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

by Steven Johnson

The telephone’s consequences were immense and multifarious. International calls brought the world closer together, though the threads connecting us were thin until recently. The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.

Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” with its bitter tale of a southern lynching.

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 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.”

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. “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.” You can see the force of this prejudice most clearly in the accounts of royalty during the 1600s and 1700s—in other words, the very people who could afford to have baths constructed and drawn for them without a second thought. 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...

Slowly, starting in the early nineteenth century, the attitudes began to shift, most notably in England and America. Charles D...

shower in his London home, and was a great advocate for the energizing and hygienic virtues of a daily shower. A minor gen...