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

by Steven Johnson

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walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city’s spectacular skyline; what they don’t realize is that the ground beneath their ...

The result was the first comprehensive sewer system in any American city.

By the early 1870s, the city’s water supply was so appalling that a sink or tub would regularly be filled with dead fish, poisoned by the human filth and then hoovered up into the city’s water pipes. In summer months, according to one observer, the fish “came out cooked and one’s bathtub was apt to be filled with what squeamish citizens called chowder.”

The concept of bathing, for instance, was alien to most nineteenth-century Europeans

In Europe, starting in the Middle Ages and running almost all the way to the twentieth century, the prevailing wisdom on hygiene maintained that submerging the body in water was a distinctly unhealthy, even dangerous thing. Clogging one’s pores with dirt and oil allegedly protected you from disease.

Elizabeth I bothered to take a bath only once a month, and she was a veritable clean freak compared to her peers. As a child, Louis XIII was not bathed once until he was seven

Sitting naked in a pool of water was simply not something civilized Europeans did; it belonged to the barbaric traditions of Middle Eastern bathhouses, not the aristocracy of Paris or London.

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.

New ways of measuring create new ways of making.

In almost complete secrecy, without any permission from government authorities (and no notice to the general public), Leal decided to add chlorine to the Jersey City reservoirs.

was a staggering risk, given the popular opposition to chemical filtering at the time.

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.

Chlorination wasn’t just about saving lives, though. It was also about having fun. After World War I, ten thousand chlorinated public baths and pools opened across America;

Before the rise of municipal pools, women bathers generally dressed as though they were bundled up for a sleigh ride. By the mid-1920s, women began exposing their legs below the knee; one-piece suits with lower necklines emerged a few years later. Open-backed suits, followed by two-piece outfits, followed quickly in the 1930s. “In total, a woman’s thighs, hip line, shoulders, stomach, back and breast line all become publicly exposed between 1920 and 1940,”

at the turn of the century, the average woman’s bathing suit required ten yards of fabric; by the end of the 1930s, one yard was sufficient.

is likely that women’s fashion would have found another route to exposure without the rise of swimming pools, but it seems unlikely that it would have happened as quickly as it did.

trillion bacteria die at the hands of calcium hypochlorite, and somehow, twenty years later, basic attitudes toward exposing the female body are reinvented.

(The phrase “often a bridesmaid, never a bride” originated with a 1925 Listerine advertisement.)

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.

Just like Frederic Tudor’s ice trade, it was an innovation that had no natural market. You couldn’t keep accurate time in the middle of the sixteenth century, but no one really noticed,

But sailors lacked any way to determine longitude at sea. Latitude you could gauge just by looking up at the sky.

the only way to figure out a ship’s longitude involved two clocks. One clock was set to the exact time of your origin point (assuming you knew the longitude of that location). The other clock recorded the current time at your location at sea. The difference between the two times told you your longitudinal position: every four minutes of difference translated to one degree of longitude, or sixty-eight miles at the equator.

Fifty-eight years in the making, his slow hunch about the pendulum’s “magical property” had finally begun to take shape. The idea lay at the intersection point of multiple disciplines and interests: Galileo’s memory of the altar lamp, his studies of motion and the moons of Jupiter, the rise of a global shipping industry, and its new demand for clocks that would be accurate to the second.

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.

More than anything else, though, industrial life needed clock time to regulate the new working day.

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

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.

The guides, the wardens of our faculties And stewards of our labour, watchful men And skillful in the usury of time Sages, who in their prescience would control all accidents, and to the very road which they have fashioned would confine us down like engines . . .

Once again, an increase in our ability to measure things turned out to be as important as our ability to make them.

With watches spiking in popularity across the country, a Minnesota railroad agent named Richard Warren Sears stumbled across a box of unwanted watches from a local jeweler, and turned a tidy profit selling them to other station agents. Inspired by his success, he partnered with a Chicago businessman named Alvah Roebuck, and together they launched a mail-order publication showcasing a range of watch designs: the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Those fifteen pounds of mail-order catalogs currently weighing down your mailbox? They all started with the must-have gadget of the late nineteenth century: the consumer-grade pocket watch.

If you asked what time it was 150 years ago, you would have received at least twenty-three different answers in the state of Indiana, twenty-seven in Michigan, and thirty-eight in Wisconsin.

The Babylonians and Romans developed oil-based lamps, but that technology virtually disappeared during the (appropriately named) Dark Ages. For almost two thousand years, all the way to the dawn of the industrial age, the candle was the reigning solution for indoor lighting. Candles made from beeswax were highly prized but too expensive for anyone but the clergy or the aristocracy. Most people made do with tallow candles, which burned animal fat to produce a tolerable flicker, accompanied by a foul odor and thick smoke.

when locals dissected the giant mammal, they discovered something utterly bizarre: inside the creature’s massive head, they found a cavity above the brain, filled with a white, oily substance. Thanks to its resemblance to seminal fluid, the whale oil came to be called “spermaceti.”

Extracting the spermaceti was almost as difficult as harpooning the whale itself. A hole would be carved in the side of the whale’s head, and men would crawl into the cavity above the brain—spending days inside the rotting carcass, scraping spermaceti out of the brain of the beast.

These new lamps were twenty times brighter than any candle had ever been, and their superior brightness helped spark an explosion in magazine and newspaper publishing in the second half of the nineteenth century,

If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages.

The problem with this story is that people had been inventing incandescent light for eighty years before Edison turned his mind to it.

By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.

The British inventor Joseph Swan had begun lighting homes and theaters a year earlier.

Edison was also a master of what we would now call “vaporware”: He announced nonexistent products to scare off competitors. Just a few months after he had started work on electric light, he began telling reporters from New York papers that the problem had been solved, and that he was on the verge of launching a national system of magical electrical light.

Despite this bravado, the fact remained that the finest specimen of electric light in the Edison lab couldn’t last five minutes. But that didn’t stop him from inviting the press out to Menlo Park lab to see his revolutionary lightbulb. Edison would bring each reporter in one at a time, flick the switch on a bulb, and let the reporter enjoy the light for three or four minutes before ushering him from the room. When he asked how long his lightbulbs would last, he answered confidently: “Forever, almost.”

Edison may not have invented the lightbulb, but he did inaugurate a tradition that would turn out to be vital to modern innovation: American electronics companies importing their component parts from Asia. The only difference is that, in Edison’s time, the Asian factory was a forest.

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.

Smyth’s detailed analyses of the pyramid’s structure convinced him that the builders had relied on a unit of measurement that was almost exactly equivalent to the modern British inch. Smyth interpreted this correspondence to be a sign that the inch itself was a holy measure, passed directly from God to Noah himself. This in turn gave Smyth the artillery he needed to attack the metric system that had begun creeping across the English Channel. The revelation of the Egyptian inch made it clear that the metric system was not just a symptom of malevolent French influence. It was also a betrayal of divine will.

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.

An entire genre of “sunshine and shadow” guidebooks to Five Points and its ilk flourished after the Civil War, offering curious visitors tips on exploring the seedy underbelly of big-city life, or at least exploring it vicariously from the safety of a small-town oasis. (The phrase “slumming it” originates with these tourist expeditions.)

The decades after the introduction of the bar-code scanner in the United States witnessed an explosion in the size of retail stores; with automated inventory management, chains were free to balloon into the epic big-box stores that now dominate retail shopping.

If there was a death ray in the history of the laser, it was the metaphoric one directed at the mom-and-pop, indie stores demolished by the big-box revolution.

was hard enough to wrap one’s mind around the idea of programmable computers—almost all of Babbage’s contemporaries failed to grasp what he had invented—but somehow, Ada was able to take the concept one step further, to the idea that this machine might also conjure up language and art.