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

by Steven Johnson

In the 1600s, amateur scientists discovered a bizarre phenomenon: the vacuum, air that seemed actually to be composed of nothing and that behaved differently from normal air. Flames would be extinguished in a vacuum; a vacuum seal was so strong that two teams of horses could not pull it apart. In 1659, the English scientist Robert Boyle had placed a bird in a jar and sucked out the air with a vacuum pump. The bird died, as Boyle suspected it might, but curiously enough, it also froze.

vacuum was so different from normal air that it could extinguish life, that meant there must be some invisible substance that normal air was made of. And it suggested that changing the volume ...

It would use energy from a pump to compress air. The compression heated the air. The machine then cooled down the compressed air by running it through pipes cooled with water. When the air expanded, it pulled heat from its environment,

Those 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. The isolated genius coming up with an idea that no one else could even dream of is actually the exception, not the rule.

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 build a production line. Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. 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.

BETWEEN 1925 AND 1950, most Americans experienced air-conditioning only in large commercial spaces such as movie theaters, department stores, hotels, or office buildings. Carrier knew that AC was headed for the domestic sphere, but the machines were simply too large and expensive for a middle-class

class home.

Half a century later, the state was well on the way to becoming one of the four most populous in the country, with ten million people escaping the humid summer months in air-conditioned homes. Carrier’s invention circulated more than just molecules of oxygen and water. It ended up circulating people as well.

Once a Democratic stronghold, the South was besieged by a massive influx of retirees who were more

conservative in their political outlook.

Northern Republicans moving south in the post-AC era did as much to undo the “Dixiecrat” base as the rebellion ag...

this had the paradoxical effect of unleashing a wave of liberal reforms, as the congressional Democrats were no longer divided between conservative S...

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 and Joe Biden broke the streak in 2008.

almost a century after Willis Carrier began thinking about keeping the ink from smearing in Brooklyn, our ability to manipulate tiny molecules of air and moisture helped transform the geography of American politics.

Ice seems at first glance like a trivial advance: a luxury item, not a necessity. Yet over the past two centuries its impact has been staggering, when you look at it from the long-zoom perspective: from the transformed landscape of the Great Plains; to the new lives and lifestyles brought into being via frozen embryos; all the way to vast cities blooming in the desert.

few years after the paintings in Arcy-sur-Cure were discovered, a music ethnographer from the University of Paris named Iegor Reznikoff began studying the caves the way a bat would: by listening to the echoes and reverberations created in different parts of the cave complex. It had long been apparent that the Neanderthal images were clustered in specific parts of the cave, with some of the most ornate and dense images appearing more than a kilometer deep. Reznikoff determined that the paintings were consistently placed at the most acoustically interesting parts of the cave, the places where the reverberation was the most profound. If you make a loud sound standing beneath the images of Paleolithic animals at the far end of the Arcy-sur-Cure caves, you hear seven distinct echoes of your voice. The reverberation takes almost five seconds to die down after your vocal chords stop vibrating. Acoustically, the effect is not unlike the famous “wall of sound” technique that Phil Spector used on the 1960s records he produced for artists such as the Ronettes and Ike and Tina Turner.

Reznikoff’s theory is that Neanderthal communities gathered beside the images they had painted, and they chanted or sang in some kind of shamanic ritual, using the reverberations of the cave to magically widen the sound of their voices.

Reznikoff is correct, those early humans were experimenting with a primitive form of sound engineering—amplifying and enhancing that most intoxicating of sounds: the human voice.

March 1857, two decades before Thomas Edison would invent the phonograph, the French patent office awarded Scott a patent for a machine that recorded sound.

But Scott’s blind spot would not prove to be a complete dead end. Fifteen years after his patent, another inventor was experimenting with the phonautograph, modifying Scott’s original design to include an actual ear from a cadaver in order to understand the acoustics better. Through his tinkering, he hit upon a method for both capturing and transmitting sound. His name was Alexander Graham Bell.

When Thomas Edison completed Scott’s original project and invented the phonograph in 1877, he imagined it would regularly be used as a means of sending audio letters through the postal system.

Bell, in inventing the telephone, made what was effectively a mirror-image miscalculation: He envisioned one of the primary uses for the telephone to be as a medium for sharing live music.

The telephone enabled less obvious transformations as well. It popularized the modern meaning of the word “hello”—as a greeting that starts a conversation—transforming it into one of the most recognized words anywhere on earth. Telephone switchboards became one of the first inroads for women into the “professional” classes.

An AT&T executive named John J. Carty argued in 1908 that the telephone had had as big of an impact on the building of skyscrapers as the elevator:

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

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. So much of the American success in postwar electronics—from transistors to computers to cell phones—ultimately dates back to that 1956 agreement. Thanks to the antitrust resolution, Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrids in the history of capitalism:

During World War II, the legendary mathematician Alan Turing and Bell Labs’ A. B. Clark collaborated on a secure communications line, code-named SIGSALY, that converted the sound waves of human speech into mathematical expressions. SIGSALY recorded the sound wave twenty thousand times a second, capturing the amplitude and frequency of the wave at that moment. But that recording was not done by converting the wave into an electrical signal or a groove in a wax cylinder. Instead, it turned the information into numbers, encoded it in the binary language of zeroes and ones. “Recording,” in fact, was the wrong word for it. Using a term that would become common parlance among hip-hop and electronic musicians fifty years later, they called this process “sampling.”

the robot historians of the future had to mark one moment where the “digital age” began—the computational equivalent of the Fourth of July or Bastille Day—that transatlantic phone call in July 1943 would certainly rank high on the list.

The first functioning radio transmissions—created by Guglielmo Marconi and a number of other more-or-less simultaneous inventors in the last decades of the nineteenth century—were almost exclusively devoted to sending Morse code.

The result was the vacuum tube, the first great breakthrough of the electronics revolution, a device that would boost the electrical signal of just about any technology that needed it. Television, radar, sound recording, guitar amplifiers, X-rays, microwave ovens, the “secret telephony” of SIGSALY, the first digital computers—all would rely on vacuum tubes.

Almost immediately, something entirely unexpected happened: the existence of a mass medium for sound unleashed a new kind of music on the United States, a music that had until then belonged almost exclusively to New Orleans, to the river towns of the American South, and to African-American neighborhoods in New York and Chicago. Almost overnight, radio made jazz a national phenomenon.

Armstrong became the first African-American to host his own national radio show shortly thereafter.

In fact, the technology that De Forest had helped invent was intrinsically better suited to jazz than it was to classical performances. Jazz punched through the compressed, tinny sound of early AM radio speakers; the vast dynamic range of a symphony was largely lost in translation. The blast of Satchmo’s trumpet played better on the radio than the subtleties of Schubert.

The radio signals were color-blind. Like the Internet, they didn’t break down barriers as much as live in a world separate from them. The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for many Americans, the first cultural common ground between black and white America that had been largely created by African-Americans. That in itself was a great blow to segregation. Martin Luther King Jr. made the connection explicit in remarks he delivered at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964:

the technology was enlisted to amplify the human voice in more immediate settings: powering amplifiers attached to microphones,

Amplification created an entirely new kind of political event: mass rallies oriented around individual speakers.

No one recognized—and exploited—this new power more quickly than Adolf Hitler,

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.

art of noise wouldn’t really take off until the sixties. In July 1960, a bassist named Grady Martin was recording a riff for a Marty Robbins song called “Don’t Worry” when his amplifier malfunctioned, creating a heavily distorted sound that we now call a “fuzz tone.” Initially Robbins wanted it removed from the song, but the producer persuaded him to keep it. “No one could figure out the sound because it sounded like a saxophone,” Robbins would say years later. “It sounded like a jet engine taking off.

Inspired by the strange, unplaceable noise of Martin’s riff, another band called the Ventures asked a friend to hack together a device that could add the fuzz effect deliberately.

and the trademark sound of the sixties was born.

But the most surprising twist of all would come just a century ago, when humans first realized that sound could be harnessed for something else: to help us see.

sound waves turn out to have an intriguing physical property: under water, they travel four times faster than they do through the air,

But his pleas were ultimately ignored. Sonar would not become a standard

the most valuable defensive weapon would have been a simple 540hz sound wave, bouncing off the hull of the attacker.

Chicago had one crippling attribute, the legacy of a glacier’s crawl thousands of years before the first humans settled there: it was unforgivingly flat. During the Pleistocene era, vast ice fields crept down from Greenland, covering present-day Chicago with glaciers that were more than a mile high. As the ice melted, it formed a massive body of water that geologists now call Lake Chicago. As that lake slowly drained down to form Lake Michigan, it flattened the clay deposits left behind by the glacier.

you couldn’t dig down to create a proper grade for drainage, why not use jackscrews to lift the city up?

Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews.

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.