How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

The technology behind SIGSALY would continue to be useful in supplying secure lines of communication. But the truly disruptive force that it unleashed would come from another strange and wonderful property it possessed: digital copies could be perfect copies. With the right equipment, digital samples of sound could be transmitted and copied with perfect fidelity. So much of the turbulence of the modern media landscape—the reinvention of the music business that began with file-sharing services such as Napster, the rise of streaming media, and the breakdown of traditional television networks—dates back to the digital buzz of the Green Hornet. If the robot historians of the future had to mark one moment where the “digital age” began—the computational equivalent of the Fourth of July or Bastille Day—that transatlantic phone call in July 1943 would certainly rank high on the list. Once again, our drive to reproduce the sound of the human voice had expanded the adjacent possible. For the first time, our experience of the world was becoming digital.