How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
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books that seemed completely sui generis, as though De Landa had arrived on Earth from some other intellectual planet. It
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written sometime in the future by some form of artificial intelligence, mapping out the history of the preceding millennium. “We could imagine,” De Landa argued, “that such a robot historian would write a different kind of history than would its human counterpart.” Events that loom large in human accounts—the European conquest of the Americas, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Magna Carta—would be footnotes from the robot’s perspective. Other events that seem marginal to traditional history—the toy automatons that pretended to play chess in the eighteenth century, the Jacquard loom that ...more
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when clockworks once represented the dominant technology on the planet, people imagined the world around them as a similar system of cogs and wheels.”
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different kind of survival of the fittest, not the usual zero-sum competitive story that we often hear in watered-down versions of Darwinism, but something more symbiotic: the insects and flowers succeed because they, physically, fit well with each other. (The technical term for this is coevolution.) The importance of this relationship was not lost on Charles Darwin, who followed up the publication of On the Origin of Species with an entire book on orchid pollination.
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hummingbirds—to extract nectar from plants, though to do that they evolved an extremely unusual form of flight mechanics that enables them to hover alongside the flower in a way that few birds can even come close to doing. Insects can stabilize themselves midflight because they have fundamental flexibility to their anatomy that vertebrates lack. Yet
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growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just
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chains of influence, the “hummingbird effect.” An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
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engendering
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aesthetics
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also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
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fall of Constantinople also triggered a seemingly minor event, lost in the midst of that vast reorganization of religious and geopolitical dominance and ignored by most historians of the time. A small community of glassmakers from Turkey sailed westward across the Mediterranean and settled in Venice, where they began practicing their trade in the prosperous new city growing out of the marshes on the shores of the Adriatic Sea.
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But electrons can gain or lose energy only in discrete steps, known as “quanta.” But the size of the steps varies from material to material. Silicon dioxide happens to have very large steps, which means that the energy from a single photon of light is not sufficient to bump up the electrons to the higher level of energy. Instead, the light passes through the material. (Most ultraviolet light, however, does have enough energy to be absorbed, which is why you can’t get a suntan through a glass window.) But light
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early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning “disks for the eyes.” Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called “lenses.”
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Within a hundred years of Gutenberg’s invention, thousands of spectacle makers around Europe were thriving, and glasses became the first piece of advanced technology—since the invention of clothing in Neolithic times—that ordinary people would regularly wear on their
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years after Lippershey had filed for his patent, Galileo used the telescope to observe that moons were orbiting Jupiter, the first real challenge to the Aristotelian paradigm that assumed all heavenly bodies circled the Earth. This is the strange parallel history
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sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to measure something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making. Such
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pulled a tail of fiber from the molten glass clinging to the crossbow. In one of his shots, Boys produced a thread of glass that stretched almost ninety feet long.
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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.
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direct role in allowing artists to paint themselves and invent perspective as a formal device; and shortly thereafter a fundamental shift occurred in the consciousness of Europeans that oriented them around the self in a new way, a shift that would ripple across the world (and
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The mirror doesn’t “force” the Renaissance to happen; it “allows” it to happen. The
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world without glass would not just transform the edifices of civilization, by removing all the stained-glass windows of the great cathedrals and the sleek, reflective surfaces of the modern cityscape. A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended life spans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer’s knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.
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Robert Gardiner.
Mattila
fam tree
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Tudor discovered that sawdust made a brilliant insulator for his ice. Blocks layered on top of each other with sawdust separating them would last almost twice as long as unprotected ice. 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.
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Hesperides,
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(Even today, Americans are far more likely to enjoy ice with their beverages than Europeans, a distant legacy of Tudor’s ambition.) By 1850,
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Chicago stockyards that emerged in the last two decades of the nineteenth century were, as Upton Sinclair wrote, “the greatest aggregation of labor and capital ever gathered in one place.” Fourteen million animals were slaughtered in an average year. In many ways, the industrial food complex held in such disdain by modern-day “slow food” advocates begins with the Chicago stockyards and the web of ice-cooled transport that extended out from those grim feedlots and slaughterhouses. Progressives like Upton Sinclair painted
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battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple individuals in the space of a few years. In the early 1920s, two Columbia University scholars surveyed the history of invention in a wonderful paper called “Are Inventions Inevitable?” They found 148 instances of simultaneous invention, most of them occurring within the same decade. Hundreds more have since been discovered.
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the turn of the twentieth century, New York’s Tribeca neighborhood—now home to some of the most expensive loft apartments in the world—was essentially a giant refrigerator, entire blocks of windowless buildings designed to chill the endless flood of produce from the nearby Washington food market.
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dramatic difference in taste: It was all about the speed of the freezing process. A slow freeze allowed the hydrogen bonds of ice to form larger crystalline shapes. But a freeze that happened in seconds—“flash freezing,” as we now call it—generated much smaller crystals that did less damage to the food itself. The
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frozen food was so appalling that it was banned at New York State prisons for being below the culinary standards of the convicts.) One
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smearing in the humid summer months. Carrier’s invention not only removed the humidity from the printing room; it also chilled the
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Before AC, the whole idea of a summer blockbuster would have seemed preposterous: the last place you’d want to be on a warm day was a room filled with a thousand other perspiring bodies. And so Carrier had persuaded Adolph Zukor, the legendary chief of Paramount, that there was money to be made by investing in central air for his theaters.
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In the 1920s, when Willis Carrier was first demonstrating air-conditioning to Adolph Zukor at the Rivoli Theatre, Florida’s population stood at less than one million. 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
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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.
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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.
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1990s, an immense collection of ancient paintings was discovered on the walls of the cave complex in Arcy-sur-Cure: over a hundred images of bison, woolly mammoths, birds, fish—even, most hauntingly, the imprint of a child’s hand. Radiometric dating determined that the images were thirty thousand years old. Only the paintings at Chauvet, in southern France, are believed to be older.
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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. Individuals would record their missives on the phonograph’s wax scrolls, and then pop them into the mail, to be played back days later. 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. An orchestra or singer would sit on one end of the line, and listeners would sit back and ...more
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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. (AT&T alone employed 250,000 women by the mid-forties.) An
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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: a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized. Americans had to pay a tithe to AT&T for their phone ...more
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was the realization of De Forest’s dream: an empire of air transmitting well-loved melodies into living rooms everywhere. And yet, once again, De Forest’s vision would be frustrated by actual events. The melodies that started playing through those magical devices were well-loved by just about everyone except De Forest himself.
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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. Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong became household names. Ellington’s band performed weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in Harlem starting in the late 1920s; Armstrong became the first African-American to host his own national radio show shortly thereafter. All of this horrified Lee De
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gave them a focal point: the voice of the leader reverberating through the plaza or stadium or park. Before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time. (The elaborate vocal stylings of opera singing were in many ways designed to coax maximum projection out of the biological limitations of the voice.) But a microphone attached to multiple speakers extended the range of earshot by several orders of magnitude. No one recognized—and exploited—this new power more quickly than Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg rallies addressed ...more
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Manhattan’s Noise Abatement Society began advocating for a quieter metropolis. Sympathetic to the society’s mission, a Bell Labs engineer named Harvey Fletcher created a truck loaded with state-of-the-art sound equipment and Bell engineers who drove slowly around New York City noise hot spots taking sound measurements. (The unit of measurement for sound volume—the decibel—came out of Fletcher’s research.) Fletcher and his team found that some city sounds—riveting and drilling
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Most cities enjoy a reliable descending grade down to the rivers or harbors they evolved around. Chicago, by comparison, is an ironing board—appropriately enough, for the great city of the American plains.
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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. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly
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steam train traveled through underground tunnels beneath London in 1863. The Paris metro opened in 1900 followed shortly by the New York subway. Pedestrian walkways, automobile freeways, electrical
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Just a hundred and fifty years ago, in cities around the world, drinking water was effectively playing Russian roulette. When we think of the defining killers of nineteenth-century urbanism, our minds naturally turn to Jack the Ripper haunting the streets of London. But the real killers of the Victorian city were the diseases bred by contaminated water supplies.
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sewer pipes drained into the Chicago River, which emptied directly into Lake Michigan, the primary source of the city’s drinking water. 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
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medical community to the germ theory, the response seems beyond comical; it simply doesn’t compute. It is a well-known story that the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis was roundly mocked and criticized by the medical establishment when he first proposed, in 1847, that doctors and surgeons wash their hands before attending to their patients.
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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.
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