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

by Steven Johnson

The telephone enabled less obvious transformations as well. It popularized the modern meaning of the word “hello”—as a greeting that starts a conversation—transforming it into one of the most recognized words anywhere on earth.

A minor genre of self-help books and pamphlets emerged, teaching people how to take a bath, with detailed instructions that seem today as if they are training someone to land a 747.

Most nineteen-year-olds figure out less scientific ways to be distracted while attending mass, but this college freshman happened to be Galileo Galilei.

Galileo spent the next twenty years becoming a professor of mathematics, experimenting with telescopes, and more or less inventing modern science,

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.