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

by Steven Johnson

Michael J. McGuire writes in his account, The Chlorine Revolution. “If the chlorine of lime feed system lost control of the amount of chemical being fed and a slug of high chlorine residual was delivered to Jersey City, Leal knew that would define the failure of the process.”

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.

We tend to think of the 1960s as the period when shifting cultural attitudes led to the most dramatic change in everyday fashion, but it is hard to rival the rapid-fire unveiling of the female body that occurred between the wars.

As with so many cultural changes, it’s not that the practice of chlorination single-handedly transformed women’s fashion; many social and technological forces converged to make those bathing suits smaller: various strands of early feminism, the fetishizing gaze of the Hollywood camera, not to mention individual stars who wore those more revealing suits. But without the mass adoption of swimming as a leisure activity, those fashions would have been deprived of one of their key showcases. What’s more, those other explanations—as valid as they are—usually get all the press.

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. Today the cleaning business is worth an estimated $80 billion.

Walk into a big-box supermarket or drugstore, and you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of products devoted to ridding our households of dangerous germs: cleaning our sinks and our toilets and floors and silverware, our teeth and our feet. These stores are effectively giant munitions depots for the war on bacteria.

Many reasonable observers of urban life in the middle of the nineteenth century were convinced that cities were not meant to be built on this scale, and that London would inevitably collapse back to a more manageable size, as Rome had done almost two thousand years before. But solving the problems of clean drinking water and reliable waste removal changed all of that.

Memorably called the “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” the competition solicited designs for toilets that do not require a sewer connection or electricity and cost less than five cents per user per day. The winning entry was a toilet system from Caltech that uses photovoltaic cells to power an electrochemical reactor that treats human waste, producing clean water for flushing or irrigation and hydrogen that can be stored in fuel cells. The system is entirely self-contained; it has no need for an electrical grid, a sewer line, or a treatment facility. The only input the toilet requires, beyond sunlight and human waste, is simple table salt, which is oxidized to make chlorine to disinfect the water.

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.

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. “The marvelous property of the pendulum,” he wrote to fellow scientist Giovanni Battista Baliani, “is that it makes all its vibrations, large or small, in equal times.”

When you spend your whole life inside that grid, it seems like second nature, but when you are experiencing it for the first time, as the laborers of industrial England did in the second half of the eighteenth century, it arrives as a shock to the system. Timepieces were not just tools to help you coordinate the day’s events, but something more ominous: the “deadly statistical clock,” in Dickens’s Hard Times, “which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin lid.”

To be a Romantic at the turn of the nineteenth century was in part to break from the growing tyranny of clock time: to sleep late, ramble aimlessly through the city, refuse to live by the “statistical clocks” that governed economic life.

Once we started measuring days with quartz clocks, we discovered that the length of the day was not as reliable as we had thought. Days shortened or lengthened in semi-chaotic ways thanks to the drag of the tides on the surface of the planet, wind blowing over mountain ranges, or the inner motion of the earth’s molten core.

“the Clock of the Long Now.”

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?” This is the strange paradox of time in the atomic age: we live in ever shorter increments, guided by clocks that tick invisibly with immaculate precision; we have short attention spans and have surrendered our natural rhythms to the abstract grid of clock time.

We can wonder what time it is and glance down at our phone and get an answer that is accurate to the split-second, but we can also appreciate that the answer was, in a sense, five hundred years in the making: from Galileo’s altar lamp to Niels Bohr’s cesium, from the chronometer to Sputnik. Compared to an ordinary human being from Galileo’s age, our time horizons have expanded in both directions: from the microsecond to the millennium. Which measure of time will win out in the end: our narrow focus on the short term, or our gift for the long now? Will we be high-frequency traders or good ancestors? For that question, only time will tell.

In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a remarkable study that drew upon hundreds of diaries and instructional manuals to convincingly argue that humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods. When darkness fell, they would drift into “first sleep,” waking after four hours to snack, relieve themselves, have sex, or chat by the fire, before heading back for another four hours of “second sleep.”

Like all adaptations, its benefits carried inevitable costs: the middle-of-the-night insomnia that plagues millions of people around the world is not, technically speaking, a disorder, but rather the body’s natural sleep rhythms asserting themselves over the prescriptions of nineteenth-century convention. Those waking moments at three a.m. are a kind of jet lag caused by artificial light instead of air travel.

In part, Edison’s “invention” of the lightbulb was less about a single big idea and more about sweating the details. (His famous quip about invention being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration certainly holds true for his adventures in artificial light.) Edison’s single most significant contribution to the electric lightbulb itself was arguably the carbonized bamboo filament he eventually settled on.

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.

The true victory lap for Edison didn’t come with that bamboo filament glowing in a vacuum; it came with the lighting of the Pearl Street district two years later. To make that happen, you needed to invent lightbulbs, yes, but you also needed a reliable source of electric current, a system for distributing that current through a neighborhood, a mechanism for connecting individual lightbulbs to the grid, and a meter to gauge how much electricity each household was using. 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.

Today, the tourists that pass through the Great Pyramid encounter signs that forbid the use of flash photography inside the vast structure. They do not mention that the Great Pyramid also marks the site where flash photography was invented.

Here again we see the strange leaps of the hummingbird’s wing at play in social history, new inventions leading to consequences their creators never dreamed of.

We like to organize the world into neat categories: photography goes here, politics there. But the history of Blitzlicht reminds us that ideas always travel in networks.

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

Learning from Las Vegas gives us a clear case study in how the long-zoom approach reveals elements that are ignored by history’s traditional explanatory frameworks: economic or art history, or the “lone genius” model of innovation. When you ask the question of why postmodernism came about as a movement, on some fundamental level the answer has to include Georges Claude and his hundred liters of neon. Claude’s innovation wasn’t the only cause, by any means, but, in an alternate universe somehow stripped of neon lights, the emergence of postmodern architecture would have in all likelihood followed a different path.

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.

The time travelers are unusually adept at “intercrossing” different fields of expertise.

That’s the beauty of the hobbyist: it’s generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage.

They are not office cubicles or university labs; they’re places away from work and school, places where our peripheral interests have the room to grow and evolve.