Review: How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

Another nice read from Steven Johnson on ideas and innovation. He does a great job of connecting many aspects of history and technology, focusing on 6 main inventions: glass (form windows to glasses, to telescopes, to touchscreens), cold (from icehouses to air conditioners and refrigerators), sound (from phonographs to sonar and radar), hygiene (from sewer systems to germ theory), time (from sundials to pocket watches to atomic clocks and CPUs), and light (from candles to light bulbs to lasers).

There are a few wonderful insights throughout the book (warning: minor spoilers ahead):

• The uses for any single technology and the connections between technologies are impossible to predict. E.g., the sonar technology used to find icebergs was later used to look at babies and, in some cases, abort them. The printing press led to more books, which led to more people realizing they needed glasses, which led to the mass production of lenses, which led to microscopes and telescopes, which completely changed how we see ourselves (cells!) and the universe (heliocentric!).

• Technologies are rarely, if ever, invented by a single, lone genius, and almost never in a single flash of insight. New ideas usually develop over many years and occur to many people, independently, around the same time. That’s because new ideas live in the “adjacent possible”. No matter how brilliant you are, you can’t invent a telephone before people have discovered electricity, microphones, speakers, and dozens of other technologies. But once those technologies are available, the phone is in the adjacent possible, and it’s almost inevitable that someone (or many people) will figure it out.

• Before the invention of the modern mirror, around the mid 15th century, most people had never clearly seen their own faces. Sure, you could see it in water and various pieces of metal, but never with much clarity. Interestingly, individualism, self-awareness, and introspection become much more common around this time period (e.g., you start seeing self-portraits and novels written in the first-person). Does seeing yourself more often (or at all) lead to more of an obsession with yourself? Could it have helped fuel the renaissance?

• Before the microphone and speakers, it was impossible for a single human being to speak to an audience larger than ~1,000 people. No matter how great an orator or how great the acoustics, sound just can’t carry that far without amplification. The microphone made it possible to have rallies (including, unfortunately, Hitler’s rallies), and eventually, to even record the sound of the voice and spread it far beyond what ever possible before.

• Before the invention of the first accurate timepieces, doing things on a precise schedule was largely impossible. Most people kept time based on work they did (“the time it takes to weave 10 yards”). More accurate time keeping has enabled everything from sailing (accurate timekeeping is required for navigation), trains (which required synchronizing timekeeping between every town along the tracks), computers (the clock in a CPU must be extremely precise), to GPS (where 24 satellites circle the earth, reporting down their time, and your phone can triangulate your location by knowing where those satellites are and the slight differences in the time they are reporting).

I suspect many of the stories Johnson tells are a bit over-simplified, but the book still makes a compelling argument about how innovation happens, and overall, it’s a fun read.

As always, I saved some of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Most discoveries become imaginable at a very specific moment in history, after which point multiple people start to imagine them.”

“The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces. There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb.”

Rating: 4 stars