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

by Steven Johnson

In 1901, a Boston-based firm called the Submarine Signal Company began manufacturing a system of communications tools that exploited this property of aquatic sound waves: underwater bells that chimed at regular intervals, and microphones specially designed for underwater reception called “hydrophones.” The SSC established more than a hundred stations around the world at particularly treacherous harbors or channels, where the underwater bells would warn vessels, equipped with the company’s hydrophones, that steered too close to the rocks or shoals.

Chesbrough’s background in railway and canal engineering turned out to be decisive in solving the problem of Chicago’s flat, nonporous terrain. Creating an artificial grade by building sewers deep underground was deemed too expensive: tunneling that far below the surface was difficult work using nineteenth-century equipment, and the whole scheme required pumping the waste back to the surface at the end of the process. But here Chesbrough’s unique history helped him come up with an alternate scenario, reminding him of a tool he had seen as a young man working the railway: the jackscrew, a device used to lift multiton locomotives onto the tracks. If you couldn’t dig down to create a proper grade for drainage, why not use jackscrews to lift the city up?

Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city’s spectacular skyline; what they don’t realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering.

We think of cities intuitively now in terms of skylines, that epic reach toward the heavens. But the grandeur of those urban cathedrals would be impossible without the hidden world below grade.

OF ALL THOSE ACHIEVEMENTS, more than the underground trains and high-speed Internet cables, the most essential and the most easily overlooked is the small miracle that sewer systems in part make possible: enjoying a glass of clean drinking water from a tap. Just a hundred and fifty years ago, in cities around the world, drinking water was effectively playing Russian roulette. When we think of the defining killers of nineteenth-century urbanism, our minds naturally turn to Jack the Ripper haunting the streets of London. But the real killers of the Victorian city were the diseases bred by contaminated water supplies.

They found that clean drinking water led to a 43 percent reduction in total mortality in the average American city. Even more impressive, chlorine and filtration systems reduced infant mortality by 74 percent, and child mortality by almost as much.

When radio and television began experimenting with storytelling, it was the personal-hygiene companies that once again led the way in pioneering new forms of advertising, a brilliant marketing move that still lingers with us today in the phrase “soap opera.” This is one of the stranger hummingbird effects of contemporary culture: the germ theory of disease may have reduced infant mortality to a fraction of its nineteenth-century levels, and made surgery and childbirth far safer than it had been in Semmelweis’s day. But it also played a crucial role in inventing the modern advertising business.

Environments such as the Texas Instruments microchip plant outside Austin, Texas, are some of the cleanest places on the planet. To even enter into the space, you have to don a full clean suit, your body covered head-to-toe with sterile materials that don’t shed. There’s something strangely inverted about the process. Normally when you find yourself dressing in such extreme protective outfits, you’re guarding yourself against some kind of hostile environment: severe cold, pathogens, the vacuum of space. But in the clean room, the suit is designed to protect the space from you. You are the pathogen, threatening the valuable resources of computer chips waiting to be born: your hair follicles and your epidermal layers and the mucus swarming around you. From the microchip’s point of view, every human being is Pig Pen, a dust cloud of filth. Washing up before entering the clean room, you’re not even allowed to use soap, because most soaps have fragrances that give off potential contaminants. Even soap is too dirty for the clean room.

For almost the entire span of human history, time had been calculated by tracking the heavenly rhythms of solar bodies. Like the earth itself, our sense of time revolved around the sun. Days were defined by the cycle of sunrise and sunset, months by the cycles of the moon, years by the slow but predictable rhythms of the seasons.

We began dividing up time into shorter units—seconds, minutes, hours—with many of those units relying on a base-12 counting system passed down from the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians. Time was defined by grade-school division: a minute was one-sixtieth of an hour, an hour was one-twenty-fourth of a day. And a day was simply the time that passed between the two moments when the sun was highest in the sky.

Most nineteen-year-olds figure out less scientific ways to be distracted while attending mass, but this college freshman happened to be Galileo Galilei. That Galileo was daydreaming about time and rhythm shouldn’t surprise us: his father was a music theorist and played the lute. In the middle of the sixteenth century, playing music would have been one of the most temporally precise activities in everyday culture. (The musical term “tempo” comes from the Italian word for time.) But machines that could keep a reliable beat didn’t exist in Galileo’s age; the metronome wouldn’t be invented for another few centuries. So watching the altar lamp sway back and forth with such regularity planted the seed of an idea in Galileo’s young mind. As is so often the case, however, it would take decades before the seed would blossom into something useful.

Increasingly obsessed with the science of dynamics, the study of how objects move through space, he decided to build a pendulum that would re-create what he had observed in the Duomo of Pisa so many years before. He discovered that the time it takes a pendulum to swing is not dependent on the size of the arc or the mass of the object swinging, but only on the length of the string.

More than anything else, though, industrial life needed clock time to regulate the new working day. In older agrarian or feudal economies, units of time were likely to be described in terms of the time required to complete a task. The day was divided not into abstract, mathematical units, but into a series of activities: instead of fifteen minutes, time was described as how long it would take to milk the cow or nail soles to a new pair of shoes. Instead of being paid by the hour, craftsmen were conventionally paid by the piece produced—what was commonly called “taken-work”—and their daily schedules were almost comically unregulated.

In The Prelude, Wordsworth announces his break from the “keepers of our time”: The guides, the wardens of our faculties And stewards of our labour, watchful men And skillful in the usury of time Sages, who in their prescience would control all accidents, and to the very road which they have fashioned would confine us down like engines . . .

If time is a river, the pendulum clock turned it into a canal of evenly spaced locks, engineered for the rhythms of industry. Once again, an increase in our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them.

The very next year, GMT was set as the international clock (based on Greenwich being located on the prime meridian), and the whole globe was divided into time zones. The world had begun to break free from the celestial rhythms of the solar system. Consulting the sun was no longer the most accurate way to tell the time. Instead, pulses of electricity traveling by telegraph wire from distant cities kept our clocks in sync.

A microprocessor is an extraordinary technological achievement on many levels, but few are as essential as this: computer chips are masters of time discipline. Think of the coordination needs of the industrial factory: thousands of short, repetitive tasks performed in proper sequence by hundreds of individuals. A microprocessor requires the same kind of time discipline, only the units being coordinated are bits of information instead of the hands and bodies of millworkers.

A modern computer is the assemblage of many different technologies and modes of knowledge: the symbolic logic of programming languages, the electrical engineering of the circuit board, the visual language of interface design. But without the microsecond accuracy of a quartz clock, modern computers would be useless.

This is in fact one of the recurring stories of the history of the clock: each new advance in timekeeping enables a corresponding advance in our mastery of geography—from ships, to railroads, to air traffic, to GPS. It’s an idea that Einstein would have appreciated: measuring time turns out to be key to measuring space.

The next time you glance down at your phone to check what time it is or where you are, the way you might have glanced at a watch or a map just two decades ago, think about the immense, layered network of human ingenuity that has been put in place to make that gesture possible.

The organization behind this device, the Long Now Foundation—cofounded by Hillis, Eno, Stewart Brand, and a few other visionaries—aims to build a number of ten-thousand-year clocks. (The first one is being constructed for a mountainside location in West Texas.) Why go to such extravagant lengths to build a clock that might tick only once in your lifetime? Because new modes of measuring force us to think about the world in a new light. Just as the microseconds of quartz and cesium opened up new ideas that transformed everyday life in countless ways, the slow time of the Long Now clock helps us think in new ways about the future.

If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish? The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”

Artificial light has transformed the way we work and sleep, helped create global networks of communication, and may soon enable radical breakthroughs in energy production. The lightbulb is so bound up in the popular sense of innovation that it has become a metaphor for new ideas themselves: the “lightbulb” moment has replaced Archimedes’s eureka as the expression most likely to be invoked to celebrate a sudden conceptual leap.

To this day, scientists are not entirely sure why sperm whales produce spermaceti in such vast quantities. (A mature sperm whale holds as much as five hundred gallons inside its skull.) Some believe the whales use the spermaceti for buoyancy; others believe it helps with the mammal’s echolocation system. New Englanders, however, quickly discovered another use for spermaceti: candles made from the substance produce a much stronger, whiter light than tallow candles, without the offensive smoke.

Spermaceti light quickly became an expensive habit for the well-to-do. George Washington estimated that he spent $15,000 a year in today’s currency burning spermaceti candles. The candle business became so lucrative that a group of manufacturers formed an organization called United Company of Spermaceti Chandlers, conventionally known as the “Spermaceti Trust,” designed to keep competitors out of the business and force the whalers to keep their prices in check.

The artificial light of the spermaceti candle triggered an explosion in the whaling industry, building out the beautiful seaside towns of Nantucket and Edgartown. But as elegant as these streets seem today, whaling was a dangerous and repulsive business. Thousands of lives were lost at sea chasing these majestic creatures, including from the notorious sinking of the Essex, which ultimately inspired Herman Melville’s masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

Extracting the spermaceti was almost as difficult as harpooning the whale itself. A hole would be carved in the side of the whale’s head, and men would crawl into the cavity above the brain—spending days inside the rotting carcass, scraping spermaceti out of the brain of the beast. It’s remarkable to think that only two hundred years ago, this was the reality of artificial light: if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.

THE STRANGE THING about the electric lightbulb is that it has come to be synonymous with the “genius” theory of innovation—the single inventor inventing a single thing, in a moment of sudden inspiration—while the true story behind its creation actually makes the case for a completely different explanatory framework: the network/systems model of innovation. Yes, the lightbulb marked a threshold in the history of innovation, but for entirely different reasons. It would be pushing things to claim that the lightbulb was crowdsourced, but it is even more of a distortion to claim that a single man named Thomas Edison invented it.

Edison was also a master of what we would now call “vaporware”: He announced nonexistent products to scare off competitors. Just a few months after he had started work on electric light, he began telling reporters from New York papers that the problem had been solved, and that he was on the verge of launching a national system of magical electrical light. A system so simple, he says, “that a bootblack might understand it.”

But for all this bluffing, Edison and his team did manage to ship a revolutionary and magical product, as the Apple marketing might have called the Edison lightbulb. Publicity and marketing will only get you so far. By 1882, Edison had produced a lightbulb that decisively outperformed its competitors, just as the iPod outperformed its MP3-player rivals in its early years.

By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.

“I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It’s their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me,” Edison famously said. “I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor.’”

A lightbulb on its own is a curiosity piece, something to dazzle reporters with. What Edison and the muckers created was much bigger than that: a network of multiple innovations, all linked together to make the magic of electric light safe and affordable.

If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections. The lightbulb shines light on more than just our bedside reading; it helps us see more clearly the way new ideas come into being, and how to cultivate them as a society.

The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.

Without bar-code scanning, the modern shopping landscape of Target and Best Buy and supermarkets the size of airport terminals would have had a much harder time coming into being. If there was a death ray in the history of the laser, it was the metaphoric one directed at the mom-and-pop, indie stores demolished by the big-box revolution.

Artificial light began as simple illumination, helping us read and entertain ourselves after dark; before long it had been transformed into advertising and art and information.

If there is a common thread to the time travelers, beyond the nonexplanation of genius, it is this: they worked at the margins of their official fields, or at the intersection point between very different disciplines.

To a certain extent, the time travelers remind us that working within an established field is both empowering and restricting at the same time. Stay within the boundaries of your discipline, and you will have an easier time making incremental improvements, opening the doors of the adjacent possible that are directly available to you given the specifics of the historical moment.

Yet there is a strange irony at the end of Jobs’s speech. After documenting the ways that unlikely collisions and explorations can liberate the mind, he ended with a more sentimental appeal to be “true to yourself”: Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.