Johnson lays out the Six Innovations That Made the Modern World one-by-one, creating quite a compelling narrative. As to his reason for writing the unorthodox history book, he states,
"This is a history worth telling, in part, because it allows us to see a world we generally take for granted with fresh eyes. Most of us in the developed world don't pause to think how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera. Thanks to air-conditioning, many of us live comfortably in climates that would have been intolerable just fifty years ago. 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: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so that we can enjoy those luxuries today without a second thought, without even thinking of them as luxuries in the first place...we are indebted to those people every bit as much as, if not more than, we are to the kings and conquerors and magnates of traditional history.
But the other reason to write this kind of history is that these innovations have set in motion a much wider array of changes in society than you might reasonably expect. 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." (p. 2)Glass: Johnson imagines a time in the distant past in which sand was superheated, perhaps by a comet, melted, and then cooled into a previously unknown substance that has fascinated mankind ever since: glass. This fascinating material was initially used, as so many new products are, by the extremely wealthy. It was the stuff of kings. But as typically happens, merchants found ways to make it cheaper and more easily accessible to the masses. We got bottles, drinking glasses, and jewelry. Eventually spectacles would change the world right about the time they were needed: the days of Johannes Gutenberg. These lenses gave way to microscopes, telescopes, and cameras. The possibilities were endless. Mirrors changed how we see ourselves by allowing us to see ourselves as others see us. New societal norms became necessary. Today glass powers the world of Silicon Valley. Computers, the World Wide Web, iPhones, and every technology we hold near and dear are dependent on glass. This simple, decorative tchotchke of the wealthy changed the world.
Cold: Today we take such simplicities as ice and cool air for granted, but for most of human history, these luxuries were unavailable, even to the extremely wealthy. As late as the early 1800, inventors and investors struggled to store and ship what nature provided bountifully in the winter: ice. While the wealthy would carve out a large chunk of lake ice and store it underground in a cellar, it would hardly last the spring. Entrepreneurs and innovators made and lost fortunes developing ways to harvest, store, and ship ice. Once the process was perfected an entirely new market opened up. It was now possible to ship meat across the country before it spoiled. New England ice met up with MidWest cattle. Placing ice on top of rail cars created "refrigerated cars." Yet in Florida, hurricanes made shipment of New England ice problematic and undependable. One physician who desired "refrigerated" hospital rooms in order to cool malarial patients decided to create a machine to produce ice. While his simple machine worked, he had no head for business and lost all trying to monetize it. However, "the knowledge of thermodynamics and the basic chemistry o fair, combined with the economic fortunes being made in the ice trade, made artificial cold ripe for invention." (p. 66) By the 1950 everyday families had the product in their home. Meanwhile Clarence Birdseye, living in Labrador, Canada in 1912 had the opposite problem. Everything was frozen whether he wanted it or not. Fresh food was impossible to come by. With the new field of artificial refrigeration, Birdseye developed a process of "flash-freezing" that would preserve the freshness of food. A similar process allows for the freezing of eggs, sperm, and embryos. The refrigeration process began to be applied to air as well. "Air Conditioning" as it was called allowed previously uninhabitable areas to become boomtowns. Americans were now free to live anywhere. Cold, far from being a frivolous luxury, has become indispensable to modern life.
Sound: For most of human history, all we could do was try to amplify sound. Recording and playing back were hardly dreamt of. In fact, the first person to record sound, two decades before Edison, was so impressed by his feat, he never even considered that the parchments could be used to reconvert back to sound waves. It was the genius of Edison who combined recording and playback. But even the genius of Edison was short-sighted. He imagined that the best use of his phonograph was in the form of audio letters. A sort of early "voice mail." When Alexander Graham Bell tinkered with the technology, he too failed to grasp the significance of his "telephone." He imagined the best use was in transmitting music across distances. Both had it exactly backwards as history would reveal. Eventually thanks to a partnership with the government, these sound recordings would be converted to digital form, making them far more secure and free from interference. But just prior to this, inventors had been tinkering with the idea of sending sound through the air, without reliance on wires. Radio was born, initially to broadcast Morse Code, "wireless telegraphs," and shortly thereafter music and the human voice. This led, unexpectedly to the rise in the popularity of music previously confined to small ethnic ghettos, jazz. Moving what was exclusively Black culture into the mainstream would also lead to movements promoting civil rights for Blacks. The same technology that made radio possible meant thousands could hear the words of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when he used a microphone to speak to the masses. Knowing that sound moved in waves also led to the invention of undersea and eventually above ground RADAR, as well as that friend to all expectant parents, ultrasound. All of these technologies that resulted from the initial understanding of how the human ear processed sound have been used for ill and good. Such is the story of all technology.
Clean: In the not so distant past, waste removal was a major concern. Cities like Chicago, built on very flat land and without the technology to tunnel deep underground intuited that the waste collecting in the streets was contributing to the disease in the city. In Chicago, the plan involved permanently jacking up the buildings and installing waste pipes underneath. Future buildings would lay pipes before anything else. But the waste solution created another problem. The drinking water became polluted with the waste being poured into it. Germ theory and even ideas we take for granted like the benefits of basic cleanliness were unknown in much of the nineteenth century. The idea that disease could be caused by invisible organisms living in the water had to be discovered and promulgated. It seemed simply too far fetched. This is where one of the previously discussed inventions plays a role: glass lenses on microscopes. Being able to see the harmful bacteria gave researchers an idea about how to kill it. Chlorine would come to the rescue. But convincing skeptical scientists to put the acrid smelling solution in drinking water would be a tough sell. So a New Jersey doctor, when given the charge to clean up the city's water supply, secretly and without permission, added chlorine to the water. He knew small amounts of the poison would not kill a human but would destroy the bacteria. The resulting increase in public health proved him right. This, of course opened up a whole new world. Pools. Which led to revealing women's bathing suits. Which led to images of cultural beauty that affect us today. All because of chlorine. Today the challenge is to bring hygiene to places where clean water and electricity may not be readily available. Solar powered toilets to the rescue, using microchips which themselves require ultra clean rooms for manufacture and use ultra pure water in the process. Clean has certainly changed our lives tremendously.
Time: For most of human history, time was calculated by tracking the movements of the heavenly bodies. A conference in 1967 set out to create as system of tracking time and weight that was much more accurate. Mechanical clocks of the Middle Ages were notoriously unreliable, but a quick look at a sundial could help recalibrate them. However, at the time, measuring exact time did not seem necessary. But once the age of exploration began, it became more important to be able to keep an accurate record of time in order to determine how far you had traveled. Based on Galileo's observation of swinging lanterns, a pendulum clock was created that could keep time far more accurately than anything before and open up whole new worlds to explorers. Of course the reason for the exploring largely centered on trade and the movement of raw and finished materials. These were produced in factories, and factories simply could not work without accurate time measuring abilities. The two epochs went hand in glove. Of course this greatly impacted the workers who now had to show up for work "on-time" and regulate their lives, not by the movements of the sun, but by the hands of a clock. By the mid-nineteenth century everyone had a clock...in their pocket. Humans had become disciplined to function according to the relentless ticking of a watch. Yet as railroads begin to criss-cross the country, passengers and cargo moved into different local times. How in the world to standardize what had never before concerned humans, moving faster than the sun? England solved this problem by putting the entire country on one time—Greenwich Mean Time. But England is a small island and the citizens could handle variations in "noon." America, spanning a continent, needed another solution. The railroads took the lead and established the four time "zones" we have today: Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. In 1884, the entire world was divided into time zones. Timekeeping technology eventually progressed from pendulum clocks to the quartz clocks necessary for even more precision. But emerging technology required even further precision—enter the "atomic clock" based on the behavior of atoms. Time went from trying to accurately measure years, to days, to hours, to the seemingly frivolous seconds, to nanoseconds. Today orbiting atomic clocks enable Google Maps to tell you exactly where you are, because they measure time. Once again, a relatively simple concept has completely changed our world.
Light: Once again, for most of human history, we labored without a device, now completely taken for granted—artificial light. The best most could achieve was a dim, smoky tallow candle. But in 1712, the first sperm whale was captured and to everyone's surprise, above his brain was a cavern filled with milky oil. To this day, no one knows quite the reason for the oil, but the people of that day discovered that it could be used to manufacture candles, which far surpassed the tallow candles in efficiency. But harpooning whales was difficult and dangerous. Fortunately a new source of oil was discovered under the ground. Lamps powered by fossil fuels changed our sleeping habits and led to the introduction of magazines because we could read them after the sun set and the work day ended. An interesting economic study shows that under tallow candles the average worker earned 10 minutes of light with every hour worked. Today, an hour of work can buy 300 days of light. Quite an impressive efficiency boost. But that required another leap in technology, the electric light bulb. While Edison is rightly credited with the invention, like all technologies, there are multiple chefs in the kitchen, so to speak. The modern light bulb is the result of several people and groups hard efforts at trial and error. But the electric light bulb didn't solve all the lighting problems. Archeologists working in dark pyramids in Egypt and wanting to photograph the secrets they uncovered had to come up with a way to momentarily light the dark chambers. Mixing magnesium and ordinary gunpowder created a mini-explosion and provided the burst of light the photographers needed. The flash was born. But this technology was not just good in Egypt. Jacob Riis took it into the dirty slums of New York and showed the world How the Other Half Lives. This in turn inspired the Progressive Reforms and a new political ideology took hold. Other forms of lighting continued to be invented, notably the neon lights that created Las Vegas. Science fiction writers introduce "rays" into the consciousness and scientist were inspired to create lasers. Rather than used as killer "death-rays" this ubiquitous device scans groceries and performs surgeries. Someday, we hope lasers will lead to a limitless source of energy through nuclear fusion. From the time of "Let there be light" until today, the quest for light continues.
This fascinating book is certainly worth a read if only to make the reader grateful for so much of what we take for granted. Additionally, it's definitely worth watching the process of world-changing inventions take place. No one, in any of the above-named "Six Innovations That Made the Modern World" could have envisioned the far-reaching effects of their discoveries. We live in a different world thanks to their risk taking and hard work.
