Status
Call number
Collection
Publication
Description
"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes-from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-How We Got to Now investigates the secret history behind the everyday objects of contemporary life. In his trademark style, Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species-to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix, which would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water made it possible to manufacture computer chips. Accompanied by a major six-part television series on PBS, How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, written in the provocative, informative, and engaging style that has earned Johnson fans around the globe. "--… (more)
Media reviews
User reviews
For example, glass: before the 15th century, most people were farsighted and never knew it; most couldn’t read and had no need to see tiny shapes formed into words. Therefore, spectacles remained rare and expensive items. The invention of the printing press changed that when it brought the written word to the masses, creating a market for spectacles. People began experimenting with lenses; microscopes, telescopes, and cameras were invented, creating a multitude of new discoveries in the sciences as a result.
The author discounts the lone genius theory where one person magically came up with an idea and “invented” it. He demonstrates how most innovations were collaborations. An example was the light bulb: multiple individuals were working on developing a light bulb, and many “invented” it, but the person known for the light bulb was the one whose bulb outperformed the others and was most successful in bringing it to market. And that was Thomas Edison.
I could babble on a lot about this book and how much I enjoyed it. But instead I’m going to encourage you to give this a read or a listen and have fun learning about how all the things we take for granted became part of our daily lives. And no, you do not need to know one bit about science to enjoy this – just curiosity about the world around us.
Audio production:
I can be a bit of a science nerd and once I started reading this I didn’t want to stop and switched between audio and print so I could keep going. The audio was competently read by George Newbern in a very listenable but documentary-like style. For those who prefer the visual, there were some very cool drawings, photos, and illustrations that make having a print copy worth while. But in either format it was an enjoyable read.
The six innovations: Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time and Light make excellent conversational
The Hummingbird Effect is described by Johnson as an unintended benefit of the introduction of a technology. This metaphor is used to first describe the quick adoption of "orbs" (i.e. reading glasses), after the creation of the Gutenberg press. While the technology of reading glasses existed for centuries before the printing press, the need did not exist.
I also found the chapter on Time to meet a specific interest of mine in addition to having recently read a similar account in Time's Pendulum.
I look forward to viewing the PBS series next.
This book is the companion book to a new PBS series of the same name. I really wanted to give this book a five star review but am going to knock it back a star. My complaint about the book is three fold: 1) large
Now to the caveats on my complaints. I am a pretty big fan of Steven Johnson's work. As I noted in my review of The Invention of Air, he is an excellent writer and has a remarkable capacity to cast events in a different light. Johnson wrote The Ghost Map, which remains a favorite of mine. Johnson gives a synopsis of The Ghost Map in the section of How We Got to Now on water. Because Johnson did such a masterful job of explaining the discovery in The Ghost Map the discussion of the same story in How We Got to Now is a bit of a let down.
As for the book being identical to the dialogue of the TV show, this wouldn't be a complaint except that I have been watching all of the episodes of the shows (usually with my kids). This is one of the rare times where I think the TV show is better than the book. This isn't a knock on the book so much as a compliment on the show which does an excellent job illustrating some of the connections that Johnson is talking about. Bits like Johnson going to a water park on the show would feel unnecessary to me but illustrate the point to the kids in a way that makes them understand the concept he is talking about.
As for the last complaint, that some of the connections are a bit attenuated, it is a minor quibble. The advances in technology that Johnson is seeking to illustrate are fascinating even if some of the connections seem less logical than others.
If you don't watch the show the book is solid and worth your time. However, this is one of those rare times where I would encourage people to try watching the TV show first, especially if you have children who are interested in science or that you want to be interested in science. Every once in awhile the TV is the superior medium and with How We Got to Now I think that is the case here.
Johnson overcomes much of this. He tells a good story. And in this book there are a number of very good stories to tell. And he has done an excellent job of finding the stories we may not be as familiar with. (Heck, this makes only the second time I learned that Edison was electrocuting elephants – the first time being during an episode of Bob's Burgers.) And he has definitely identified defining discoveries – the key things without which we couldn't be where we are today.
But Johnson doesn't overcome all of it. They are good stories, and I learned some things I didn't know. But some of the connections may well overreach. And, as should be expected, the book merely scratches the surface of a number of very deep subjects. It is also interesting that throughout this discussion of how specific innovations made all the difference in the world, he also makes the case (one you will often hear in scientific circles) that certain discoveries will happen simply because it is the time for them to be discovered. (This isn't some mythological discussion; it is much more about the synergy of events which lead to discoveries.)
However, the connections are interesting. And, as I've already mentioned, the writing is very good. And Johnsons makes his case with some authority – that is, he lays out excellent evidence of how important specific discoveries were to our becoming the world we are today.
As long as you approach this as a book that is more entertainment than deep understanding, then you should be fine. That isn't to say it is incorrect. It is just to say that it is only correct as far as it goes.
More than that, though, he shows how inventions designed solely to solve one particular limited problem can have direct but unexpected consequences that lead not just to the development of still further technological developments, but also to influences on society, history, and art. To me, this weird, tangled web of causality and influence Johnson illuminates is by far the most fascinating thing about the book, whether he's drawing a direct line from Clarence Birdseye ice-fishing with Inuits to the existence of sperm banks, or outlining how the invention of the laser led to the growth and expansion of big-box retail stores.
It reminds me a little of James Burke's TV show/ book Connections and its follow-up, The Pinball Effect, but where Burke is random and rambly, Johnson is more focused and concise. Each of the chapters here is short, and the entire book is only about 200 pages. Meaning this isn't the book you want if you're looking for a really detailed and in-depth history of any of the topics it covers. But Johnson does manage to pack a lot of worthwhile thought and information into such a small amount of space, and he does it in his usual zippy, highly readable style.
I'd actually already read a fair bit about most of these subjects, and wondered going in if I were going to find some of the chapters a bit boring since they were talking about things I already knew, but Johnson includes so many odd and interesting little details that I'd either forgotten or never heard of, and he provides so many new perspectives and draws so many surprising connections between things that I never felt the least bit bored.
Rating: 4.5/5. If only just for including so many little things that made me go, "Oh, neat!"
So much for the form. As to the content, it's fairly unobjectionable. Some of the science is simplified to the point where it's borderline misleading, and some of the leaps he makes are too extreme, for instance in the chapter on Time, where he jumps straight from the 16th century to the 19th, leaving the naive reader with the impression that it must have been Galileo's pendulum clock that enabled ships to determine longitude. But those are constraints due to the need to fit everything in to a TV show. The producer obviously told him they could shoot on location in Pisa or Greenwich, but not both...
Obviously, this isn't a book that's addressed at readers who already know a little bit about the history of technology: most of the stories he tells here are very familiar ones, and there was very little that I hadn't already met many times in other places. After six chapters I caught myself thinking that we'd had just about all the usual suspects except Albert Einstein and Ada Lovelace - imagine my surprise when Ada turned up in the Conclusion after all! Johnson's discussion of how innovation comes about is rather more interesting than the actual examples he brings in, but it's all very anecdotal and not developed enough here to be really worth reading this book for. He has written another book devoted to that topic, of course. The other inevitable topic in books about the history of technology is "unintended nasty consequences of progress" - that's something Johnson touches on a few times here and there, but again he doesn't really get the chance to develop it.
"You don't need to know any of these things to tell the time now, but that's the way progress works; the more we build up these vast repositories of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them. Your mind is silently assisted by all that knowledge each time you check your phone to see what time it is, but the knowledge itself is hidden."
I think that is a very important statement of the human experience and how much our future is determined by the past. In addition to making me say, "Wow!" this book also led me to think and ponder on the human condition without leading me to conclusions, something I always enjoy.
As he writes about each subject, he reminds you of life before these inventions, with no artificial light, drinking water that could kill you in 48 hours and food that spot quickly in the summer. He tells about the characters that put their reputations and money on the line to get these things off the ground. Others then saw the potential of the ideas and the spinoff ideas from the initial one have been phenomenal. For example before Gutenberg, it was only a handful of monks that needed glasses for near sighted work. After the first books appeared, people realised that they couldn't see the text and the market for reading glasses, using the newly developed lenses took off. The most fascinating was the way that the entire city of Chicago was jacked up to allow space underneath to install a sewerage system.
Johnson has a way of conveying ideas and concepts that make this a pleasure to read, well worth reading.
This book looks at connections in inventions – one thing had to be invented or discovered, which created a chain reaction for the next thing and the next thing, etc. Glass, then spectacles, then the printing press caused more people to need spectacles, then microscopes, etc.
I found this
Nicely written popular science.
For example, spectacles weren’t developed until the wide-spread availability of printed books made the need for them obvious. Before that, the technology existed, but not the need. This book is full of insights like that, things which become obvious once Johnson points them out. Great book.
Awards
Language
Original publication date
Physical description
ISBN
Similar in this library
DDC/MDS
153.35 |