How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Rate it:
Open Preview
14%
Flag icon
And that knowledge would plant the seed of an idea in his mind,
14%
Flag icon
The history of global trade had clearly demonstrated that vast fortunes could be made by transporting a commodity that was ubiquitous in one environment to a place where it was scarce.
16%
Flag icon
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.
16%
Flag icon
For ice to melt, it needs to pull heat from the surrounding environment to break the tetrahedral bonding of hydrogen atoms that gives ice its crystalline structure. (The extraction of heat from the surrounding atmosphere is what grants ice its miraculous capacity to cool us down.)
16%
Flag icon
technique: the cooler you take on a picnic keeps your watermelon chilled because it is made of polystyrene chains interspersed with tiny pockets of gas. By 1815, Tudor had finally assembled the key pieces of the ice puzzle: harvesting, insulation,
18%
Flag icon
Ice made a new kind of food network imaginable.
20%
Flag icon
It was a classic case of a dominant industry disparaging a much more powerful new technology, the way the first computers with graphic interfaces were dismissed by their rivals as “toys” and not “serious business machines.”
20%
Flag icon
Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.
24%
Flag icon
When we think about breakthrough ideas, we tend to be constrained by the scale of the original invention. We figure out a way to make artificial cold, and we assume that will just mean that our rooms will be cooler, we’ll sleep better on hot nights, or there will be a reliable supply of ice cubes for our sodas. That much is easy to understand. But if you tell the story of cold only in that way, you miss the epic scope of it.
27%
Flag icon
neural toolkit of human beings doesn’t seem to include the capacity for reading sound waves by
Aygerim
i will ee this sentence.
29%
Flag icon
for the first time, some component of the physical world had been
33%
Flag icon
Yet once again, one man’s malfunction turned out to be another man’s music, as artists such as Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin—and later punk experimentalists like Sonic Youth—embraced the sound in their recordings and performances.
Aygerim
y
33%
Flag icon
by deliberately exploiting the malfunctions, turning noise and error into a useful signal. 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.
35%
Flag icon
The march of technology has its own internal logic, but the moral application of that technology is up to us. We can decide to use ultrasound to save lives or terminate
38%
Flag icon
This is one of those places where our basic sensibilities deviate from the sensibilities of our nineteenth-century ancestors.
39%
Flag icon
New ways of measuring create new ways of making.
44%
Flag icon
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.
50%
Flag icon
computer chips are masters of time discipline.
51%
Flag icon
GPS determines your location by comparing clocks.
51%
Flag icon
the more we build up these vast repositories of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them. Your mind is silently assisted by all that knowledge each time you check your phone to see what time it is, but the knowledge itself is hidden from view. That is a great convenience, of course, but it can obscure just how far we’ve come since Galileo’s altar-lamp daydreams in the Duomo of Pisa.
52%
Flag icon
Knowing what time it was turned that raw data into meaning.
54%
Flag icon
Those waking moments at three a.m. are a kind of jet lag caused by artificial light instead of air travel.
54%
Flag icon
spermaceti candles had become the most prized form of artificial light in America and Europe.
54%
Flag icon
George Washington estimated that he spent $15,000 a year in today’s currency burning spermaceti candles.
55%
Flag icon
some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.
55%
Flag icon
This is one of the stranger twists in the history of extinction: because humans discovered deposits of ancient plants buried deep below the surface of the earth, one of the ocean’s most extraordinary creatures was spared.
55%
Flag icon
150 years ago, reading after dark was a luxury. The
56%
Flag icon
incandescent light
56%
Flag icon
that glows when an electric current runs through it, some mechanism to keep the filament from burning out too quickly,
56%
Flag icon
Joseph Swan had begun lighting homes and theaters a year
56%
Flag icon
“vaporware”: He announced nonexistent products to
57%
Flag icon
(His famous quip about invention being one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration certainly holds true for his adventures in artificial light.)
57%
Flag icon
he invented an entire system for inventing, a system that would come to dominate twentieth-century industry.