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

by Steven Johnson

Without clocks, the industrial takeoff that began in England in the middle of the eighteenth century would, at the very least, have taken much longer to reach escape velocity—for several reasons. Accurate clocks, thanks to their unrivaled ability to determine longitude at sea, greatly reduced the risks of global shipping networks, which gave the first industrialists a constant supply of raw materials and access to overseas markets. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the most reliable watches in the world were manufactured in England, which created a pool of expertise with fine-tool manufacture that would prove to be incredibly handy when the demands of industrial innovation arrived, just as the glassmaking expertise producing spectacles opened the door for telescopes and microscopes. The watchmakers were the advance guard of what would become industrial engineering.