Small Discoveries, Huge Impact
The still-unfolding stories behind our everyday necessities
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World
By Steven Johnson
Riverhead 2014, 292 pages
Glass. Cold. Sound. Clean. Time. Light. These are six categories of technology behind many essential modern devices – the toilets we flush, thermostats we adjust, and clocks we set back or forward each spring and fall. In this new book, Steven Johnson tells how they came about, seeking a broad framework through which to consider the many first attempts, false starts, and refinements that contribute to a single invention – what system theorist Stuart Kauffman calls the “adjacent possible.”
A popular author of seven other books on science and ideas, Johnson narrates his story with considerable verve. Indeed, How We Got to Now forms part of a larger project, the print version of a six-part PBS science series aired this October and November. Produced and narrated by Johnson, each 54-minute segment features him pursuing his investigations aboard nuclear submarines, down San Francisco sewers or French caves, at microchip plants, or into the Dubai desert.
In encouraging a long view of technology history, Johnson highlights unexpected consequences, emphasizing that a single change often prompted many others in unrelated fields. The Gutenberg printing press generated mass production and distribution of books but also a surge in demand for spectacles and eyepieces. As more people struggled to focus on pages of printed text, they grew aware of their nearsightedness and in great numbers began to seek out the “first piece of advanced technology” regularly worn upon the human body.
Production of lenses spurred a range of explorations in optical research, from refractive lenses to mirrors and microscopes, and more recently, the fine glass filaments of fiber optics. Johnson lays out this vast field of developments, allowing us to ponder the myriad paths that led from the first eyepieces to the superpowered twin telescopes upon the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Kea that now enable scientists to gaze into far galaxies.
The six chapters around each of these core topics offer engaging narratives of unusual and lesser known contributions in the stories of sewage, clock and watch manufacturing, electrification, and refrigeration. Spurred by the burgeoning meatpacking business in Chicago, one mid-19th-century pork magnate built packing plant rooms cooled by ice; by 1878, engineers were being employed to design ice-cooled railway cars, eventually leading to refrigerated ships and the distribution of Chicago’s meat across the seas. But the fervor to find markets for ice also led to stupendous failures: Several years earlier, Boston trader Frederic Tudor shipped huge frozen blocks to the steamy West Indies, certain that he could convince people of their benefits. Yet “the sheer novelty of an object can make its utility hard to discern,” and Tudor succeeded only in accruing enormous debt. During the same period, the Florida physician John Gorrie suspended ice from his hospital ceiling to help ease the fevers of malaria patients. Irregular supply from the Northeast prompted Gorrie’s creation of his own refrigeration machine. While this product also failed in the marketplace, it contributed to increasing experimentation.
Throughout this book, Johnson describes roiling networks of ideas, needs, and experimentation, emphasizing that curiosity often led to the fortuitous birth of new technologies. The first successful explorations into frozen food products were occasioned after a young naturalist visiting Labrador realized that fish and produce frozen in the dead of winter tasted better. Further experiments led Clarence Birdseye to invent flash freezing, which would eventually revolutionize the food industry. The impact on society of some of the new technologies can’t be overstated. A variant of refrigeration – home air conditioning – produced stunning demographic shifts in the United States during the 1960s: The population of Tucson, Ariz., leaped from 45,000 to 210,000 in ten years. Houston’s grew from 600,000 to 940,000.
In each of the six chapters, Johnson casts a wide net of social, commercial, and political connections, moving us from early experiments with electrical filaments, for example, to explorations of fusion power at the National Ignition Facility of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. He closes his overview by urging the embrace of imaginative leaps of creativity outside designated fields of expertise, like the ones taken by many of the pioneers he features. “Better to make new connections than remain comfortably situated in the same routine,” he declares.
Review by Robin Tatu
Robin Tatu is Prism’s senior editorial consultant.