How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson | 9 | Hardcover | Barnes & Noble
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
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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 vir how pendulum clocks helped trigger the i 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.
Editorial Reviews
From Barnes & NobleIn Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson successfully demolished the "Eureka Moment" theory of ideas dropping on inventors like apples from a tree. In How We Got to Now, he escorts us further into the real world of innovation by describing half a dozen breakthroughs that have radically changed humankind, almost always in unforeseen ways. To this new mix, Johnson brings the talents of a natural storyteller, dispensing real-life tales of both genius inventors and near-miss blunderers in equally captivating ways. A perfect fit for fans of books like The Tipping Point and The Black Swan. (P.S. This illustrated hardcover is the companion book to a six-part PBS series that debuts this fall.)
The New York Times Book Review
- Jon Gertner
How We Got to Now is full of nifty connections…stories that illustrate obscure chains of causality that shaped the modern world…Johnson has a deft and persuasive touch, as well as an aversion to fist- often, he seems to leave the door open a crack for reasonable disagreements…[Technological history] not only helps readers better see where we've been, but urges us to think harder about where we're going…mapping in advance the effects of our inventions is never easy. But in this graceful and compelling book, Johnson shows us why it is far more important than we might have ever imagined.
Publishers Weekly★ 07/07/2014
In this fascinating book, Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From) presents a “history of ideas and innovation,” focusing on six important technical and scientific innovations that have shaped the modern world but that we often take for granted. The book reveals what Johnson calls “the hummingbird effect,” when “an innovation... in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.” We learn how Gutenberg’s press created a market for spectacles, which, in turn, led to the development of the microscope, the telescope, how muckrakers were empowered by flash photography in the Progressive E and how the modern advertising business has roots in the germ theory of disease. Understanding the hummingbird effect is crucial in our world of constant technological development. Johnson debunks the genius theory of innovation—the romantic idea of the lone inventor who changes history—arguing instead that ideas and innovations emerge from “collaborative networks” at the intersections of different domains. He says that this understanding is crucial to “see more clearly the way new ideas come into being, and how to cultivate them as a society.” 75 b&w and color photos. Agent: Lydia Wills, Lydia Wills LLC. (Oct.)
Kirkus Reviews★
Best-selling author Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, 2010, etc.) continues his explorations of what he calls the "hummingbird effect," unforeseeable chains of influence that change the world. An innovation, writes the author, typically arises in one field—chemistry, say, or cryptography. But it does not rise alone—"ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas," and those tributary ideas likely came from many sources and disciplines, conditioned by the intellectual resources available at the time. Da Vinci aside, the author notes that even the most brilliant 17th-century inventor couldn't have hit on the refrigerator, which "simply wasn't part of the adjacent possible at that moment." A couple of centuries later, it was, thanks to changes in our understanding of materials, physics, chemistry and other areas. Johnson isn't the first writer to note that such things as the can opener were game-changers, but he has a pleasing way of spinning out the story to include all sorts of connections as seen through the lens of "long zoom" history, which looks at macro and micro events simultaneously. Sometimes he writes in a sort of rah-rah way that, taken to extremes, could dumb the enterprise down intolerably, as when he opines, "silicon dioxide for some reason is incapable of rearranging itself back into the orderly structure of crystal." Take out "for some reason" and replace with "because of the laws of physics," and things look brighter. However, Johnson's look at six large areas of innovation, from glassmaking to radio broadcasting (which involves the products of glassmaking, as it happens), is full of well-timed discoveries, and his insistence on the interdisciplinary nature of invention and discovery gives hope to the English and art history majors in the audience. Of a piece with the work of Tracy Kidder, Henry Petroski and other popular explainers of technology and science—geeky without being overly so and literate throughout.
From the PublisherPraise for Steven Johnson
&“A great science writer.” — Bill Clinton, speaking at the Health Matters conference
&“Mr. Johnson, who knows a thing or two about the history of science, is a first-rate storyteller.” —&The New York Times
“You’re apt to find yourself exhilarated…Johnson is not composing an etiology of particular inventions, but doing something broader and more imaginative…I particularly like the cultural observations Johnson draws along the way…[he] has a deft and persuasive touch…[a] graceful and compelling book.” —&The New York Times Book Review
&“Johnson is a polymath. . . . &[It’s] exhilarating to follow his unpredictable trains of thought. To explain why some ideas upend the world, he draws upon many disciplines: chemistry, social history, geography, even ecosystem science.” —&Los Angeles Times
“Steven Johnson is a maven of the history of ideas... How We Got to Now is readable, entertaining, and a challenge to any jaded sensibility that has become inured to the everyday miracles all around us.” — The Guardian
“[Johnson's] point is simple, important and well-timed: During periods of rapid innovation, there is always tumult as citizens try to make sense of it....Johnson is an engaging writer, and he takes very complicated and disparate subjects and makes their evolution understandable.”&—&The Washington Post
&“Through a series of elegant books about the history of technological innovation, Steven Johnson has become one of the most persuasive advocates for the role of collaboration in innovation….Mr. Johnson's erudition can be quite gobsmacking.” – The Wall Street Journal
&“An unbelievable book…it’s an innovative way to talk about history.” — Jon Stewart
"What makes this book such a mind-expanding read is Johnson’s ability to appreciate human advancement as a vast network of influence, rather than a simple chain of one invention leading to another, and result is nothing less than a celebration of the human mind." — The Daily Beast
“Fascinating…it’s an amazing book!” —&CBS This Morning
&“A full three cheers for Steven Johnson. He is, by no means, the only writer we currently have in our era of technological revolution who devotes himself to innovation, invention and creativity but he is, far and away, the most readable.” — The Buffalo News&
"The reader of How We Got to Now cannot fail to be impressed by human ingenuity, including Johnson’s, in determining these often labyrinthine but staggeringly powerful developments of one thing to the next." — San Francisco Chronicle
"A rapid but interesting tour of the history behind many of the comforts and technologies that comprise our world." —&Christian Science Monitor
"How We Got to Now... offers a fascinating glimpse at how a handful of basic inventions—such as the measurement of time, reliable methods of sanitation, the benefits of competent refrigeration, glassmaking and the faithful reproduction of sound—have evolved, often in surprising ways." — Shelf Awareness&
"[Johnson] writes about science and technology elegantly and accessibly, he evinces an infectious delight in his subject matter...Each chapter is full of strange and fascinating connections." — Barnes and Noble Review
"From the sanitation engineering that literally raised nineteenth-century Chicago to the 23 men who partially invented the light bulb before Thomas Edison,&[How We Got to Now]&is a many-layered delight."— Nature Review
“A highly readable and fascinating account of science, invention, accident and genius that gave us the world we live in today.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
The Barnes & Noble ReviewMost of us have been taught at some point that Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. But Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World includes a list of a couple dozen other scientists and entrepreneurs, working as far back as forty years before Edison's 1879 achievement, who can be considered "partial inventors" of the technology for which the Wizard of Menlo Park gets all the credit. We romanticize our greatest innovators, turning them into folk heroes whose accomplishments can be recited by schoolchildren across the land, but the truth is more complicated — and indeed, more interesting. "The lightbulb was the kind of innovation that comes together over decades, in pieces," Johnson observes. "There was no lightbulb moment in the story of the lightbulb."
How We Got to Now explores the complex histories of six taken-for-granted technologies. In addition to "Light," the other chapter titles are "Glass," "Cold," "Sound," "Clean," and "Time," corresponding to a six-part documentary series on PBS. Johnson is as well suited to hosting the television series as he is to writing the book: the author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You writes about science and technology elegantly and accessibly, and both onscreen and on the page, he evinces an infectious delight in his subject matter.
Johnson is particularly interested in the unpredictable ways that developments in one field can trigger momentous changes in another, a process he refers to as "the hummingbird effect" (named for the way the coevolution of flowering plants and insects unexpectedly led to the hummingbird's evolved — and unbirdlike — ability to float in midair while extracting nectar from flowers). Each chapter is full of strange and fascinating connections, but my favorite was the one on glass. Johnson shows how Johannes Gutenberg's fifteenth-century invention of the printing press made vast numbers of people aware for the first time that they were farsighted, creating a new and massive demand for spectacles. The growth in the market for spectacles in turn led to a surge in experimentation with lenses, resulting in the inventions of both the microscope and the telescope. Johnson doesn't stop there: he brings the story of glass up to the present moment, describing how silicon dioxide enables you to read material like this on the Internet, which is created out of fiber-optic cables.
Some common themes emerge throughout the book. Many of those we recognize as visionaries were considered mad in their own time. Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, now regarded as a pioneer of germ theory, was derided for suggesting, in the mid- nineteenth century, that doctors who had been dissecting corpses ought to wash their hands if they went on to deliver babies that same day. (He was eventually committed to an insane asylum, where he died.) Frederic Tudor was ridiculed when he began shipping blocks of ice from his native New England to the sweltering Caribbean in the earl the business venture paid off during his lifetime, however, and Tudor, who eventually oversaw shipments all over the world, helped transform ice "from a curiosity to a luxury to a necessity."
But the lone, misunderstood genius having a eureka
more often, once historical events make an innovation possible, different people in different parts of the world develop similar ideas independently of one another, a process known as multiple invention. Johnson argues, convincingly, that understanding the nature of innovation should have broader implications — that we should encourage collaboration by supporting "less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections."
Johnson tries to be less opinionated when it comes to the costs and benefits of the technologies he covers, declaring the book "resolutely agnostic" on questions of value. Despite that claim, his overall tone is unmistakably celebratory. "Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us," he writes breathlessly. He later observes, in the chapter on sound, that one of the first people to exploit the new-found power to amplify the human voice was Hitler, whose speeches drew hundreds of thousands of rapt listeners to the Nuremberg rallies. The image hangs there darkly for a moment, before Johnson adds that amplification also enabled hundreds of thousands to hear Martin Luther King Jr. declare, "I have a dream."
Barbara Spindel has covered books for Time Out New York, <, Details, and Spin. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies.
Reviewer: Barbara Spindel
Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Mind Wide Open, Emergence, and Interface Culture, and is the editor of the anthology The Innovator’s Cookbook. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.
Average Rating 4
only on chapter 3....
So far I am enjoying the book....of course this would not be the case if it hadn't been for BN's Nook Books website.
Everything was uncomplicated....perfect for the not so avid readers such as myself! It actually makes me want to finish my book/s just to justify ordering more! (-:
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Very, Very interesting book
Reminds me of an old TV series called &Connections& that traced the link between certain discoveries to todays technological developments. This book has been adapted into a PBS series on TV. If you like history AND technology this is a MUST read book.
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A corollary to the modern perception that every event, however m
A corollary to the modern perception that every event, however minor, has an impact, however minor, on every other event in space and future time, is that there must be some hierarchy of influence of any given event upon another. &That hierarchy most probably follows some type of &normal& or si i.e., if we could quantify the impact of all events on any given event, then there would be a very large number of events with little impact and very few events that have significant or notable impact. &The task on the abundant side of the curve is impossible. &The task on the scarce side of the curve has become the subject of its own genre of very readable and very interesting &connection& books. &How one selects among that rarified few of important influences and decide which are truly critical is what distinguishes one story from another.In How We Got to Now, Steven Johnson explores six historical themes or threads - Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time and Light - which he attempts to elevate to positions of prominence in explaining the evolution of today's culture and technology. &This too little book complements the television series of the same name.There is not much that is new here - at least portions of each of Johnson's stories have appeared more than once elsewhere. &What does distinguish this book from others is the author's attempt to fathom the meaning behind the broad connections of a particular innovation with all others. &Unfortunately the author's exploration of this connections is simply too fleeting to provide much insight. &In addition, the author's connections are sometimes strained. &For example, right from the start on the subject of glass, Johnson alludes to the early discovery of Libyan desert glass. &But that discovery did not lead to the glass makers of Rome or Venice. &The manufacture of glass arose from observations of the effects of very hot fire on ash and sand - the Egyptians who discovered Libyan glass had no way of knowing that it formed as a result of an extraterrestrial, high temperature impact.The book has a limited set of Notes which, at least in the eBook version reviewed here, are in a format that is not particularly scholarly - references are only made at the end of the book back to pages within the text. &The Bibliography is adequate with the caveat that web references are more often than not dated by the time a book is published. &A good Index and a nice set of credited illustrations complete this text.Richard R. Pardi
Environmental Science William Paterson University
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There was a t v series before about connections
Does this mention who invented soap
the romans had baths
and plumbing but no soap
what about candles and
horseshoes
without underware would we have had paper.? Why doesnt this list subjects so dont waste time
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