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

by Steven Johnson

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. “Bathing fills the head with vapors,” a French doctor advised in 1655. “It is the enemy of the nerves and ligaments, which it loosens, in such a way that many a man never suffers from gout except after bathing.”

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 years old. 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.

parallel investigations. First, there was the epidemiological detective work of John Snow in London, who first proved that cholera was caused by contaminated water and not miasmatic smells, by mapping the deaths of a Soho epidemic. Snow never managed to see the bacteria that caused cholera directly; the technology of microscopy at the time made it almost impossible to see organisms (Snow called them “animalcules”) that

being able to take a sample of water and determine empirically whether it was free of contamination meant that cycles of experimentation could be tremendously accelerated. Microscopes

Unlike others, Leal made no attempt to patent the chlorination technique that he had pioneered at the Boonton Reservoir. His idea was free to be adopted by any water company that wished to provide its customers with “pure and wholesome” water. Unencumbered by patent restrictions and licensing fees, municipalities quickly adopted chlorination as a standard practice, across the United States and eventually around the world.

(The phrase “often a bridesmaid, never a bride” originated with a 1925 Listerine advertisement.) When radio and television began experimenting with storytelling, it was the personal-hygiene companies that once again led the way in pioneering new forms of advertising, a brilliant marketing move that still lingers with us today in the phrase “soap opera.” This is one of the stranger hummingbird effects of contemporary culture: 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

inventing the modern advertising business.

As of 1800, no society had successfully built and sustained a city of more than two million people. The first cities to challenge that barrier (London and Paris,

today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute

backward as a species. (There were only a billion people alive in 1850.) So the question before us now is how we bring the clean revolution

“Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” the competition solicited designs for toilets that do not require a sewer connection or electricity and cost less than five cents per user per day. The winning entry was a toilet system from Caltech that uses photovoltaic cells to power an electrochemical reactor that treats human waste, producing clean water for flushing or irrigation and hydrogen that can be stored in fuel cells. The system is entirely self-contained; it has no need for an electrical grid, a sewer line, or a treatment facility. The only input the toilet requires, beyond sunlight and human waste, is simple table salt, which is oxidized to make chlorine to disinfect the water. Those

To avoid impurities, chip plants create pure H2O, water that has been filtered not only of any bacterial contaminants but also of all the minerals, salts, and random ions that make up normal filtered water. Stripped of all those extra “contaminants,” ultrapure water, as it is called, is the ideal solvent for microchips. But those missing elements also make ultrapure water undrinkable for humans; chug a glass of the stuff and it will start leeching minerals out of your body. This

Galileo was daydreaming about time and rhythm shouldn’t surprise us: his father was a music theorist and played the lute. In the middle of the sixteenth century, playing music would have been one of the most temporally precise activities in everyday culture. (The musical term “tempo” comes from the Italian word for time.) But machines that could keep a reliable beat didn’t exist in Galileo’s age; the metronome wouldn’t be invented for another few centuries. So watching the altar lamp sway back and forth with such regularity planted the seed of an idea in Galileo’s young mind. As

on the size of the arc or the mass of the object swinging, but only on the length of the string. “The marvelous property of the pendulum,” he wrote to fellow scientist Giovanni Battista Baliani, “is that it makes all its vibrations, large or small, in equal times.”

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.

Dennison had a vision of machines mass-producing identical tiny screws that could then be put into any watch of the same model, and machines that would engrave cases at precision speed. His vision took him through a bankruptcy or two, and earned him the nickname “the Lunatic of Boston” in the local press. But eventually, in the early 1860s, he hit on the idea of making a cheaper watch, without the conventional jeweled ornamentation that traditionally adorned pocket watches. It would be the first watch targeted at the mass market, not just the well-to-do. Dennison’s “Wm. Ellery” watch—named after one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, William Ellery—became a breakout hit, particularly with the soldiers of the Civil War. More than 160,000 watches were sold; even Abraham Lincoln owned and carried a “Wm. Ellery” watch. Dennison

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.

unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you. Those satellites are sending out the most elemental of signals, again and again, in perpetuity: the time is 11:48:25.084738 . . . the time is 11:48:25.084739. . . . When your phone tries to figure out its location, it pulls down at least three of these time stamps from satellites, each reporting a slightly different time thanks to the duration it takes the signal to travel from satellite to the GPS receiver in your

Embedded in your ability to tell the time is the understanding of how electrons circulate within cesium atoms; the knowledge of how to send microwave signals from satellites and how to measure the exact speed with which they travel; the ability to position satellites in reliable orbits above the earth, and of course the actual rocket science needed to get them off the ground; the ability to trigger steady vibrations in a block of silicon dioxide—not to mention all the advances in computation and microelectronics and network science necessary to process and represent that information on your phone.

1890s, while working on her doctoral thesis in Paris, Marie Curie proposed for the first time that radiation was not some kind of chemical reaction between molecules, but something intrinsic to the atom—a discovery so critical to the development of physics, in fact, that she would become the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize. Her research quickly drew the attention of her husband, Pierre Curie, who abandoned his own research into crystals to focus on radiation. Together they discovered that radioactive elements decayed at constant rates. The half-life of carbon 14, for instance, is 5,730 years. Leave some carbon 14 lying around for five thousand years or so, and you’ll find that half of it is gone.

elements decay at wildly different rates, which means that they are like clocks running at different time scales. Carbon 14 “ticks” every five thousand years, but potassium 40 “ticks” every 1.3 billion years. That makes radiocarbon dating an ideal clock for the deep time of human history, while potassium 40 measures geologic time, the history of the planet itself.

eastern Nevada, a grove of bristlecone pines grows in the dry, alkaline soil. The pines are small trees for conifers, rarely more than thirty feet high, gnarled by the constant winds rolling across the desert range. We know from carbon dating (and tree rings) that some of them are more than five thousand years old—the oldest living things on the planet.

Long Now Foundation—cofounded by Hillis, Eno, Stewart Brand, and a few other visionaries—aims to build a number of ten-thousand-year clocks. (The first one is being constructed for a mountainside location in West Texas.) Why go to such extravagant lengths to build a clock that might tick only once in your lifetime? Because

require future generations to finish? The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”

humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods. When darkness fell, they would drift into “first sleep,” waking after four hours to snack, relieve themselves, have sex, or chat by the fire, before heading back for another four hours of “second sleep.” The

above the brain, filled with a white, oily substance. Thanks to its resemblance to seminal fluid, the whale oil came to be called “spermaceti.”

George Washington estimated that he spent $15,000 a year in today’s currency burning spermaceti candles.

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.

Steve Jobs: that he was a master of marketing and PR. It is true that Edison had a very tight relationship with the press at this point of his career. (On at least one occasion, he gave shares in his company to a journalist in exchange for better coverage.) Edison was also a master of what we would now call “vaporware”: He announced nonexistent

emissaries to scour the globe for the most incandescent bamboo in the natural world. One representative paddled down two thousand miles of river in Brazil. Another headed to Cuba, where he was promptly struck down with yellow fever and died. A third representative named William Moore ventured to China and Japan, where he struck a deal with a local farmer for the strongest bamboo the Menlo Park wizards had encountered. The arrangement remained intact for many years, supplying the filaments that would illuminate rooms all over the world. 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.

bricolage

cross-disciplinary research-and-development lab. In this sense, the transformative ideas and technologies that came out of places such as Bell Labs and Xerox-PARC have their roots in Edison’s workshop. Edison didn’t just invent technology; he invented an entire system for inventing, a system that would come to dominate twentieth-century industry. Edison also helped inaugurate another tradition that would become vital to contemporary high-tech innovation: paying his employees in equity rather than just cash.

certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. 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. The lightbulb shines light on more than just our bedside reading; it helps us see more clearly the way new ideas come into being, and how to cultivate them as a society.

mixed magnesium with ordinary gunpowder, creating a controlled mini-explosion that illuminated the walls of the King’s Chamber for a split second, allowing him to record its secrets on his glass plates. 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.

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.) But despite stylistic differences, these texts shared one attribute: they had almost no effect on improving the actual living conditions of those slum dwellers.

Vegas had oriented itself around the vantage point of the automobile driver, cruising down Fremont Street or the strip: shop windows and sidewalk displays had given way to sixty-foot neon cowboys. The geometric seriousness of the Seagram Building or Brasília had given way to a playful anarchy: the Wild West of the gold rush thrust up against Olde English feudal designs, sitting next to cartoon arabesques, fronted by an endless stream of wedding chapels.

NIF to create, in essence, a miniature star on Earth, fusing hydrogen atoms together and releasing a staggering amount of energy. For that fleeting moment, as the lasers compress the hydrogen, that fuel pellet is the hottest place in the solar system—hotter, even, than the core of the sun.

Annabella Byron, had encouraged her study of mathematics, hiring a series of tutors to instruct her in algebra and trigonometry, a radical course of study in an age when women were excluded from important scientific institutions such as the Royal Society, and were assumed to be incapable of rigorous scientific thinking. But Annabella had an ulterior motive in encouraging her daughter’s math skills, hoping that the methodical and practical nature of her studies would override the dangerous influence of her dead father.

Babbage’s Analytical Engine was doomed to a certain practical failure—he was trying to build a digital-age computer with industrial-age mechanical parts—but conceptually it was a brilliant leap forward.

common thread to the time travelers, beyond the nonexplanation of genius, it is this: they worked at the margins of their official fields, or at the intersection point between very different disciplines.

time travelers remind us that working within an established field is both empowering and restricting at the same time. Stay within the boundaries of your discipline, and you will have an easier time making incremental improvements, opening the doors of the adjacent possible that are directly available to you given the specifics of the historical moment. (There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Progress depends on incremental improvements.)

Darwin published his book on pollination four years after Origin of Species, he gave it the wonderfully Victorian title, On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. We now understand the “good effects of intercrossing” thanks to the modern science of genetics, but the principle applies to intellectual history as well. The time travelers are unusually adept at “intercrossing” different fields of expertise. That’s the beauty of the hobbyist: it’s generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole