How We Got to Now

I recently finished reading a book I highly recommend, How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (2014), by Steven Johnson.  In it, he talks about modern innovations, almost miraculous, we tend to take for granted, which play a significant role in the modern world we live in.  He focuses on six such innovations, which I will try to summarize:

• Glass - clear glass did not appear until the 14th Century (it was always colored and opaque before that).  Soon after came the printing press, which called for spectacles so many with eyesight problems could read.  People playing around with spectacles led to the development of both the telescope and the microscope, which led to major breakthroughs in science.  Later, some who placed specially treated paper behind a lens developed photography, and later film.  Television developed as some coated the glass with phosphor and shot electrons at it.  Others later used glass to develop fiberglass - widely used as a material to make lightweight objects. Later, others found glass fibers
  
  could transmit light frequencies at multiple frequencies and with negligible loss of signal.  Today, fiber optic communications help to bind our world in a sort of global village.  When glass makers found coating the back of glass with a mixture of tin and mercury created mirrors, it changed all our lives.  We could suddenly see ourselves clearly.  Painters used it to understand how to paint a 3 dimensional world on a 2 dimensional canvass by looking at what they wanted to paint in a mirror.  Modern large telescopes extensively use mirrors to focus a large image into something we can see, so we can look back in time since light from a distance takes so long to reach us.
• Cold - until the 19th Century, most produce and meats didn't keep long in the summer heat. Frederic Tudor went into bankruptcy before figuring out how to transport and preserve New England ice in
  
  warmer climates.  Once he did, he made a fortune, and meat and produce could be transported much further, vastly improving diets.  Sometime later, Dr. John Corrie found that cooling compressed air with cooled water pulled heat from its surrounding which cooled the air - and he could make artificial ice.  But soon others used this innovation to first cool offices and factories, and then homes (as well as the home refrigerator).  Soon, many moved to the Sun belt cooled by air conditioning, which radically changed the political map.  Dr. Birdseye, studying the natural effect flash freezing fishes caught by the Inuit Eskimos, soon transformed the entire frozen food market employing flash freezing.  The summer blockbusters became possible with the advent of air-conditioned movie theaters.
• Sound - a stenographer thought up the first system of recording sound.  However, it did not occur to him to create a playback system.  Alexander Bell devised a system of capturing sound, transmitting it electronically, with instantaneous playback at the other end - the telephone - which largely caught on
  
  as it became more affordable.  It took Thomas Edison, building on the work of others, to devise a system to capture sound, and make it capable of playback at any time later.  Later, Marconi developed a wireless system for sending Morse code, which developed into radio.  Radio helped to expose jazz, largely a form of music developed by black musicians for largely black audiences, into a form of music widely accepted in the culture of the 20s, since the audience usually couldn't see the color of the musician on the other end.  Amplification of signals, developed at Bell Labs, not only helped radio, it made large scale events, such as the March on Washington, possible with the amplification of the speaker.  A later development of the digitization of sound allows us to preserve a perfect reproduction of the original sound, which often deteriorates over time in other mediums.
• Clean - for most of human history, taking a drink of water involved a roll of the dice, especially in crowded cities.  Though some European cities had sewers, they often flowed into the source of drinking water, creating the vast waves of diseases they experienced.  Chicago experienced this.  They hired an engineer, Ellis Chesbrough, who faced a problem.  Chicago had a flat landscape, so building a sewer system under it would flow nowhere.  He found an innovative solution - he raised the city, about 10 feet on average, building by building, and at times block by block, using an army of jackscrews and men twisting them to raise them, and then immediately insert sewer lines under them, connected to main lines running down the center of the street (which he filled).  It was the first comprehensive sewer system in any American city.  Other cities soon followed.  However, though this
  
  development helped, by itself, it did not lead to the clean water we rely on.  John Leal, building on insights from bacteria developments under the microscope, found that using the right level of chlorine in water destroyed enough deadly bacteria in water to make drinking water safe.  Many American cities soon adopted this development, which dramatically dropped the disease rate, especially among children.  As a result, many American cities developed public swimming pools with clean waters.  Chlorine soon led to the development of Clorox, which revolutionized cleanliness in consumer homes.  Oddly, our entire computerized world depends on cleanliness - since microchips cannot be produced without the extreme sterility found in the clean rooms where manufactures produce them.
• Time - For most of human history, exact time did not matter.  However, once sailors undertook long voyages on open seas, it became critical.  To determine longitude (east vs. west), you needed to know your exact time (which you could tell from the sun) and compare it to the time from the port you left from (which required a precise clock).  Both Spain and England offered vast sums to anyone who developed a clock which could keep an accurate time of the home port clock, since most clocks of
  
  that time lost significant amounts of time.  Galileo developed a concept keeping time based on the pendulums, based on his observations of swinging alter lamps.  However, it took many others to perfect this concept into a working clock worked out a way to keep an accurate measure of the home port clock.  An accurate clock soon became central to the industrial revolution.  The development of trains soon showed the inferiority of local time, and William F. Allen led the effort to adopt the 4 standardized time zones in American, which led to international time zones around the world.  In our world, time has been redefined by atomic clocks, which provides the basis for how many of us find our way through GPS.
• Light - Many of us think Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.  We don't tend to know that someone else invented it at least 40 years before he did, and many slowly improved upon it.  Edison did not invent the light bulb, but his team worked hard to improve it to the point where it became practical. He
  
  bought the existing patents, and then hired a talented diversified team who used their interdisciplinary efforts to work out in an extended disciplinary method the problems the existing light bulb presented.  He also choose to award the best in his team with stock in his company to incentive them.  His innovations led to the modern research teams which incentives with stock options, which generated many of our technological innovations.  Over time, light developed into flash photography, neon lights, laser, bar-code scanners, and, recently, the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livormore Labs in California which seeks to use many multiple laser beams focused through multiple mirrors to duplicate the atomic process in the sun to fuse hydrogen atoms together.

Johnson likes to speak of the Hummingbird effect - about how innovations in one area lead to innovations in other areas or fields - often unforeseen by the innovator of the original invention.  He also likes to talk about how innovations do not seem to occur as a result on of the efforts of one individual, but instead seems to build upon small contributions by many individuals until finally one, or more individuals, experiences a breakthrough, which then tends to generate all kinds of other unforeseen positive developments.

PBS made this book into a television series, which I watched, borrowing a copy from my local library.  I also highly recommend watching this television show if you can.  While I didn't necessarily agree with all the views he expressed - still I thought he conveyed enough interesting views which I agreed with, that I highly recommend reading the book and watching the series.  He has a way of uniting various disciplines which few others do when studying the same subjects.  I got a lot out of both watching the video (which I did first) and then reading the book.