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April 27 - July 17, 2024
Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have
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The extraordinary (and unsettling) property of the butterfly effect is that it involves a virtually unknowable chain of causality; you can’t map the link between the air molecules bouncing around the butterfly and the storm system brewing in the Atlantic.
But Gutenberg’s great breakthrough had another, less celebrated effect: it made a massive number of people aware for the first time that they were farsighted. And that revelation created a surge in demand for spectacles.
Gutenberg made printed books relatively cheap and portable, which triggered a rise in literacy, which exposed a flaw in the visual acuity of a sizable part of the population, which then created a new market for the manufacture of spectacles.
Before long the microscope would reveal the invisible colonies of bacteria and viruses that both sustain and threaten human life, which in turn led to modern vaccines and antibiotics.
Starting in the 1940s, we began coating glass with phosphor and firing electrons at it, creating the hypnotic images of television. Within a few years, sociologists and media theorists were declaring that we had become a “society of the image,” the literate Gutenberg galaxy giving way to the blue glow of the TV screen and the Hollywood glamour shot.
but all of them, in one way or another, depended on the unique ability of glass to transmit and manipulate light.
There’s an intuitive line that you can follow from the lenses of the first spectacles, to the lens of a microscope, to the lens of a camera.
But Boys’s crossbow experiment suggested that there was one more twist in the story of this amazingly versatile material: using glass for its strength. By the middle of the next century, glass fibers, now wound together in a miraculous new material called fiberglass, were everywhere: in home insulation, clothes, surfboards, megayachts, helmets, and the circuit boards that connected the chips of a modern computer.
The transparency of glass fibers became an asset only once we began thinking of light as a way to encode digital information.
This hybrid of two seemingly unrelated inventions—the concentrated, orderly light of lasers, and the hyper-clear glass fibers—came to be known as fiber optics.
Today, the backbone of the global Internet is built out of fiber-optic cables.
miracle possible: we had to invent the idea of digital data itself, and laser beams, and computers at both ends that could transmit and receive those beams of information—not to mention the ships that lay and repair the cables. But those strange bonds of silicon dioxide, once again, turn out to be central to the story. The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.
What we rarely do is recognize the way glass supports this entire network: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on screens made of glass. It’s silicon dioxide all the way down the chain.
Rembrandt, for instance, painted around forty self-portraits over the course of his life.
For the first time, mirrors became part of the fabric of everyday life.
The historian Alan MacFarlane writes of the role of glass in shaping artistic vision, “It is as if all humans had some kind of systematic myopia, but one which made it impossible to see, and particularly to represent, the natural world with precision and clarity. Humans normally saw nature symbolically, as a set of signs. . . . What glass ironically did was to take away or compensate for the dark glass of human sight and the distortions of the mind, and hence to let in more light.”
Lewis Mumford writes in his Technics and Civilization. “Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself.” Social conventions as well as property rights and other legal customs began to revolve around the individual rather than the older, more collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the kingdom.
The psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story you start wanting to hear once you begin spending meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in the mirror. How
The same holds true for technological advances like the mirror. Without a technology that enabled humans to see a clear reflection of reality, including their own faces, the particular constellation of ideas in art and philosophy and politics that we call the Renaissance would have had a much more difficult time coming into being.
Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence of individual liberty in legal codes. That has to count as progress. But reasonable people disagree about whether we have now tipped the scales too far in the direction of individualism, away from those collective organizations: the union, the community, the state.
But even in the thin, ultra-stable atmosphere above Mauna Kea, small disturbances can blur the images captured by Keck. And so the observatories employ an ingenious system called “adaptive optics” to correct the vision of the telescopes. Lasers are beamed into the night sky above Keck, effectively creating an artificial star in the heavens. That false star becomes a kind of reference point; because the scientists know exactly what the laser should look like in the heavens were there no atmospheric distortion, they are able to get a measurement of the existing distortion by comparing the
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A world without glass would not just transform the edifices of civilization, by removing all the stained-glass windows of the great cathedrals and the sleek, reflective surfaces of the modern cityscape.
A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended life spans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer’s knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.
This was the hummingbird effect that the furnace unleashed: by learning how to generate extreme heat in a controlled environment, we unlocked the molecular potential of silicon dioxide, which soon transformed the way we see the world, and ourselves.
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.
What made ice valuable was precisely the low-energy state of a New England winter, and the peculiar capacity of ice to store that lack of energy for long periods of time. The cash crops of the tropics caused populations to swell in climates that could be unforgivingly hot, which in turn created a market for a product that allowed you to escape the heat.
Tools for measuring heat and weight with increased precision were developed, along with standardized scales such as Celsius and Fahrenheit, and as is so often the case in the history of science and innovation, when you have a leap forward in the accuracy of measuring something, new possibilities emerge.
Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.
Birdseye’s frozen-food breakthrough took shape as a slow hunch, but it also emerged as a kind of collision between several very different geographic and intellectual spaces. To imagine a world of flash-frozen food, Birdseye needed to experience the challenges of feeding a family in an arctic climate surrounded by brutal cold; he needed to spend time with the Inuit fishermen; he needed to inspect the foul containers of cod-fishing trawlers in New York harbors; he needed the scientific knowledge of how to produce temperatures well below freezing; he needed the industrial knowledge of how to
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What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.
When we think about twentieth-century miniaturization, our minds naturally gravitate to the transistor or the microchip, but the shrinking footprint of air-conditioning deserves its place in the annals of innovation as well: a machine that had once been larger than a flatbed truck reduced in size so that it could fit in a window.
Carrier’s invention circulated more than just molecules of oxygen and water. It ended up circulating people as well.
But air-conditioning arguably had the most significant impact on Presidential politics. Swelling populations in Florida, Texas, and Southern California shifted the electoral college toward the Sun Belt, with warm-climate states gaining twenty-nine electoral college votes between 1940 and 1980, while the colder states of the Northeast and Rust Belt lost thirty-one. In the first half of the twentieth century, only two presidents or vice presidents hailed from Sun Belt states. Starting in 1952, however, every single winning presidential ticket contained a Sun Belt candidate, until Barack Obama
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But the frozen world that Tudor and Birdseye helped conjure into being would do more than just populate the world with fish sticks. It would also populate the world with people, thanks to the flash freezing and cryopreservation of human semen, eggs, and embryos. Millions of human beings around the world owe their existence to the technologies of artificial cold. Today, new techniques in oocyte cryopreservation are allowing women to store healthy eggs in their younger years, extending their fertility well into their forties and fifties in many cases. So much of the new freedom in the way we
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The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956. In the first configuration, the system allowed twenty-four simultaneous calls. That was the total bandwidth for a voice conversation between the two continents just fifty years ago: out of several hundred million voices, only two dozen conversations at a time.
The definitive history of Bell Labs, Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory, reveals the secret to the labs’ unrivaled success. It was not just the diversity of talent, and the tolerance of failure, and the willingness to make big bets—all of which were traits that Bell Labs shared with Edison’s famous lab at Menlo Park as well as other research labs around the world. What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.
It was a unique arrangement, one we are not likely to see again. The monopoly power gave the company a trust fund for research that was practically infinite, but every interesting idea that came out of that research could be immediately adopted by other firms.
Almost overnight, radio made jazz a national phenomenon. Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong became household names. Ellington’s band performed weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in Harlem starting in the late 1920s; Armstrong became the first African-American to host his own national radio show shortly thereafter.
new sound that has been slowly incubating in some small section of the world—New Orleans, in the case of jazz—finds its way onto the mass medium of radio, offending the grown-ups and electrifying the kids. The channel first carved out by jazz would subsequently be filled by rock ’n’ roll from Memphis, British pop from Liverpool, rap and hip-hop from South Central and Brooklyn.
With jazz, of course, there was a crucial additional element. The overnight celebrities were, for the most part, African-Americans: Ellington, Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday. It was a profound breakthrough: for the first time, white America welcomed African-American culture into its living room, albeit through the speakers of an AM radio.
The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States.
Remove the microphone and amplifier from the toolbox of twentieth-century technology and you remove one of that century’s defining forms of political organization, from Nuremberg to “I Have a Dream.”
Starting in the 1950s, guitarists playing through tube amplifiers noticed that they could make an intriguing new kind of sound by overdriving the amp: a crunchy layer of noise on top of the notes generated by strumming the strings of the guitar itself. This was, technically speaking, the sound of the amplifier malfunctioning, distorting the sound it had been designed to reproduce. To most ears it sounded like something was broken with the equipment, but a small group of musicians began to hear something appealing in the sound.
Fessenden had hoped his idea—using sound to see—might save lives; while he couldn’t persuade the authorities to put it to use in detecting U-boats, the oscillator did end up saving millions of lives, both at sea and in a place Fessenden would never have expected: the hospital.
We rarely think about it, but the growth and vitality of cities have always been dependent on our ability to manage the flow of human waste that emerges when people crowd together.
As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average.
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.
From a technological standpoint, the great nineteenth-century breakthrough in public health—the knowledge that invisible germs can kill—was a kind of team effort between maps and microscopes.
his father had suffered a slow and painful death from drinking bacteria-infested water during the Civil War. His father’s experience in the war gives us a compelling statistical portrait of the threat posed by contaminated water and other health risks during this period. Nineteen men in the 144th Regiment died in combat, while 178 died of disease during the war.
