and introduces new information and historical facts with so much ease.
Highly recommended.
The most important thing with nonfiction books like this one is to learn something new, and that's what happened after reading this book.
This book takes a different approach, as Johnson calls it "The Hummingbird effect" which is different from the butterfly effect, as in he looks at inventions that had their effect on other innovations in completely different fields, in an almost not intentional or intentional way.
He also talks about some of the non-standard inventions like glass and time and clean, or approaches some well-established inventions in a new way that is new and refreshing like light and sound and cold.
Of course, the book as it says in the introduction looks solely on the way these innovations affected and came about in the US and Europe. so the "we" in the title is actually more about how Americans and Europeans innovated these ideas or made any progress with them. The only drawback is that he doesn't mention how some of the innovations came to being first in some other places like Asia or some Arabian country.
I enjoyed this book, the info and little pictures that came with it, and Johnson's style is really smooth and introduces new information and historical facts with so much ease.
Highly recommended.
October 10, 2015
An odd reading experience for me in that it felt like I was reading this short book for a month and yet I read it within a week. And while I liked the general concept and a couple of its ideas I was disappointed by its sweeping superficiality. It was like visiting those foreign lands at EPCOT - sort of interesting but lacking in depth (not nearly what it’s made out to be).
The book was written in conjunction with the PBS series by the same name but I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was thrown together later to capitalize on the popularity of the show. Maybe the series is similarly lacking in depth; I didn’t see it and have no desire to do so.
The opening chapter about glass was the book’s best section and was merely okay while the final chapter about light was a complete slog. Anyone interested in a better discussion about Frederic Tudor (covered in the second chapter “Cold”) may consider reading “The Frozen Water Trade” (by Gavin Weightman).
Edit - Some reviewers panned this book and praised “Connections” (by James Burke) as a much better alternative. I have to vigorously disagree. While I disliked this book I found “Connections” to be borderline unreadable for its overly sweeping historical analysis and mind-numbingly dense descriptions of how things worked.
The book was written in conjunction with the PBS series by the same name but I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was thrown together later to capitalize on the popularity of the show. Maybe the series is similarly lacking in depth; I didn’t see it and have no desire to do so.
The opening chapter about glass was the book’s best section and was merely okay while the final chapter about light was a complete slog. Anyone interested in a better discussion about Frederic Tudor (covered in the second chapter “Cold”) may consider reading “The Frozen Water Trade” (by Gavin Weightman).
Edit - Some reviewers panned this book and praised “Connections” (by James Burke) as a much better alternative. I have to vigorously disagree. While I disliked this book I found “Connections” to be borderline unreadable for its overly sweeping historical analysis and mind-numbingly dense descriptions of how things worked.
December 22, 2014
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
“How We Got to Now" is a fascinating history on how six major innovations caused strange chains of influence. Contributing editor to Wired magazine and best-selling author of seven books, Steven Johnson, provides the readers with a real treat. Brilliant storytelling and a keen eye for patterns of intersection of science and technology results in a wonderful reading experience. This captivating 304-page book includes the following six chapters/innovations: 1. Glass, 2. Cold, 3. Sound, 4. Clean, 5. Time, and 6. Light.
Positives:
1. Great science writing. It’s well researched, enlightening and a pleasure to read.
2. Fascinating topic, how innovations are connected and the strange chains of influence resulting from them.
3. Excellent format. Each chapter covers a specific innovation. The prose is smooth and informative. Johnson is a gifted storyteller.
4. Great use of photos and visual material to complement the excellent narration.
5. A recurring theme throughout the book, “Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.” It’s what the author refers to as the “hummingbird effect”.
6. The focus of the book is on how the changes came about.
7. Love how science, history and technology are weaved into great storytelling. “After years of trial and error, experimenting with different chemical compositions, the Murano glassmaker Angelo Barovier took seaweed rich in potassium oxide and manganese, burned it to create ash, and then added these ingredients to molten glass. When the mixture cooled, it created an extraordinarily clear type of glass. Struck by its resemblance to the clearest rock crystals of quartz, Barovier called it cristallo. This was the birth of modern glass.”
8. Enlightening tidbits throughout. “In the monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, monks laboring over religious manuscripts in candlelit rooms used curved chunks of glass as a reading aid.”
9. What propelled the modern self? Find out.
10. An interesting look at ice. “This was Tudor’s frugal genius: he took three things that the market had effectively priced at zero—ice, sawdust, and an empty vessel—and turned them into a flourishing business.” Cool stuff.
11. A fascinating look at the history of Chicago. “The conventional story about Chicago is that it was made possible thanks to the invention of the railroad and the building of the Erie Canal. But those accounts tell only part of the story. The runaway growth of Chicago would have never been possible without the peculiar chemical properties of water: its capacity for storing and slowly releasing cold with only the slightest of human interventions.”
12. A look at simultaneous inventions. “One of those simultaneous inventors was the French engineer Ferdinand Carré, who independently designed a refrigeration machine that followed the same basic principles as Gorrie’s.”
13. What is the connection between telephones and the building of skyscrapers? Find out.
14. The invention of the vacuum tube. “Over the next decade, engineers at Bell Labs and elsewhere modified his basic three-electrode design, removing the gas from the bulb so that it sealed a perfect vacuum, transforming it into both a transmitter and a receiver. The result was the vacuum tube, the first great breakthrough of the electronics revolution, a device that would boost the electrical signal of just about any technology that needed it.”
15. An interesting history of clean. “It is a well-known story that the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was roundly mocked and criticized by the medical establishment when he first proposed, in 1847, that doctors and surgeons wash their hands before attending to their patients.”
16. Great insights into the development of measuring time. “KEEPING PROPER TIME IS ULTIMATELY all about finding—or making—things that oscillate in consistent rhythms: the sun rising in the sky, the moon waxing and waning, the altar lamp, the quartz crystal. The discovery of the atom in the early days of the twentieth century—led by scientists such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg—set in motion a series of spectacular and deadly innovations in energy and weaponry: nuclear power plants, hydrogen bombs.”
17. Interesting insights on why Thomas Edison gets the credit for the light bulb.
18. The “mystery” behind flash photography and the tool it provided that led to a grand movement of social reform.
19. The history of neon lights and bar codes and its impact.
20. Notes and a formal bibliography.
Negatives:
1. I would have added a timeline to show how these six innovations intersected.
2. Those who saw the documentary will not find anything particularly different from the book.
In summary, this book was a real treat; it’s beautifully written and quite enlightening. Steve Johnson selects six basic innovations that have impacted the world and does a wonderful job of showing how they went beyond just solving the initial intended problem. I can’t recommend this gem enough!
Further recommendations: “Where Good Ideas Come From” by the same author, “The Innovators” and “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner, “Alan Turing” by Andrew Hodges, “The Innovator’s Method” by Nathan Furr, “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, “Drive” by Daniel H. Pink, “Switch” and “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath, and “The Power of habit” by Charles Duhigg.
“How We Got to Now" is a fascinating history on how six major innovations caused strange chains of influence. Contributing editor to Wired magazine and best-selling author of seven books, Steven Johnson, provides the readers with a real treat. Brilliant storytelling and a keen eye for patterns of intersection of science and technology results in a wonderful reading experience. This captivating 304-page book includes the following six chapters/innovations: 1. Glass, 2. Cold, 3. Sound, 4. Clean, 5. Time, and 6. Light.
Positives:
1. Great science writing. It’s well researched, enlightening and a pleasure to read.
2. Fascinating topic, how innovations are connected and the strange chains of influence resulting from them.
3. Excellent format. Each chapter covers a specific innovation. The prose is smooth and informative. Johnson is a gifted storyteller.
4. Great use of photos and visual material to complement the excellent narration.
5. A recurring theme throughout the book, “Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.” It’s what the author refers to as the “hummingbird effect”.
6. The focus of the book is on how the changes came about.
7. Love how science, history and technology are weaved into great storytelling. “After years of trial and error, experimenting with different chemical compositions, the Murano glassmaker Angelo Barovier took seaweed rich in potassium oxide and manganese, burned it to create ash, and then added these ingredients to molten glass. When the mixture cooled, it created an extraordinarily clear type of glass. Struck by its resemblance to the clearest rock crystals of quartz, Barovier called it cristallo. This was the birth of modern glass.”
8. Enlightening tidbits throughout. “In the monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, monks laboring over religious manuscripts in candlelit rooms used curved chunks of glass as a reading aid.”
9. What propelled the modern self? Find out.
10. An interesting look at ice. “This was Tudor’s frugal genius: he took three things that the market had effectively priced at zero—ice, sawdust, and an empty vessel—and turned them into a flourishing business.” Cool stuff.
11. A fascinating look at the history of Chicago. “The conventional story about Chicago is that it was made possible thanks to the invention of the railroad and the building of the Erie Canal. But those accounts tell only part of the story. The runaway growth of Chicago would have never been possible without the peculiar chemical properties of water: its capacity for storing and slowly releasing cold with only the slightest of human interventions.”
12. A look at simultaneous inventions. “One of those simultaneous inventors was the French engineer Ferdinand Carré, who independently designed a refrigeration machine that followed the same basic principles as Gorrie’s.”
13. What is the connection between telephones and the building of skyscrapers? Find out.
14. The invention of the vacuum tube. “Over the next decade, engineers at Bell Labs and elsewhere modified his basic three-electrode design, removing the gas from the bulb so that it sealed a perfect vacuum, transforming it into both a transmitter and a receiver. The result was the vacuum tube, the first great breakthrough of the electronics revolution, a device that would boost the electrical signal of just about any technology that needed it.”
15. An interesting history of clean. “It is a well-known story that the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was roundly mocked and criticized by the medical establishment when he first proposed, in 1847, that doctors and surgeons wash their hands before attending to their patients.”
16. Great insights into the development of measuring time. “KEEPING PROPER TIME IS ULTIMATELY all about finding—or making—things that oscillate in consistent rhythms: the sun rising in the sky, the moon waxing and waning, the altar lamp, the quartz crystal. The discovery of the atom in the early days of the twentieth century—led by scientists such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg—set in motion a series of spectacular and deadly innovations in energy and weaponry: nuclear power plants, hydrogen bombs.”
17. Interesting insights on why Thomas Edison gets the credit for the light bulb.
18. The “mystery” behind flash photography and the tool it provided that led to a grand movement of social reform.
19. The history of neon lights and bar codes and its impact.
20. Notes and a formal bibliography.
Negatives:
1. I would have added a timeline to show how these six innovations intersected.
2. Those who saw the documentary will not find anything particularly different from the book.
In summary, this book was a real treat; it’s beautifully written and quite enlightening. Steve Johnson selects six basic innovations that have impacted the world and does a wonderful job of showing how they went beyond just solving the initial intended problem. I can’t recommend this gem enough!
Further recommendations: “Where Good Ideas Come From” by the same author, “The Innovators” and “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner, “Alan Turing” by Andrew Hodges, “The Innovator’s Method” by Nathan Furr, “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, “Drive” by Daniel H. Pink, “Switch” and “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath, and “The Power of habit” by Charles Duhigg.
March 18, 2015
I guess I will be the black sheep and give this one a bad review :)
The good news is that the stories about technological innovations are fascinating. The author (as advertised) draws several interesting connections between seemingly unrelated technologies, and points out several cases where the environment and context of the invention played a much larger role in its success than the genius of the inventor.
So what's not to like? For me, the problem is the commentary between these anecdotes. The themes are interesting at first, but one can only hear about the "long view" and "adjacent possible" so many times. There is commentary between every story about innovation. Every. single. one. Sometimes it overplays a story that didn't need to be overplayed, sometimes it is repetitive, and sometimes it simply doesn't add any new insight. By the end of the book I was trying to skip these passages.
Overall there is great information, but a frustrating presentation. I'm reading this book for fun so the latter issue tips it towards a bad review for me.
The good news is that the stories about technological innovations are fascinating. The author (as advertised) draws several interesting connections between seemingly unrelated technologies, and points out several cases where the environment and context of the invention played a much larger role in its success than the genius of the inventor.
So what's not to like? For me, the problem is the commentary between these anecdotes. The themes are interesting at first, but one can only hear about the "long view" and "adjacent possible" so many times. There is commentary between every story about innovation. Every. single. one. Sometimes it overplays a story that didn't need to be overplayed, sometimes it is repetitive, and sometimes it simply doesn't add any new insight. By the end of the book I was trying to skip these passages.
Overall there is great information, but a frustrating presentation. I'm reading this book for fun so the latter issue tips it towards a bad review for me.
November 17, 2014
I love stuff like this - like that old British tv series Connections - that tell you how one discovery or technological improvement in the field of printing, for example, led to another discovery or great leap forward in the field of art, or rapid progress in science, etc. Anyway, that's what this book is about and it is fascinating. There's also a PBS series that brings it to life, but the book by itself is great.
April 24, 2022
3.5 stars
This book looks at connections in inventions – one thing had to be invented or discovered, which created a chain reaction for the next thing and the next thing, etc. Glass, then spectacles, then the printing press caused more people to need spectacles, then microscopes, etc.
I found this interesting – the connections more than how the things were invented. Many inventions would have happened even if the person who invented had not been the one to do so – someone else would have done so soon after. I listened to the audio. The narrator was mostly fine, but there was the occasional odd pause that was noticeable, though the content was enough to (mostly) keep my interest in the book, anyway.
This book looks at connections in inventions – one thing had to be invented or discovered, which created a chain reaction for the next thing and the next thing, etc. Glass, then spectacles, then the printing press caused more people to need spectacles, then microscopes, etc.
I found this interesting – the connections more than how the things were invented. Many inventions would have happened even if the person who invented had not been the one to do so – someone else would have done so soon after. I listened to the audio. The narrator was mostly fine, but there was the occasional odd pause that was noticeable, though the content was enough to (mostly) keep my interest in the book, anyway.
January 15, 2022
This book offers a fascinating look at the evolutionary chain of how, very often, one breakthrough invention or technology inspires the creations of many others. Often in entirely different industries.
While the writing was a little dry at times and there were moments when the author would spend more time on some less interesting (to me) inventions than others, overall I enjoyed my time with this book and learned quite a bit, which is always what I'm after when reading non-fiction.
3.5 stars, rounded up.
While the writing was a little dry at times and there were moments when the author would spend more time on some less interesting (to me) inventions than others, overall I enjoyed my time with this book and learned quite a bit, which is always what I'm after when reading non-fiction.
3.5 stars, rounded up.
August 13, 2021
A fun little hop, skip, and jump through history using the framework of six major inventions. I liked Johnson's emphasis on how much the moment, culture, and previous developments led to each innovation--these aren't geniuses standing alone in a quiet lab, they're part of a larger network of cultural and scientific discovery.
November 13, 2017
How We Got to Now is a reasonably entertaining and easy to read survey of six topics which shaped the world we live in now, in various ways. The main benefit is that Johnson tries to look across disciplines and from different angles, and tries to capture the whole of the picture. The six topics he picked make sense: glass, (artificial) cold, (the understanding of) sound, hygiene, time (and the accuracy thereof) and (artificial) light — they’re summarised under six headings: glass, cold, sound, clean, time, light. That does sound a little odd with the title, since sound is hardly something we invented. Nonetheless, he makes good points about the way science and technology surrounding those topics has made our modern lives what they are.
Not world-shattering, but entertaining enough!
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
Not world-shattering, but entertaining enough!
Reviewed for The Bibliophibian.
January 13, 2023
My favorite kind of nonfiction: not too technical for a nontechnical person like me, breezy, but with lots of details about the people who made these innovations, and the connections between them. The printing press lead to more people reading which lead to more people realizing they needed glasses . . . Love connections like that!
I read this in hybrid form, in that I listened to the audiobook as I was doing stuff around the house, but we own the hardcover, so I would switch back to reading and would make sure and look at the pictures. The book is beautifully made, with chapter decorations and color photographs, so I recommend the physical book over the audiobook.
I read this in hybrid form, in that I listened to the audiobook as I was doing stuff around the house, but we own the hardcover, so I would switch back to reading and would make sure and look at the pictures. The book is beautifully made, with chapter decorations and color photographs, so I recommend the physical book over the audiobook.
December 15, 2017
Oh I loved where he wanted to go with this and I learned some fascinating stuff. But I guess I was expecting Neil Postman or Lewis Mumford--more insight about how exactly each innovation changed our thinking and culture. There was certainly some of that, but mostly it was a chain reaction story--this led to that and without glass there wouldn't be microfiber and without that telephones etc. It was fascinating, but not all I hoped it would be.
December 11, 2014
สนุกมาก Steven Johnson เขียนเรื่องที่มาของสิ่งสำคัญในชีวิตประจำวันหกอย่าง ได้แก่ แก้ว/กระจก, การเก็บความเย็น, เสียง, สุขอนามัย, (การบันทึก)เวลา และแสงสว่าง ซึ่งล้วนแต่เปลี่ยนโฉมหน้าของประวัติศาสตร์โลก แต่วันนี้เรามักจะมองว่าเป็นหมูในอวย
เรื่องราวของสิ่งประดิษฐ์สำคัญๆ อย่างเช่นแท่นพิมพ์ หลอดไฟฟ้าหรือโทรศัพท์เป็นสิ่งที่เราคุ้นกันดีอยู่แล้ว แต่สิ่งที่ทำให้ How We Got to Now แตกต่างและน่าสนใจกว่ามาก คือ การที่ Johnson ชี้ให้เห็น "ความเชื่อมโยง" ระหว่างนวัตกรรมต่างๆ และธรรมชาติของผลกระทบที่ตามมา ซึ่งมักจะโกลาหล คาดเดาไม่ได้ แต่ผลกระทบสำคัญๆ หลายอย่างก็เกิดขึ้นข้ามสาขาวิชา และเปลี่ยนแปลงอารยธรรมมนุษย์ไปอย่างไม่มีวันหวนคืน
Johnson เรียกลักษณะผลกระทบที่เกิดขึ้นจากนวัตกรรมว่า "ผลนกฮัมมิ่งเบิร์ด" (humming bird effect) -- จากข้อเท็จจริงในธรรมชาติที่ว่า ดอกไม้ต้องหาวิธีแพร่กระจายเกสรออกไปในวงกว้าง จึงวิวัฒนาการน้ำหวานขึ้นมาดึงดูดแมลง ไม่ได้สนใจนก แต่การอุบัติขึ้นของน้ำหวานก็ส่งผลให้นกฮัมมิ่งเบิร์ดวิวัฒนาการปีกและการบินแบบใหม่ที่ทำให้มัน "ทรงตัว" อยู่ได้ในอากาศระหว่างที่ดูดกินน้ำหวาน
ประเด็นของ Johnson คือ การได้เห็นดอกไม้ผลิตน้ำหวานขึ้นมาไม่ทำให้เรารู้ล่วงหน้าหรอกว่า จะทำให้นกบางชนิดเปลี่ยนรูปแบบของปีกและวิธีบินไปตลอดกาล เช่นเดียวกัน เรารู้ว่าแท่นพิมพ์ของ Gutenberg เปลี่ยนอารยธรรมมนุษย์ไปตลอดกาล แต่มีกี่คนที่รู้ว่าเทคโนโลยีนี้ส่งผลให้แว่นตาเป็นที่ต้องการและขายดีเทน้ำเทท่า เพราะคนนับล้านอยากอ่านหนังสือมากขึ้น กระตุ้นให้เกิดนวัตกรรมใหม่ๆ ในวงการเลนส์ จุดประกายให้มีการพัฒนาเลนส์ของกล้องจุลทรรศน์และกล้องโทรทรรศน์ ซึ่งก็ทำให้เราพิสูจน์ได้ในที่สุดว่าโลกหมุนรอบดวงอาทิตย์
ในทำนองเดียวกัน เทคโนโลยีการเก็บความเย็นมีจุดเริ่มต้นที่การหั่นและขนส่งน้ำแข็งในฤดูหนาว แต่การปิดท่าเรือทางใต้ในช่วงสงครามกลางเมืองอเมริกันคือเหตุการณ์ที่ส่งผลให้น้ำแข็งขาดตลาดและทำให้ตู้เย็นยุคแรกขายดีเป็นครั้งแรก จุดประกายให้นักประดิษฐ์คิดค้นอาหารแช่แข็ง, การขยายตัวของรางรถไฟหลังการปฏิวัติอุตสาหกรรมจุดประกายการแบ่งเวลาในพื้นที่ต่างๆ ออกเป็นโซนเวลาและการวาง "มาตรฐาน" ของการบันทึกเวลาที่เปลี่ยนอย่างหน้ามือเป็นหลังมือจากการบันทึกเวลาแบบหยาบๆ เช่น "เวลาที่ใช้เกี่ยวข้าวสองไร่" ในสมัยก่อน
บทที่สนุกที่สุดในสายตาของเราคือบท "สุขอนามัย" (clean) ซึ่งอธิบายประวัติศาสตร์การเติบโตที่สนุกมากๆ ของเมืองชิคาโก (Johnson ชี้ว่าโดยทั่วไปแล้ว เมืองทุกเมืองโตไม่ได้ถ้าไม่มีน้ำประปาและระบบกำจัดน้ำเสียที่มีประสิทธิภาพ เพราะไม่อย่างนั้นคนจะป่วยตายจากโรคที่มากับน้ำอย่างอหิวาตกโรค) คนชิคาโกต้องคิดวิศวกรรมใหม่เพราะเมืองตั้งอยู่ในที่ราบ น้ำเสียจากแม่น้ำชิคาโกถ่ายลงทะเลสาบมิชิแกน ต้องหาวิธีเปลี่ยนทิศการไหลของน้ำในแม่น้ำชิคาโก
บทท้ายๆ อธิบายเรื่องราวที่แท้จริงของหลอดไฟฟ้า ธอมัส เอดิสัน ไม่ได้ประดิษฐ์หลอดไฟขึ้นมาชนิด "ปิ๊ง" ไอเดียขึ้นมาทั้งดุ้นในหัวในชั่วพริบตาและลงมือผลิต แต่สิ่งประดิษฐ์ของเขาเป็นการต่อยอดนวัตกรรมต่างๆ ที่ประกอบกันเป็นหลอดไฟ มีผู้ทดลองและจดสิทธิบัตรไปแล้วมากมาย เอดิสันควรได้รับการยกย่องมากกว่าว่า คิดค้นหลอดไฟรุ่นแรกที่ "ขายได้" ในเชิงพาณิชย์ และเล็งเห็นเป็นคนแรกๆ ว่า สภาพแวดล้อมที่เอื้อต่อนวัตกรรม คือ การมี "ทีมงาน" ซึ่งประกอบด้วยคนจากหลากหลายสาขาวิชา หลายเชื้อชาติและความคิดความเชื่อ มาร่วมทำงานด้วยกันในบรรยากาศ "เปิด" คือเอื้อต่อการลองผิดลองถูกซ้ำแล้วซ้ำเล่า
ป.ล. นอกจากจะเขียนหนังสือเก่งแล้ว Steven Johnson ยังคุยสนุกด้วย ดู TEDTalk ของเขาได้ที่ https://www.ted.com/speakers/steven_j...
ป.ป.ล. อ่านจบแล้วทำให้นึกถึงซีรีส์สา���คดีโทรทัศน์เก่าเรื่อง Connections by James Burke แต่ละตอนฉายความเชื่อมโยงที่น่าแปลกใจระหว่างเทคโนโลยีต่างๆ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecti...
เรื่องราวของสิ่งประดิษฐ์สำคัญๆ อย่างเช่นแท่นพิมพ์ หลอดไฟฟ้าหรือโทรศัพท์เป็นสิ่งที่เราคุ้นกันดีอยู่แล้ว แต่สิ่งที่ทำให้ How We Got to Now แตกต่างและน่าสนใจกว่ามาก คือ การที่ Johnson ชี้ให้เห็น "ความเชื่อมโยง" ระหว่างนวัตกรรมต่างๆ และธรรมชาติของผลกระทบที่ตามมา ซึ่งมักจะโกลาหล คาดเดาไม่ได้ แต่ผลกระทบสำคัญๆ หลายอย่างก็เกิดขึ้นข้ามสาขาวิชา และเปลี่ยนแปลงอารยธรรมมนุษย์ไปอย่างไม่มีวันหวนคืน
Johnson เรียกลักษณะผลกระทบที่เกิดขึ้นจากนวัตกรรมว่า "ผลนกฮัมมิ่งเบิร์ด" (humming bird effect) -- จากข้อเท็จจริงในธรรมชาติที่ว่า ดอกไม้ต้องหาวิธีแพร่กระจายเกสรออกไปในวงกว้าง จึงวิวัฒนาการน้ำหวานขึ้นมาดึงดูดแมลง ไม่ได้สนใจนก แต่การอุบัติขึ้นของน้ำหวานก็ส่งผลให้นกฮัมมิ่งเบิร์ดวิวัฒนาการปีกและการบินแบบใหม่ที่ทำให้มัน "ทรงตัว" อยู่ได้ในอากาศระหว่างที่ดูดกินน้ำหวาน
ประเด็นของ Johnson คือ การได้เห็นดอกไม้ผลิตน้ำหวานขึ้นมาไม่ทำให้เรารู้ล่วงหน้าหรอกว่า จะทำให้นกบางชนิดเปลี่ยนรูปแบบของปีกและวิธีบินไปตลอดกาล เช่นเดียวกัน เรารู้ว่าแท่นพิมพ์ของ Gutenberg เปลี่ยนอารยธรรมมนุษย์ไปตลอดกาล แต่มีกี่คนที่รู้ว่าเทคโนโลยีนี้ส่งผลให้แว่นตาเป็นที่ต้องการและขายดีเทน้ำเทท่า เพราะคนนับล้านอยากอ่านหนังสือมากขึ้น กระตุ้นให้เกิดนวัตกรรมใหม่ๆ ในวงการเลนส์ จุดประกายให้มีการพัฒนาเลนส์ของกล้องจุลทรรศน์และกล้องโทรทรรศน์ ซึ่งก็ทำให้เราพิสูจน์ได้ในที่สุดว่าโลกหมุนรอบดวงอาทิตย์
ในทำนองเดียวกัน เทคโนโลยีการเก็บความเย็นมีจุดเริ่มต้นที่การหั่นและขนส่งน้ำแข็งในฤดูหนาว แต่การปิดท่าเรือทางใต้ในช่วงสงครามกลางเมืองอเมริกันคือเหตุการณ์ที่ส่งผลให้น้ำแข็งขาดตลาดและทำให้ตู้เย็นยุคแรกขายดีเป็นครั้งแรก จุดประกายให้นักประดิษฐ์คิดค้นอาหารแช่แข็ง, การขยายตัวของรางรถไฟหลังการปฏิวัติอุตสาหกรรมจุดประกายการแบ่งเวลาในพื้นที่ต่างๆ ออกเป็นโซนเวลาและการวาง "มาตรฐาน" ของการบันทึกเวลาที่เปลี่ยนอย่างหน้ามือเป็นหลังมือจากการบันทึกเวลาแบบหยาบๆ เช่น "เวลาที่ใช้เกี่ยวข้าวสองไร่" ในสมัยก่อน
บทที่สนุกที่สุดในสายตาของเราคือบท "สุขอนามัย" (clean) ซึ่งอธิบายประวัติศาสตร์การเติบโตที่สนุกมากๆ ของเมืองชิคาโก (Johnson ชี้ว่าโดยทั่วไปแล้ว เมืองทุกเมืองโตไม่ได้ถ้าไม่มีน้ำประปาและระบบกำจัดน้ำเสียที่มีประสิทธิภาพ เพราะไม่อย่างนั้นคนจะป่วยตายจากโรคที่มากับน้ำอย่างอหิวาตกโรค) คนชิคาโกต้องคิดวิศวกรรมใหม่เพราะเมืองตั้งอยู่ในที่ราบ น้ำเสียจากแม่น้ำชิคาโกถ่ายลงทะเลสาบมิชิแกน ต้องหาวิธีเปลี่ยนทิศการไหลของน้ำในแม่น้ำชิคาโก
บทท้ายๆ อธิบายเรื่องราวที่แท้จริงของหลอดไฟฟ้า ธอมัส เอดิสัน ไม่ได้ประดิษฐ์หลอดไฟขึ้นมาชนิด "ปิ๊ง" ไอเดียขึ้นมาทั้งดุ้นในหัวในชั่วพริบตาและลงมือผลิต แต่สิ่งประดิษฐ์ของเขาเป็นการต่อยอดนวัตกรรมต่างๆ ที่ประกอบกันเป็นหลอดไฟ มีผู้ทดลองและจดสิทธิบัตรไปแล้วมากมาย เอดิสันควรได้รับการยกย่องมากกว่าว่า คิดค้นหลอดไฟรุ่นแรกที่ "ขายได้" ในเชิงพาณิชย์ และเล็งเห็นเป็นคนแรกๆ ว่า สภาพแวดล้อมที่เอื้อต่อนวัตกรรม คือ การมี "ทีมงาน" ซึ่งประกอบด้วยคนจากหลากหลายสาขาวิชา หลายเชื้อชาติและความคิดความเชื่อ มาร่วมทำงานด้วยกันในบรรยากาศ "เปิด" คือเอื้อต่อการลองผิดลองถูกซ้ำแล้วซ้ำเล่า
ป.ล. นอกจากจะเขียนหนังสือเก่งแล้ว Steven Johnson ยังคุยสนุกด้วย ดู TEDTalk ของเขาได้ที่ https://www.ted.com/speakers/steven_j...
ป.ป.ล. อ่านจบแล้วทำให้นึกถึงซีรีส์สา���คดีโทรทัศน์เก่าเรื่อง Connections by James Burke แต่ละตอนฉายความเชื่อมโยงที่น่าแปลกใจระหว่างเทคโนโลยีต่างๆ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connecti...
October 9, 2014
I received this book compliments of Riverhead Books through the Goodreads First Reads program.
In the late 1970's James Burke hosted a television show called Connections in which he demonstrated how one innovation led to another in a seemingly unrelated way. Steven Johnson's How We Got To Now, which is the companion book to his PBS programs, quickly reminded me of that earlier series. Thankfully it is less frenetic and more focused. Johnson has chosen to explore the importance of six topics and unravel the journey of each to Now. While the current outbreak of Ebola has highlighted the importance of sanitation, most of the time we take Clean for granted. The same is true of Glass, Cold, Sound, Time and Light. We utilize the discoveries and refinements made possible by hard work, networking, accident, serendipity. Innovations don't leap from out of the blue and they lead to unintended consequences, good, bad, in between, and they lead to change.
The stories of How We Got To Now are lively and often surprising, with a cast of familiar and unfamiliar names. Johnson ties it together with some general observations on how innovations occur. The book is well illustrated, includes a bibliography and apparently will include notes, index and credits (the ARC is lacking these).
In the late 1970's James Burke hosted a television show called Connections in which he demonstrated how one innovation led to another in a seemingly unrelated way. Steven Johnson's How We Got To Now, which is the companion book to his PBS programs, quickly reminded me of that earlier series. Thankfully it is less frenetic and more focused. Johnson has chosen to explore the importance of six topics and unravel the journey of each to Now. While the current outbreak of Ebola has highlighted the importance of sanitation, most of the time we take Clean for granted. The same is true of Glass, Cold, Sound, Time and Light. We utilize the discoveries and refinements made possible by hard work, networking, accident, serendipity. Innovations don't leap from out of the blue and they lead to unintended consequences, good, bad, in between, and they lead to change.
The stories of How We Got To Now are lively and often surprising, with a cast of familiar and unfamiliar names. Johnson ties it together with some general observations on how innovations occur. The book is well illustrated, includes a bibliography and apparently will include notes, index and credits (the ARC is lacking these).
January 17, 2015
Fascinating! The author looks at the topics of glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light and explains how one discovery led to others, with very unpredictable results. For example, the invention of the printing press led to more books which led to more people realizing they needed spectacles which led to an improvement of the glassmaking process to make corrective lenses which led to the invention of microscopes which opened a new world to scientists studying disease. Sometimes many inventors work on similar ideas at the same time - other times an inventor may make a huge leap by getting ideas from different disciplines. I really enjoyed the book and I think I will watch the PBS series now.
December 18, 2021
Excellent read. 3.5 stars but not rounded up because the subjects interface and mix in such meandering ways that the core issues lose direct focus. Admittedly with such massive innovation and physical human advances it is extremely difficult. Nothing occurs without context of what else is "known" commonly.
Still I solidly recommend.
Chicago's raising and also sewerage are 4 stars fully. That and the "sound" transmission pieces are the best parts. Carrier's and the ice sellers quests should have been better connected with more info on humidity factor control uses. There are 1000's.
No one who has it truly appreciates water from a faucet. Which doesn't make you sick. And doesn't need to.be carried.
Still I solidly recommend.
Chicago's raising and also sewerage are 4 stars fully. That and the "sound" transmission pieces are the best parts. Carrier's and the ice sellers quests should have been better connected with more info on humidity factor control uses. There are 1000's.
No one who has it truly appreciates water from a faucet. Which doesn't make you sick. And doesn't need to.be carried.
July 8, 2023
Incredibly interesting and well written. About as much of a page flipper as you’ll ever find in non-long-form-narrative non-fiction. I loved this book.
The loss of a star is due to the fact that the book felt like a bit of a hodge podge of cool stories at times, and when the author tried to tie them all together with deep discourses on the nature of innovation, I wasn’t really having it. I’d probably give the introduction and conclusion of this book 3 stars. But the meat and potatoes of the book - the six chapters just telling the stories of various innovations - they were five star material. Would suggest to any curious reader who likes to read non-fiction for pure entertainment
The loss of a star is due to the fact that the book felt like a bit of a hodge podge of cool stories at times, and when the author tried to tie them all together with deep discourses on the nature of innovation, I wasn’t really having it. I’d probably give the introduction and conclusion of this book 3 stars. But the meat and potatoes of the book - the six chapters just telling the stories of various innovations - they were five star material. Would suggest to any curious reader who likes to read non-fiction for pure entertainment
November 16, 2019
A rushed birth this was: great book in chapter one (Glass), feels more and more rushed with each incoming chapter. The principal idea is highlighted early - new technology creates fresh needs (abundance of books kickstarts optical science) and has unexpected lateral effects. After that the text is concerned with reinforcing the idea by repeating it over and over with examples, interspersed with inspirational passages.
One thing of note in the latter part is the recognition of Thomas Edison not as an inventor per se, but as the creator of the modern R&D department.
One thing of note in the latter part is the recognition of Thomas Edison not as an inventor per se, but as the creator of the modern R&D department.
October 5, 2014
Johnson again paints a rich tapestry of innovation, much of it unexpected and not linear. His stories often begin in odd places before they coalesce. I've enjoyed just about all of his books and this one is no exception. I was familiar with a few of the stories (Babbage, Edison) but certainly not all of them. This book is informative and very enjoyable to read.
April 29, 2017
“How We Got To Now” is competent enough, but it feels threadbare. It feels like a narrative designed to punctuate a picture show that is missing its pictures. It probably feels that way because it is that way—it was written to accompany a PBS television series (which is flacked on the cover of the book), and, unfortunately, without the moving pictures, the book doesn’t stand on its own very well.
The dedication of the book is “For Jane, who no doubt expected a three-volume treatise on nineteenth-century whaling.” I would have preferred that to the book I got. Whaling, after all, is an infinitely fascinating activity, with deep roots and relevance to American history. A detailed exploration of whaling would teach the reader a lot. Instead, I got superficial histories of six areas of technology (glass; refrigeration; sound transmission; sanitation; timekeeping; and illumination); bound together by two less-than-gripping themes.
The first theme is what the author, Steven Johnson, calls (I’m not sure if the term is original) the “hummingbird effect.” This is the idea that “an innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” The theme gets its name from the presumed evolution of hummingbirds to better access hard-to-reach nectar in flowers, which flowers had earlier evolved to allow insects, not birds, to access the nectar. (Like all post hoc evolutionary explanations, this is a little too pat, but hey, I wasn’t there when hummingbirds evolved, so what do I know? On the other hand, neither was Johnson.) This is basically a gussied up law of unintended consequences. Johnson refers to it frequently, but particularly in connection with improvements in measurement—when measurement improves, he says, it makes possible seemingly unrelated developments that could not happen before. None of this is false, but I don’t think it’s the major set of insights Johnson thinks it is.
The second, related, theme is that single individuals are unimportant to scientific progress. Johnson strongly believes that if Person X hadn’t invented something, Person Y would have invented the same thing at roughly the same time, because the hummingbird effect in essence dictates that that the conditions collectively ripen at a given time, and every breakthrough is “a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration.” Thus, the net effect of social configuration, other inventions, and other external circumstances dictates the emergence of new technologies. Specific individuals have little or nothing to do with any particular invention coming to life. Again, that’s probably mostly true, but (despite frequent cases of simultaneous invention), it’s often true only on longer time scales than Johnson says—witness, for example, Johnson’s own observation that hundreds of years passed between spectacles and telescopes, even though a telescope is merely two lenses placed together and now seems obvious.
I suppose every book (and TV series) needs an organizing structure, and these two themes are Johnson’s. They’re not real exciting, but at least they’re not offensive. And, to his credit, Johnson explicitly and repeatedly rejects the idea of judging whether any particular technological development is good or bad, instead sticking to the facts, so we are spared the lectures common in these types of popular science works, and his structure works well enough to keep the narrative moving.
Speaking of offensive, Johnson halfheartedly apologizes for “the ‘we’ of [this book’s] title [being] North Americans and Europeans.” But, as he points out, that’s entirely apt, because “certain critical experiences—the rise of the scientific method, industrialization—happened in Europe first, and have now spread across the world.” A crisper way of putting this would be that nobody in the rest of the world has contributed anything notably relevant to modern science or technology, whether antibiotics or nerve gas, but at least Johnson states the truth, which gives the reader more confidence in the accuracy of other parts of his book.
Johnson begins with glass. He traces a line—not a straight line; more like the line traced by a bouncing pinball—from colored natural and man-made glass known to the ancients, to medieval Venetian scientifically produced clear glass, to monkish spectacles, to the printing press. Occasionally there are jarring, though not critical, errors. For example, Johnson makes a big deal out of the printing press increasing the market for reading up-close, given that prior to widespread printing most people had little need for close-up focus. He repeatedly incorrectly refers to “hyperopia” and “farsightedness,” claiming that it was common in the population and spectacles corrected it such that people could read. That condition exists, but it wasn’t the medieval problem. Both hyperopia and myopia (nearsightedness) were rare problems in medieval society, just as they are in pre-modern societies today (myopia in particular is a disease of modernity, for reasons which are debated). The real need was for the correction of presbyopia, which is a totally different eye condition—the decreasing ability of the lenses of the eyes to focus at near distances as people age, a problem that happens to 100% of the population. So Johnson is right about the need for spectacles—but not for quite the reason he gives.
Anyway, Johnson’s ball keeps bouncing, from the printing press, to microscopes, telescopes, glass fibers (for communication and as a raw material), and to mirrors. Then he tells us that glass mirrors played a major role in changing the consciousness of Europeans, “orient[ing] them around the self in a new way,” thus they were a key element of causing the Renaissance. Well, maybe. But the Renaissance was about a lot more than increased individualism, which was really a much later development, and anyway mirrors entered mass life only during the 19th Century, and therefore could have had little do with group self-perception during the Renaissance. Like the explanation of why the hummingbird is the way it is, this story sounds good on first reading, but a little thought makes it seem glib to the point of being facile.
The next two chapters cover refrigeration, from the transport of ice blocks to southern climes to modern frozen foods; and sound transmission, from Neanderthal cave rituals to ultrasound as a scientific tool. Then Johnson turns to sanitation, treading the well-worn path that led Europeans to discover the importance of medical and water sanitation and disinfection.
When talking about sanitation, Johnson makes an interesting point I had never considered. We are used to our ancestors being ridiculed, and being held up as stinky barbarians next to supposedly enlightened people in China and the Islamic world, because they bathed so rarely. As Johnson says of our ancestors, in this context and also in general, “they look and act like modern people in many ways . . . but every now then, strange gaps open between us and them, not just the obvious gaps in technological sophistication, but more subtle, conceptual gaps.” But, as Johnson notes, they didn’t fail to bathe because they lacked the technology or ability. They made the deliberate, considered choice not to bathe because bathing was universally regarded in the West as extremely bad for one’s health. As far as they were concerned, cleaning oneself was one of the “barbaric traditions of Middle Eastern bathhouses, not [fit for] the aristocracy of Paris of London.” Of course, that aristocracy could have bathed as much as they wished. But as Johnson says, “The virtues of washing oneself were not self-evident, the way we think of them today.” Our ancestors were wrong about the health consequences, no doubt, but it doesn’t make them any less sophisticated or cultured than those cleaner people in other parts of the world (whom, after all, the Europeans proceeded to dominate for centuries, while creating everything good, and most of the bad, in the world we live in today).
Johnson finally turns to timekeeping and illumination. As to time, he discusses the history of modern clocks (arising from Galileo’s work on pendulums), and their impact on European technology, from the calculation of longitude to the regularization of work hours, all the way to atomic clocks and the Clock of the Long Now. As to illumination, he follows the changeovers from tallow and beeswax to whale oil to electric illumination (using the now famous calculations of William Nordhaus of the exponentially decreasing amount of wages needed to purchase a thousand lumen-hours of light). Johnson notes that Edison was not the first to work on lightbulbs, just the most successful (and perhaps the most dogged)—the basic formula of a carbonized filament in a glass bulb pre-dated Edison by decades. But Edison, of course, like Steve Jobs, was a tireless self-promoter and a “master of vaporware.” Johnson also attributes a variety of social changes to the ability to create light. For example, he attributes to flash technology Jacob Riis creating his muckraking photos of New York tenements, resulting in legislation to protect the poor, and to neon lights the creation of Las Vegas, which had a significant influence on modernist architecture. (In the argument over whether social change drives technological change, or vice versa, Johnson is very much on the side of vice versa.)
Johnson ends on a false note, unfortunately, with a short chapter buying into the myth that Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, was the first computer programmer. This claim is based on her interest in mathematics, encouraged by her mother, and her professional relationship with Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine, regarded as the first computer. Lovelace translated an Italian engineer’s essay on the Engine, to which she attached extensive footnotes, some of which constituted a type of early program (for example, to calculate Bernoulli numbers with punch cards). Until recently, it was universally agreed those were summaries of Babbage’s own earlier-created programs, placed there at his request (and nobody disputes he wrote programs prior to Lovelace, so she was not in any case the “first programmer”). She may or may not have improved Babbage’s earlier programs; it’s impossible to tell from the limited documentary evidence. But because of the modern desperation to find and elevate any female role model in science, in order to pretend it is not female choice and innate abilities that results in fewer female computer (and other) scientists, but rather supposed sexist suppression, history has been re-written to claim (as Johnson does) that the programs were Lovelace’s original contributions. On the other hand, Lovelace did have some interesting speculations, perhaps original, in her notes on the future uses of the Engine beyond calculation. Johnson retreats to focusing on those, but even there, his characterization of Lovelace’s suggestion that the Engine might compose music as “an imaginative leap . . . almost beyond comprehension” suggests hyperbole covering up a lack of faith in the subject of his focus.
Anyway, this book isn’t great. But it’s a quick read. The PBS series accompanying it is available for streaming (for a price) on Amazon, and combining the two might be a worthwhile exercise (I haven’t done so). As an education tool for a high school student, or a not-well-informed adult who wants to kill some time, the book could be pretty good. It’s certainly better than watching PewDieDie on YouTube (or Twitch, or whatever). If you know something about the history of these technologies, though, you won’t learn anything new here.
The dedication of the book is “For Jane, who no doubt expected a three-volume treatise on nineteenth-century whaling.” I would have preferred that to the book I got. Whaling, after all, is an infinitely fascinating activity, with deep roots and relevance to American history. A detailed exploration of whaling would teach the reader a lot. Instead, I got superficial histories of six areas of technology (glass; refrigeration; sound transmission; sanitation; timekeeping; and illumination); bound together by two less-than-gripping themes.
The first theme is what the author, Steven Johnson, calls (I’m not sure if the term is original) the “hummingbird effect.” This is the idea that “an innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” The theme gets its name from the presumed evolution of hummingbirds to better access hard-to-reach nectar in flowers, which flowers had earlier evolved to allow insects, not birds, to access the nectar. (Like all post hoc evolutionary explanations, this is a little too pat, but hey, I wasn’t there when hummingbirds evolved, so what do I know? On the other hand, neither was Johnson.) This is basically a gussied up law of unintended consequences. Johnson refers to it frequently, but particularly in connection with improvements in measurement—when measurement improves, he says, it makes possible seemingly unrelated developments that could not happen before. None of this is false, but I don’t think it’s the major set of insights Johnson thinks it is.
The second, related, theme is that single individuals are unimportant to scientific progress. Johnson strongly believes that if Person X hadn’t invented something, Person Y would have invented the same thing at roughly the same time, because the hummingbird effect in essence dictates that that the conditions collectively ripen at a given time, and every breakthrough is “a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration.” Thus, the net effect of social configuration, other inventions, and other external circumstances dictates the emergence of new technologies. Specific individuals have little or nothing to do with any particular invention coming to life. Again, that’s probably mostly true, but (despite frequent cases of simultaneous invention), it’s often true only on longer time scales than Johnson says—witness, for example, Johnson’s own observation that hundreds of years passed between spectacles and telescopes, even though a telescope is merely two lenses placed together and now seems obvious.
I suppose every book (and TV series) needs an organizing structure, and these two themes are Johnson’s. They’re not real exciting, but at least they’re not offensive. And, to his credit, Johnson explicitly and repeatedly rejects the idea of judging whether any particular technological development is good or bad, instead sticking to the facts, so we are spared the lectures common in these types of popular science works, and his structure works well enough to keep the narrative moving.
Speaking of offensive, Johnson halfheartedly apologizes for “the ‘we’ of [this book’s] title [being] North Americans and Europeans.” But, as he points out, that’s entirely apt, because “certain critical experiences—the rise of the scientific method, industrialization—happened in Europe first, and have now spread across the world.” A crisper way of putting this would be that nobody in the rest of the world has contributed anything notably relevant to modern science or technology, whether antibiotics or nerve gas, but at least Johnson states the truth, which gives the reader more confidence in the accuracy of other parts of his book.
Johnson begins with glass. He traces a line—not a straight line; more like the line traced by a bouncing pinball—from colored natural and man-made glass known to the ancients, to medieval Venetian scientifically produced clear glass, to monkish spectacles, to the printing press. Occasionally there are jarring, though not critical, errors. For example, Johnson makes a big deal out of the printing press increasing the market for reading up-close, given that prior to widespread printing most people had little need for close-up focus. He repeatedly incorrectly refers to “hyperopia” and “farsightedness,” claiming that it was common in the population and spectacles corrected it such that people could read. That condition exists, but it wasn’t the medieval problem. Both hyperopia and myopia (nearsightedness) were rare problems in medieval society, just as they are in pre-modern societies today (myopia in particular is a disease of modernity, for reasons which are debated). The real need was for the correction of presbyopia, which is a totally different eye condition—the decreasing ability of the lenses of the eyes to focus at near distances as people age, a problem that happens to 100% of the population. So Johnson is right about the need for spectacles—but not for quite the reason he gives.
Anyway, Johnson’s ball keeps bouncing, from the printing press, to microscopes, telescopes, glass fibers (for communication and as a raw material), and to mirrors. Then he tells us that glass mirrors played a major role in changing the consciousness of Europeans, “orient[ing] them around the self in a new way,” thus they were a key element of causing the Renaissance. Well, maybe. But the Renaissance was about a lot more than increased individualism, which was really a much later development, and anyway mirrors entered mass life only during the 19th Century, and therefore could have had little do with group self-perception during the Renaissance. Like the explanation of why the hummingbird is the way it is, this story sounds good on first reading, but a little thought makes it seem glib to the point of being facile.
The next two chapters cover refrigeration, from the transport of ice blocks to southern climes to modern frozen foods; and sound transmission, from Neanderthal cave rituals to ultrasound as a scientific tool. Then Johnson turns to sanitation, treading the well-worn path that led Europeans to discover the importance of medical and water sanitation and disinfection.
When talking about sanitation, Johnson makes an interesting point I had never considered. We are used to our ancestors being ridiculed, and being held up as stinky barbarians next to supposedly enlightened people in China and the Islamic world, because they bathed so rarely. As Johnson says of our ancestors, in this context and also in general, “they look and act like modern people in many ways . . . but every now then, strange gaps open between us and them, not just the obvious gaps in technological sophistication, but more subtle, conceptual gaps.” But, as Johnson notes, they didn’t fail to bathe because they lacked the technology or ability. They made the deliberate, considered choice not to bathe because bathing was universally regarded in the West as extremely bad for one’s health. As far as they were concerned, cleaning oneself was one of the “barbaric traditions of Middle Eastern bathhouses, not [fit for] the aristocracy of Paris of London.” Of course, that aristocracy could have bathed as much as they wished. But as Johnson says, “The virtues of washing oneself were not self-evident, the way we think of them today.” Our ancestors were wrong about the health consequences, no doubt, but it doesn’t make them any less sophisticated or cultured than those cleaner people in other parts of the world (whom, after all, the Europeans proceeded to dominate for centuries, while creating everything good, and most of the bad, in the world we live in today).
Johnson finally turns to timekeeping and illumination. As to time, he discusses the history of modern clocks (arising from Galileo’s work on pendulums), and their impact on European technology, from the calculation of longitude to the regularization of work hours, all the way to atomic clocks and the Clock of the Long Now. As to illumination, he follows the changeovers from tallow and beeswax to whale oil to electric illumination (using the now famous calculations of William Nordhaus of the exponentially decreasing amount of wages needed to purchase a thousand lumen-hours of light). Johnson notes that Edison was not the first to work on lightbulbs, just the most successful (and perhaps the most dogged)—the basic formula of a carbonized filament in a glass bulb pre-dated Edison by decades. But Edison, of course, like Steve Jobs, was a tireless self-promoter and a “master of vaporware.” Johnson also attributes a variety of social changes to the ability to create light. For example, he attributes to flash technology Jacob Riis creating his muckraking photos of New York tenements, resulting in legislation to protect the poor, and to neon lights the creation of Las Vegas, which had a significant influence on modernist architecture. (In the argument over whether social change drives technological change, or vice versa, Johnson is very much on the side of vice versa.)
Johnson ends on a false note, unfortunately, with a short chapter buying into the myth that Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, was the first computer programmer. This claim is based on her interest in mathematics, encouraged by her mother, and her professional relationship with Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine, regarded as the first computer. Lovelace translated an Italian engineer’s essay on the Engine, to which she attached extensive footnotes, some of which constituted a type of early program (for example, to calculate Bernoulli numbers with punch cards). Until recently, it was universally agreed those were summaries of Babbage’s own earlier-created programs, placed there at his request (and nobody disputes he wrote programs prior to Lovelace, so she was not in any case the “first programmer”). She may or may not have improved Babbage’s earlier programs; it’s impossible to tell from the limited documentary evidence. But because of the modern desperation to find and elevate any female role model in science, in order to pretend it is not female choice and innate abilities that results in fewer female computer (and other) scientists, but rather supposed sexist suppression, history has been re-written to claim (as Johnson does) that the programs were Lovelace’s original contributions. On the other hand, Lovelace did have some interesting speculations, perhaps original, in her notes on the future uses of the Engine beyond calculation. Johnson retreats to focusing on those, but even there, his characterization of Lovelace’s suggestion that the Engine might compose music as “an imaginative leap . . . almost beyond comprehension” suggests hyperbole covering up a lack of faith in the subject of his focus.
Anyway, this book isn’t great. But it’s a quick read. The PBS series accompanying it is available for streaming (for a price) on Amazon, and combining the two might be a worthwhile exercise (I haven’t done so). As an education tool for a high school student, or a not-well-informed adult who wants to kill some time, the book could be pretty good. It’s certainly better than watching PewDieDie on YouTube (or Twitch, or whatever). If you know something about the history of these technologies, though, you won’t learn anything new here.
September 16, 2020
I read How We Got to Now after having read and appreciated several of Johnson's other books, but not having seen the associated tv show.
It's a fun sketch of the history of multiple technologies. Air conditioning, mirrors, the computer, freezing food, radio, audio recording, chlorinated water, watches, electrical light, and more. Johnson organizes these into six themes: sound, light, cleaning, time, glass, and cold. This allows him to race between different inventions, people, historical events, details of the natural world, scientific concepts, and popular culture, a bit like James Burke's Connections (the tv series as well as the 1978 book).
Overall it's very entertaining and engaging. Having taught it once, I know it's a good introduction to the history of technology. The structure also lets Johnson hit some of his earlier themes, like the importance of innovation networks over the impact of a single genius and his form of technological determinism.
Weaknesses: it's a fast book, without time to get deeply into topics. And while Johnson brings in some nonwhite and female people, it's still overwhelmingly about western (mostly American and western European) white men. There are historical reasons for this, but it would be good to see the book stretch beyond the cliche.
Overall, recommended.
It's a fun sketch of the history of multiple technologies. Air conditioning, mirrors, the computer, freezing food, radio, audio recording, chlorinated water, watches, electrical light, and more. Johnson organizes these into six themes: sound, light, cleaning, time, glass, and cold. This allows him to race between different inventions, people, historical events, details of the natural world, scientific concepts, and popular culture, a bit like James Burke's Connections (the tv series as well as the 1978 book).
Overall it's very entertaining and engaging. Having taught it once, I know it's a good introduction to the history of technology. The structure also lets Johnson hit some of his earlier themes, like the importance of innovation networks over the impact of a single genius and his form of technological determinism.
Weaknesses: it's a fast book, without time to get deeply into topics. And while Johnson brings in some nonwhite and female people, it's still overwhelmingly about western (mostly American and western European) white men. There are historical reasons for this, but it would be good to see the book stretch beyond the cliche.
Overall, recommended.
June 16, 2015
4.5 stars. Glass, which started as a novelty and an ornament, exploded when the printing press, a coevolutionary/symbiotic factor, created a desire to read more, but also exposed the fact that many people were farsighted and needed glasses. The economic incentive to produce glasses led to improvements and discoveries in glass, leading to the development of microscopes and biology, and the invention of fiber optics which is at the backbone of the internet today.
The key idea in this book is that inventions and discoveries are, by nature, networked, and exhibit what Johnson calls the "hummingbird effect". Each discovery expands what Stuart Kauffman calls the "adjacent possible", the scope of possibilities now unlocked by that new discovery. This adjacent possible is sometimes combined with other factors that allow for coevolution and symbiosis, like how flowers offered more nectar to incentivize increased pollination, which caused hummingbirds to evolve wings that allowed them to extract nectar while floating in air. Many times, this constitutes the engine of invention and discovery. Glass is certainly the most convincing case.
• Cold caused innovations in preservation and, Johnson argues, a migration to hotter climates that air conditioning enabled, causing political changes due to retirees moving to the South.
• Sound led to a sort of liberation for African–American culture through jazz, sonar, and ultrasound.
• Clean led to the all-important germ theory and a healthier populace.
• Time led to an industrial society and computers, and this is where Johnson reiterates that "our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them" (176). Our measure of time led to us changing our experience of our lives to be set within the grid of hours.
• Light, which was attributed to Edison mostly because he knew how to market and he built a better product (but did not invent incandescent lights in the first place), led to photography being immensely more useful with flash photography which led to political change, and also led to the importance of lasers in the development of fusion energy.
Johnson concludes by saying that the best inventors that tend to see far ahead seem to be ones that cross disciplinary lines and aren't afraid to try something crazy – like what Astro Teller calls the 10% change vs. the 10x change. 10% changes are within disciplines. 10x changes are cross-discipinary.
It's clear that this is a really well-written book that is pretty engaging. I finished this (short, 250-page) book in the span of 36 hours, and everything was extremely understandable and couched in laymen's terms. Certainly, the "long lens" that he takes to the historical impact of innovations makes for a great narrative. The real benefit of this book is that Johnson talks about these innovations in a way that explains exactly how they're relevant in the real world, and he puts this overarching model of invention and discovery over it, one that is evolutionary and a sort of genealogy, which ties the innovations together conceptually. Finally, he extends his model of discovery and invention to what it means for policy: if we understand that invention and discovery is done as a network, collaboratively, then we should advocate more liberal, not stronger, patent laws. It's an extremely coherent narrative that is as informative as it is entertaining.
However, it suffers from uncontrolled expectations. The Glass example was so good and fitting and overarching that each of the four following innovations, up until Light, made it difficult to follow up. It seemed to follow the format of a term paper: present your second-best idea up front, followed by some of the more duller ideas, and then go out with your best one. The best and second-best seemed to be reverse in this narrative, which felt like Glass promised some great things that the rest of the chapters failed to quite deliver up to. That's not to discount the innovations that he talks about – they could have just been way more hard-hitting.
Finally, it also suffers from the common problem that plagues nonfiction books of this ilk, which comes from the need to weave a narrative and from historical look-back format of this book: historical revisionism. Sadly, Johnson makes no reference to the problem of revisionism, and general readers won't make the attempt to go into the primary sources to validate whether some of Johnson's pivotal points, like the economic engine of people needing eyeglasses due to the printing press caused an explosion in glass production, are actually true or not. So, readers should take a skeptic's perspective to this book, as with any book on history as longitudinal as this one.
All in all, this book inspired me to be one of the makers that contribute to the path of discovery and be a part of the combinatorial hummingbird effect of invention, in the hopes that our collective human work will lead to a second volume of this book a few hundred years from now, perhaps subtitled "Six More Innovations That Made The Modern World."
The key idea in this book is that inventions and discoveries are, by nature, networked, and exhibit what Johnson calls the "hummingbird effect". Each discovery expands what Stuart Kauffman calls the "adjacent possible", the scope of possibilities now unlocked by that new discovery. This adjacent possible is sometimes combined with other factors that allow for coevolution and symbiosis, like how flowers offered more nectar to incentivize increased pollination, which caused hummingbirds to evolve wings that allowed them to extract nectar while floating in air. Many times, this constitutes the engine of invention and discovery. Glass is certainly the most convincing case.
• Cold caused innovations in preservation and, Johnson argues, a migration to hotter climates that air conditioning enabled, causing political changes due to retirees moving to the South.
• Sound led to a sort of liberation for African–American culture through jazz, sonar, and ultrasound.
• Clean led to the all-important germ theory and a healthier populace.
• Time led to an industrial society and computers, and this is where Johnson reiterates that "our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them" (176). Our measure of time led to us changing our experience of our lives to be set within the grid of hours.
• Light, which was attributed to Edison mostly because he knew how to market and he built a better product (but did not invent incandescent lights in the first place), led to photography being immensely more useful with flash photography which led to political change, and also led to the importance of lasers in the development of fusion energy.
Johnson concludes by saying that the best inventors that tend to see far ahead seem to be ones that cross disciplinary lines and aren't afraid to try something crazy – like what Astro Teller calls the 10% change vs. the 10x change. 10% changes are within disciplines. 10x changes are cross-discipinary.
It's clear that this is a really well-written book that is pretty engaging. I finished this (short, 250-page) book in the span of 36 hours, and everything was extremely understandable and couched in laymen's terms. Certainly, the "long lens" that he takes to the historical impact of innovations makes for a great narrative. The real benefit of this book is that Johnson talks about these innovations in a way that explains exactly how they're relevant in the real world, and he puts this overarching model of invention and discovery over it, one that is evolutionary and a sort of genealogy, which ties the innovations together conceptually. Finally, he extends his model of discovery and invention to what it means for policy: if we understand that invention and discovery is done as a network, collaboratively, then we should advocate more liberal, not stronger, patent laws. It's an extremely coherent narrative that is as informative as it is entertaining.
However, it suffers from uncontrolled expectations. The Glass example was so good and fitting and overarching that each of the four following innovations, up until Light, made it difficult to follow up. It seemed to follow the format of a term paper: present your second-best idea up front, followed by some of the more duller ideas, and then go out with your best one. The best and second-best seemed to be reverse in this narrative, which felt like Glass promised some great things that the rest of the chapters failed to quite deliver up to. That's not to discount the innovations that he talks about – they could have just been way more hard-hitting.
Finally, it also suffers from the common problem that plagues nonfiction books of this ilk, which comes from the need to weave a narrative and from historical look-back format of this book: historical revisionism. Sadly, Johnson makes no reference to the problem of revisionism, and general readers won't make the attempt to go into the primary sources to validate whether some of Johnson's pivotal points, like the economic engine of people needing eyeglasses due to the printing press caused an explosion in glass production, are actually true or not. So, readers should take a skeptic's perspective to this book, as with any book on history as longitudinal as this one.
All in all, this book inspired me to be one of the makers that contribute to the path of discovery and be a part of the combinatorial hummingbird effect of invention, in the hopes that our collective human work will lead to a second volume of this book a few hundred years from now, perhaps subtitled "Six More Innovations That Made The Modern World."
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