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

by Steven Johnson

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

Figuring out whether we think the change is better for us in the long run is not the same as figuring out how the change came about in the first place. Both kinds of figuring are essential if we are to make sense of history and to map our path into the future.

The condition of “hyperopia”—farsightedness—was widely distributed through the population, but most people didn’t notice that they suffered from it, because they didn’t read.

It seems impossible, but the fact is that you can hold the entire collection of all the voice and data traffic traveling between North America and Europe in the palm of one hand. A thousand innovations came together to make that miracle possible:

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.

our ingenuity is both confined and empowered by the physical properties of the elements around us.

Stuart Kauffman, cold became part of the “adjacent possible” of that period.

It’s not just a matter of a solitary genius coming up with a brilliant invention because he or she is smarter than everyone else. And that’s because ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas. We take the tools and metaphors and concepts and scientific understanding of our time, and we remix them into something new.

when you have a leap forward in the accuracy of measuring something, new possibilities emerge.

patents rippling across the planet are an example of one of the great curiosities in the history of innovation: what scholars now call “multiple invention.” Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters, where a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same discovery.

Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.

It’s no accident that the world’s largest cities—London, Paris, New York, Tokyo—were almost exclusively in temperate climates until the second half of the twentieth century. What we are seeing now is arguably the largest mass migration in human history, and the first to be triggered by a home appliance.

THE DREAMERS AND INVENTORS who ushered in the cold revolution didn’t have eureka moments, and their brilliant ideas rarely transformed the world immediately. Mostly they had hunches, but they were tenacious enough to keep those hunches alive for years, even decades, until the pieces came together.

When we think about breakthrough ideas, we tend to be constrained by the scale of the original invention.

the two legendary inventors had it exactly reversed: people ended up using the phonograph to listen to music and using the telephone to communicate with friends.

The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.

antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department worked out an intriguing compromise, settled officially in 1956. AT&T would be allowed to maintain its monopoly over phone service, but any patented invention that had originated in Bell Labs would have to be freely licensed to any American company that found it useful, and all new patents would have to be licensed for a modest fee.

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.

Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrids in the history of capitalism: a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized.

SIGSALY was not just a milestone in telephony. It was a watershed moment in the history of media and communications more generally: for the first time, our experiences were being digitized.

Lee De Forest, who wrote a characteristically baroque denunciation to the National Association of Broadcasters: “What have you done with my child, the radio broadcast? You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie.”

Radio signals had a kind of freedom to them that proved to be liberating in the real world. Those radio waves ignored the way in which society was segmented at that time: between black and white worlds, between different economic classes. The radio signals were color-blind.

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.”

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking—and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door in the adjacent possible.

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.

This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.

The primary system for sanitation removal was scavenging pigs roaming the streets, devouring the refuse that the humans left behind.

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. From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.

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.

Just a hundred and fifty years ago, in cities around the world, drinking water was effectively playing Russian roulette.

no more startling example of how much things have changed in our understanding of cleanliness over the past century and a half: Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver babies and dissect corpses in the same afternoon.

our basic sensibilities deviate from the sensibilities of our nineteenth-century ancestors. They look and act like modern people in many ways: they take trains and schedule meetings and eat in restaurants. But every now and then, strange gaps open between us and them, not just the obvious gaps in technological sophistication, but more subtle, conceptual gaps.

Clogging one’s pores with dirt and oil allegedly protected you from disease. “Bathing fills the head with vapors,” a French doctor advised in 1655.

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.

Advances of public infrastructure meant that people were much more likely to have running water in their homes to fill their bathtubs; that the water was cleaner than it had been a few decades earlier; and, most important, that the germ theory of disease had gone from fringe idea to scientific consensus.

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.

Before the adoption of these units of measurement, you had to test improvements to the water system the old-fashioned way: you built a new sewer or reservoir or pipe, and you sat around and waited to see if fewer people would die. But being able to take a sample of water and determine empirically whether it was free of contamination meant that cycles of experimentation could be tremendously accelerated.

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.

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.

today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.

If new ideas and new technology can make a new solution imaginable, the way the germ theory and the microscope triggered the idea of chemically treating water, then has there not been a sufficient supply of new ideas since Leal’s day that might trigger a new paradigm for keeping our cities clean, one that would bypass the big-engineering phase altogether?

The developing world has famously bypassed some of the laborious infrastructure of wired telephone lines, jumping ahead of more “advanced” economies by basing their communications around wireless connections instead. Could the same pattern play out with sewers?

This is the full circle of clean: some of the most brilliant ideas in science and engineering in the nineteenth century helped us purify water that was too dirty to drink. And now, a hundred and fifty years later, we’ve created water that’s too clean to drink.

To build the modern world, we had to create an unimaginably repellent space, an underground river of filth, and cordon it off from everyday life. And at the same time, to make the digital revolution, we had to create a hyper-clean environment, and once again, cordon it off from everyday life. We never get to visit these environments, and so they retreat from our consciousness.

the creation of a viable industrial workforce required a profound reshaping of the human perception of time.

The whole idea of an “hourly wage”—now practically universal in the modern world—came out of the time regimen of the industrial age.

Telegraphs and railroads exposed the hidden blurriness of nonstandardized clock time, just as, centuries before, the invention of the book had exposed the need for spectacles among the first generation of European readers.