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

by Steven Johnson

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

This book is then partially about these strange 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.

“long zoom” history: the attempt to explain historical change by simultaneously examining multiple scales of experience—from the vibrations of sound waves on the eardrum all the way out to mass political movements.

The glassmakers had brought a new source of wealth to Venice, but they had also brought the less appealing habit of burning down the neighborhood.

Unwittingly,

the Venetian doges had created an innovation hub: by concentrating the glassmakers on a single island the size of a small city neighborhood, they triggered a surge of creativity, giving birth to an environment that possessed what economists call “information spillover.”

Those 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.”

What changed all of that, of course, was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the 1440s.

Literacy rates rose dramatically; subversive scientific and religious theories routed around the official channels of orthodox belief;

In 1590 in the small town of Middleburg in the Netherlands, father and son spectacle makers Hans and

Zacharias Janssen experimented with lining up two lenses, not side by side like spectacles, but in line with each other, magnifying the objects they observed, thereby inventing the microscope.

Before long the microscope would reveal the invisible colonies of bacteria and viruses that both sustain and threaten human life, which in turn led to modern vaccines and antibiotics.

The microscope took nearly three generations to produce truly transformative science, but for some reason

the telescope generated its revolutions more quickly. Twenty years after the invention of the microscope, a cluster of Dutch lensmakers, including Zacharias Janssen, more or less simultaneously invented the telescope. (Legend

To be sure, the story of the modern lens and its impact on media is not terribly surprising. There’s an intuitive line that you can follow from the lenses of the first spectacles, to the lens of a microscope, to the lens of a camera. Yet glass would turn out to have another bizarre physical property, one that even the master glassblowers of Murano had failed to exploit.

It seems impossible, but the fact is that 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. A thousand innovations came together to make that miracle possible: we had to invent the idea of digital data itself, and laser beams, and computers at

both ends that could transmit and receive those beams of information—not to mention the ships that lay and repair the cables. But those strange bonds of silicon dioxide, once again, turn out to be central to the story. The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.

The explosion of interest in self-portraiture was the direct result of yet another technological breakthrough in our ability to manipulate glass. Back in Murano, the glassmakers had figured out a way to combine their crystal-clear glass with a new innovation in metallurgy, coating the back of the glass with an amalgam of tin and mercury to create a shiny and highly reflective surface.

For the first time, mirrors became part of the fabric of everyday life. This

This is what the robot historian’s perspective allows us to see: the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.

A 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.

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.

As a thermal conductor, air is about two thousand times less efficient than metal, and more than twenty times less efficient than glass. In his icehouses, Tudor’s double-shelled structure created a buffer of air that kept the summer heat away from the ice; his sawdust packaging on the ships ensured that there were countless

pockets of air between the wood shavings to keep the ice insulated.

By 1815, Tudor had finally assembled the key pieces of the ice puzzle: harvesting, insulation, transport, and storage.

Tudor’s ice trade had finally turned a profit. By the

1820s, he had icehouses packed with frozen New England water all over the American South. By the 1830s, his ships were sailing to Rio and Bombay. (India would ultimately prove to be his most lucrative market.) By his death in 1864, Tudor had amassed a fortune worth more than $200 million in today’s dollars.

IF YOU WIDEN YOUR FRAME of reference, and look at the ice trade in the context of technological history, there is something

puzzling, almost anachronistic, about Tudor’s innovation. This was the middle of the nineteenth century, after all, an era of coal-powered factories, with railroads and telegraph wires connecting massive cities. And yet the state of the art in cold technology was still entirely based on cutting chunks of frozen water out of a lake. Humans had been experimenting with the technology of heat for at least a hundred thousand years, since the mastery of fire—arguably Homo sapiens’ first innovation. But the opposite end of the thermal spectrum was much more challenging. A century into the industrial revolution, artificial cold was still a fantasy.

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.

and Fahrenheit, and as is so often the case in the history of science and innovation, when you have a leap forward in the accuracy of measuring something, new possibilities emerge.

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. Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to

imagine them. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple ...

The definitive history of Bell Labs, Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory, reveals the secret to the labs’ unrivaled success. It was not just the diversity of talent, and the tolerance of failure, and the willingness to make big bets—all of which were traits that Bell Labs shared with Edison’s famous lab at Menlo Park as well as other research labs around the world. What made Bell Labs fundamentally different had as much to do

with antitrust law as the geniuses it attracted.

From as early as 1913, AT&T had been battling the U.S. government over its monopoly control of the nation’s phone service. That it was, in fact, a monopoly was undeniable. If you were making a phone call in the United States at any point between 1930 and 1984, you were almost without exception using AT&T’s network. That monopoly power made the company immensely profitable, since it faced no significant competition. But for seventy years, AT&T managed to keep the regulators at bay by convincing them that the phone network was a “natural monopoly” and

a necessary one.

The skewed sex ratios of modern China contain several important lessons, setting aside the question of abortion itself, much less gender-based abortion. First, they are a reminder that no technological advance is purely positive in its effects: for every ship saved from an iceberg, there are countless pregnancies terminated because of a missing Y chromosome. The march of technology has its own internal logic, but the moral application of that technology is up to us. We can decide to use ultrasound to save lives or terminate them. (Even more challenging, we can use ultrasound to blur the very boundaries of

life, detecting a heartbeat in a fetus that is only weeks old.)

But there’s another, more hopeful lesson in the story of sonar and ultrasound, which is how quickly our ingenuity is able to leap boundaries of conventional influence. Our ancestors first noticed the power of echo and reverberation to change the sonic properties

Most innovation happens in the present tense of the adjacent possible, working with the tools and concepts that are available in that time.

If there is a 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.

the time travelers remind us that working within an established field is both empowering and restricting at the same time.

Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.