How We Got To Now: The History And Power Of Great Ideas (2014) - Plot & Excerpts
This is my favorite kind of book, blending two of my favorite topics, history and science. And it was translated into a PBS series. Does it get any better than that? In some ways, this reminds me a little bit of another series of books that were companions to a PBS series - Connections by James Burke. Both take a starting point - a particular technology or a need that technology would answer - and follow developments that sprang from that technology to a modern development. In Johnson's case, though, he often goes farther outside the box than even Burke did. He sees consequences of an invention or technological achievement and explores how it led to changes in our lives in unexpected, often non-tech related ways. The evolution of inventions. Interesting, surely more so if used as a companion book to the PBS TV series (which I have not seen).Random notes from the book:How We Got To Now: 6 Innovations that Made the Modern Worldby Steven JohnsonCoevolutionEvolution of pollen shaped hummingbird’s wings so float in air when extracting nectar from flower...rotate wings to give power to the upstroke as well as the downstroke.Clear influences of one organism on another...the flower clearly influences the hummingbird’s physiognomy in direct, intelligible ways.Invention of printing press led to surge in demand for spectacles. Made new practice of reading, realize they were farsighted, lead to lenses and experimentation with lenses, led to invention of microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were composed of microscopic cells. So printing technology expanded our vision down to the cellular scale.A/c enabled man to colonize hotspots. Cool down homes and office buildings, the technology a/c inventors unleashed on the world enabled dramatic changes in American settlement patterns, which in turn transformed the occupants of Congress and the White House.Cogs and wheels systems compose universe.Surges over intellectual and social boundaries like the internet over the past 30 years.Mixed and unintended consequences, overall, the arc of history show trend to better tools, energy sources, ways to transmit info.Google search 1999 free, great, but took ads from news sources.A/c live desert, cost to water supplies.Vacuum tube expanded audience jazz, mass spread of Hitler messages.Physicist Richard Feynman. Compared to artist, he sees beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, the processes (of flower). A science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.Transformative ideas. Galileo telescope.GLASSGlass: when superheated grains of sand (silicon dioxide) cool down below their melting point, a vast stretch of the Libyan Desert (hit by comet, superheated) was coated with a layer of what we now call glass. Glass made transition from ornament in Egypt to advance technology during height of Roman Empire.Craftsmen figured out how to melt the silica into drinking vessels and windowpanes.Clear.Versatile and transformative material in human culture.Turkish glassmakers after 1204 sacking of Constantinople sailed west across Med to newly prosperous Venice. Venetian doges unwittingly created innovation hub by sending the glassmakers across Venetian lagoon to island of Murano. To reduce fire hazard to wooden structures.Angelo Barovier took seaweed rich in potassium oxide and manganese, burned it to create ash, then added these ingredients to molten glass, when mixture cooled, extraordinarily clear glass, resemblance to clearest rock crystals of quartz, Barovier called it cristallo - birth of modern glass early 1300s.Then: realized glass could bend light (in addition to absorbing light energy). So: mid-1300s monk with glasses. Northern Italy glassmakers: shape glass into small disks, place in frame, world’s first spectacles.The Gutenberg galaxy (Marshall McLuhan) impact of printing press. Literacy rates rose, theories and news spread, then amusements like the novel and porno.Hackers manipulating light through convex pieces of glass - hackers of the first optical revolution.Line up 2 lenses to magnify objects...microscope 1590. By 1650, Brit scientist Robert Hooke published illustrated volume Micrographia, hand-drawn images of what Hooke saw - fleas, wood, leaves, frozen urine...cork...cells (invented name). Eventually virus and bacterium - medical revelations, breakthrough knowledge.Telescope Hans Lippershey.Eventually telescopes on big island HA’s Mauna Kea (larger than Everest counting thousands of feet beneath sea), view of solar system.Galileo 1610 heretic circulate ideas outside the censorious limits of the Church.Photography 19th c.See beyond natural limits of human vision.Enabled the Renaissance: self-reflection...introspection conceptual ideas of art, philosophy and politics.TV, movies.Charles Vernon Boys, 1917, shot crossbow threads of glass...showed strength, glass fibers, fiberglass, insulation, surfboards, yachts, helmets, circuit boards that connected the chips of a modern computer, jets. Nontransparent uses. Then: 1970 Corning Glassworks, the murano of modern times, developed type of glass so clear, length of bus so transparent like looking through windowpane...now with further refinement can be half-mile thick. Bell Labs too fibers, shot laser beams down their length, fluctuating optical signals that corresponded to the zeroes and ones of binary code--this hybrid of seemingly unrelated inventions of laser and hyper-clear glass fibers became known as fiber optics. Cables vastly more efficient than sending electrical signals over copper cables, esp for long distances: light allows much more bandwidth and far less susceptible to noise and interference than is electrical energy. Now global Internet built out of fiber-optic cables…. 10 traverse the Atlantic Ocean.Self-portraiture after 1400. Mirrors.Diego Velazquez invested masterpiece Las Meninas reveal the artist in middle of painting roayl family. (selfie) ALso used for perspective as a formal device.See stars, cells, selves.Introspection co-evolved with new object. COLDFrederic Tudor, Boston, ship lake ice to island 1800s.Vacuum remove oxygen, cool...wood chip insulation air pockets cool and not conduct heat like metal.Refrig artificial cold doctor Florida invented to chill patients but died penniless.Refrig rail cars Chicago meatpacking industry.Clarence Birdseye flash frozen fresher fresh taste. Fished with Inuits in Labrador, compared taste of frozen fish (flash, vs. long-term).Sold company megamillionaireA/c sun belt, politicians thus changed political geography. More dev in hot tropical cities now.SOUNDBurgundy France cave Arcy-sur-Cure 2nd oldest cave only to Chauvet. Paintings clustered in the most acoustically interesting part of cave, with the most reverb. Massive echo. Chant shamanistic ritual. Primitive sound engineering, amplifying and enhancing voices.Led to reproduce, recording, communicating.Ear and voice.Can draw a visual, now a sound.Vibrations ear canal 1500s sound waves.Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville printer sound writing stenography. Phonautograph no playback; instead, squiggles to be the ultimate stenography.Alexander Graham Bell modified 15 yrs after his patent.Thomas Edison 1877Propaganda spreadCLEANChicago flat.Shipyards, ork. City growth. Favelas and shantytowns of megacities even today.Disease erupted.Urban engineeringEllis Chesbrough rail and canal design, create grade would be to hard. Jackscrewed up bldgs.Insert sewer lines.So much of the American success in postwar electronics - from transistors to computers to cell phones - ultimately dates back to that 1956 agreement - antitrust resolution by which AT&T could keep its (monopoly) profits, but would have to give away its ideas in return.TIMEGalileo pendulum altar-lamp duomo of pisa...realizes same amt of time to complete swing regardless of arc. Study of dynamics. Depends on length of rope suspended. At the time no real need for precise timekeeping. Rhythm of nature, sun. Mid-1600s. Pendulum clock.Tempo music.Precision helped shipping, manuf timepieces by late 1600s.time discipline.Dickens statistical clock “measured every second with a beat like the rap on a coffin lid.”Romantics early 1800s rebelled.Manufacture precision, like clockwork, efficiency.Sundials to clocks, shift from astronomy.Quartz crystal ability to expand and contract in equal time first exploited by radio engineers in the 1920s, who used it to lock radio transmissions to consistent frequencies. Bells Labs 1928 first clock that kept time from the regular vibrations of a quartz crystal. Lost or gained only a thousandth of a second per day and far less vulnerable to atmospheric changes in temp or humidity.Then atomic clocks, precision.LIGHTSpermaceti Sperm whales killed 300,000 in a century 1700s-1800s.early 1800s carbon and platinum filament. Edison showman, credit, 1882 his bulb outperformed competitors.Experimented with bamboo.Lit up the whole Pearl Street NY area -- that was Edison’s breakthrough. Networked innovations.Flashbulb magnesium lit Giza pyramid up for split second. 1861.Jacob Riis - show need for poverty reform. Photos bleak, 1887 Blitzlicht.Light key to Vegas strip. Husband and wife postmodern architecture: Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Neon. TOm Young designer signs The Boulders - Young Electric Sign Company YESCO, Tom Young. Tom Wolfe: skyline of signs. Fremont Street.Laser 1960s storm of inventions resulted in it. Bells Labs and Hughes Aircraft. The laser is to ordinary light as a broadcast signal is to static. Machine-readable code: UPC car codes 1974. Scanners, enabled maintain large and automated inventory management. Big-box stores, modern shipping. Demolished small stores.Lawrence Livermore Labs in Northern Calif. highest-energy laser system. Illumination and more. So accurate, far. Each microsecond pulse of light has, for its brief existence, 1,000 times the amount of energy in America’s entire national grid. NIF (National Ignition Facility). Aim: sustainable clean energy.THE TIME TRAVELERSAda Lovelace, daughter scandalous poet Byron, mid 1800s, calculus whiz, the first real software programmer with Victorian-era inventor Charles Babbage. Like mill hands and bodies of worker, CPU “the mill”...etched on punch cards that century later used to program computers.Analytical engine. Imaginative leap. Numerical notation And algebraical. A century ahead of their time.Da Vinci in 15th century could imagine and draw helicopters.Not only genius, but worked at margins of their fields, or at the intersection point between different disciplines.And the tenacity to stick with their hunches.Progress depends on incremental improvements.Creative power of stumbling into new experiences - Steve Jobs - he was . At 30 pushed out of Apple, had to become fresh beginner again. “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.”
What do You think about How We Got To Now: The History And Power Of Great Ideas (2014)?
Phenomenal. Recommended by Marc andreesen in one of his interviews, this is a worthwhile read
—Haze2193
Insightful and deep. I love all of Johnson's books
—crazyjc
