Mutually Assured Construction
An engineer and materials scientist examines the symbiotic relationship between humans and their technological creations.
Review by Robin Tatu
The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another
By Ainissa Ramirez.
MIT Press, April 2021.
328 pages.
As a youth, Ainissa Ramirez was inspired to pursue science by the PBS series 3-2-1 Contact, which featured a problem-solving Black girl. “When I saw her using her brain, I saw my reflection,” explains the award-winning author and former engineering educator. That personal connection was harder to sustain in college, where introductory math and engineering courses were dry “and the lessons were designed to weed out students.” The saving grace was supportive professors and her growing love for materials science, first at Brown University and then through a PhD in materials science and engineering at Stanford. Today Ramirez has fashioned herself a “science evangelist,” dedicated to helping others find their own touchstones to STEM through her videos, podcasts, a 2012 TED talk, numerous publications, and now The Alchemy of Us.
A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ramirez’s engaging new book presents the history of eight pivotal inventions, from quartz clocks and carbon light bulb filaments to glass labware and silicon chips. Beyond exploring the creation of novel materials, The Alchemy of Us details how each invention has changed our world through the ability to accurately measure time, extend daylight hours, travel long distances, and store enormous amounts of information. Ramirez often features lesser-known figures and stories of struggle as well as triumph. “I chose to look at the gaps, at the silences in history,” she writes, “because they, too, are instructive about the making of our culture.” Throughout, readers are prompted to ponder the implications of technological change: what has been gained and lost?
The opening chapter, for example, interweaves intriguing stories about time management into an examination of Warren Marrison’s 1927 creation of the first quartz clock. We learn of the London widow who, in the early 1900s, “sold time” by carrying news of the correct hour on her chronometer to clients across the city. Albert Einstein, whose experiments challenged the notion of fixed time, makes an appearance, as does jazz legend Louis Armstrong, who “stretched, squeezed, or shifted notes,” altering the timed constraints of a musical score. We should sleep better than our ancestors, Ramirez notes, but in our quest for precise timekeeping, we’ve become tied to clocks, altering natural sleep habits and suffering sleep deprivation.
Subsequent chapters look at materials development—and societal impact—through the backstories of the inventors. Samuel Morse’s work on the electromagnetic telegraph was prompted in part by the loss of his wife, whose death he learned of belatedly. We read of his efforts to perfect a transmitter but also to secure a patent and convince Congress to finance installation of telegraph lines. The chapter on photography includes the 1970s campaign founded by two Black Polaroid employees—Caroline Hunter and Ken Williams—to get the corporation to break ties with South Africa’s apartheid government, which was using Polaroid technology to monitor and control the country’s Black population. “Technologies we make are not innocuous,” Ramirez observes, “and their use is not always for the greater good.”
While she delivers plenty of nitty-gritty on the inventors’ process, such as how Thomas Edison manipulated helical grooves on brass cylinders to reproduce clear sounds on the first phonograph, readers may particularly appreciate Ramirez’s reflections on technology’s future. The internet has “become an extension of the mind on a scale larger than anything humankind has ever experienced,” she writes, but how does it change the way we think, understand, and create? The author urges us to consider what we value about being human and how to preserve such intangibles as empathy that technology cannot provide.
Beyond its focus on the “complexity and humanness” of inventions, The Alchemy of Us makes a persuasive case that “discussions about technology must be inclusive.” When people see themselves in accounts of technological breakthroughs, Ramirez emphasizes, they come away empowered. All of us can innovate, meet challenges, and think critically about the impact of inventions on society.
Robin Tatu is Prism‘s book editor.
© Amazon/Getty Images/Alexander Da Silva