How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

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

Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird’s wing. But that is the way change happens.

The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, "Are we being good ancestors?

The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.

Humans had proven to be unusually good at learning to recognize visual patterns; we internalize our alphabets so well we don’t even have to think about reading once we’ve learned how to do it.

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.

The garage is the space for the hacker, the tinkerer, the maker. The garage is not defined by a single field or industry; instead, it is defined by the eclectic interests of its inhabitants. It is a space where intellectual networks converge.

If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.

This may be one of the most astonishing, and tragic, hummingbird effects in all of twentieth-century technology: someone builds a machine to listen to sound waves bouncing off icebergs, and a few generations later, millions of female fetuses are aborted thanks to that very same technology.

If you worked for an hour at the average wage of 1800, you could buy yourself ten minutes of artificial light. With kerosene in 1880, the same hour of work would give you three hours of reading at night. Today, you can buy three hundred days of artificial light with an hour of wages. Something extraordinary obviously happened between the days of tallow candles or kerosene lamps and today’s illuminated wonderland. That something was the electric lightbulb.

The time travelers are usually adapt at "intercrossing" different fields of expertise. That's the beauty of the hobbyist: it's generally easier to mix different intellectual fields when you have a whole array of them littering your study or your garage.

Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking – and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door to the adjacent possible. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended lifespans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer's knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.

Like every big idea, Birdseye’s breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye’s idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.

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.

There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb. By the time Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street station, a handful of other firms were already selling their own models of incandescent electric lamps.

Every time you glance down at your smartphone to check your location, you are unwittingly consulting a network of twenty-four atomic clocks housed in satellites in low-earth orbit above you.

today there are more than three billion people around the world who lack access to clean drinking water and basic sanitation systems. In absolute numbers, we have gone backward as a species.

Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city’s spectacular skyline; what they don’t realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering.

...if your great-great-great-grandfather wanted to read his book after dark, some poor soul had to crawl around in a whale’s head for an afternoon.

By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.

An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

Edison invented the lightbulb the way Steve Jobs invented the MP3 player: he wasn’t the first, but he was the first to make something that took off in the marketplace. So

Semmelweis was derided and dismissed not just for daring to propose that doctors wash their hands; he was derided and dismissed for proposing that doctors wash their hands if they wanted to deliver babies and dissect corpses in the same afternoon. This

In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.

From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.

The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.