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By the time you reach the end of Steven Johnson’s latest book on innovation, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, you are apt to find yourself exhilarated and a little bit fatigued. It’s a case of literary jet lag.
Have you ever wondered why flash photography led to antipoverty programmes at the turn of the 20th century? Or how the invention of the laser contributed to the decline of mom-and-pop stores? How We Got to Now is full of nifty connections like these - stories that illustrate obscure chains of causality that shaped the modern world. Johnson shows this meandering journey, and what sort of cultural waves ripple outward as we move ahead.
Thematic flow
The release of this book coincided with a PBS series of the same name, and the text builds on some of Johnson’s research from his previous works, including Where
Good Ideas Come From. Here, though, Johnson is not composing an etiology of particular inventions, but doing something broader and more imaginative. How We Got to Now divides technological history into six thematic areas - glass, cold, sound,
cleanliness, time and light. Admittedly, this gave me pause; themes can be pretty dreary as a structural conceit. But the ones here function more like departure points for sets of skillfully interwoven narratives. To take the example of glass, we begin with a formation of molten silica, probably by a crashing comet, 26 million years ago in the Libyan desert. In due course, we move to the glassmakers of Venice in the 13th century.
And then things get more interesting. Monks labouring over religious manuscripts find that curved pieces of glass can aid their vision; a few centuries later,
spectacles become popular, because parts of the European population, in response to the invention of the printing press, discover they need corrective lenses to read these new things called books. In time come telescopes and microscopes, which bring forth revolutionary ideas about stars and germs. Fibreglass eventually arrives, and soon we figure out how to make fibre optic glass cables, which carry pulses of laser light and zip petabytes of data around the globe. See what I mean about the
jet lag?
Cultural observations
Enjoyable as this historical journey is, I particularly like the cultural observations Johnson draws along the way. The invention and refinement of the glass-making process, for example, also led to the production of high-quality mirrors. This helped painters like Rembrandt create startling works of self-portraiture; also, it coincided with a new generation of writers, Shakespeare included, willing to examine their characters’ interior lives with unprecedented scrutiny.
“The mirror helped invent the modern self,” Johnson asserts. What’s more, “it set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less trans-
formative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered.”
This connection might strike readers as too reductive, but I reacted with delight rather than skepticism. No doubt it helps that Johnson has a deft and persuasive touch, as well as an aversion to fist-pounding; often, he seems to leave the door open a crack for reasonable dis-agreements. And I had a few of those, too. Still, I never doubted the logic of his larger narrative point - to help us see how deeply intertwined our scientific and social worlds really are, and how a broader appreciation for causes and effects (the growth of the Sun Belt, in this case, ultimately leading to Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victories) can arrange the noise of history into a more coherent tune.
Connecting evolution
As it happens, Johnson has a handy phrase for what he’s seeking to examine with this kind of historical approach: hummingbird effects. He points to the evolution of
flowers, which over eons developed new colours and rich nectar - which in turn
influenced the development of other parts of their ecosystem.
As he notes, “Bees and other insects evolved the sensory tools to see and be drawn to flowers, just as the flowers evolved the properties that attract bees.”
Meanwhile, the hummingbird evolved a special form of hovering flight that made the extraction of flower nectar easier. So here we’ve leapt from A to B to C - or as Johnson puts it: “The sexual reproduction strategies of plants end up shaping the design of a hummingbird’s wings.”
Some of Johnson’s observations, sprinkled throughout the text, prove more thought-provoking than others. At times, the compact anecdotes and swift pacing, while no doubt well-suited to a television series, make some of his stories feel too breezy for their own good.
But in fairness to Johnson, it’s the social triggers that so successfully propel his
narrative, which helps explain why his work on innovation, along with that of writers like Walter Isaacson, is now pushing technological history into the non-fiction mainstream.
Collective innovation
Johnson is especially adept at dismantling the myths of technology creation that seem to distort our political and economic discourse.
At various points in How We Got to Now, he helps us see how innovation is
almost never the result of a lone genius experiencing a sudden voilà! moment; it’s a complex process involving a dizzying number of inputs, individuals, setbacks and (sometimes) accidents. Also, it’s hardly the exclusive domain of private-sector
entrepreneurs. Important ideas are often driven by academics, governments and philanthropists.
Above all, though, technological histories like this help us reckon with how much we miss by focusing too exclusively on economic, cultural and political history. Not that any one domain is superior to another - only that Johnson proves you can’t explain one without the other.
He does seem to suggest that technological history may have an advantage in one regard: It not only helps readers better see where we’ve been, but urges us to think harder about where we’re going. By any stretch, 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.