How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World

*Brushes cobwebs from blog* - Okay, here's another super late book review of How We Got To Now - Size Innovations That Made the Modern World.

The title is misleading because Steven Johnson actually discusses six concepts that seeded innovation and invention.  His six concepts are: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light, and I'm pretty sure you don't invent "time".  (However, you can redefine it, measure it, and apply it to concrete objects.)

Steven Johnson's writing is enthusiastic and sometimes all over the place, like a favorite science teacher or history professor who rambles on and on about how people did crazy things FOR SCIENCE and now we're all better off.  While he tries to keep a linear narrative to describe inventions chronologically, he goes off on seemingly random tangents that eventually merge back into the major innovative theme.  For example, while sandy glass was inserted into windows of wealthy Roman houses, Venetian immigrants from Turkey were busy discovering cristallo glass in Murano, Italy, and monasteries were using pieces of glass as reading lenses - geniuses in diverse settings striving to solve different problems in different parts of the world, all with glass as the same solution.

It's a pretty fun and actually exciting read because Johnson's passion is contagious, and as long as you hang in there and try to follow his train of thought, you'll end up geeking out with him. He does concede in the beginning that he'll end up all over the place in his pursuit of linking cause and effect: "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 review ends here, but if you're REALLY BORED, read on...

Some cool facts I've learned that I may one day use to win Pub Trivia

Glass:

• The first traces of glass were discovered in the Libyan desert, where the temperature is so hot that it melts, tempers, and cools sand into shards of natural glass.
• After the sacking of Constantinople - glassmakers from Turkey sailed away and settled in Venice, but were sent into exile because they kept burning down the neighborhood with their furnace issues.  Guess where they were sent - the island of Murano, where its glass is revered worldwide today. Angelo Barovier invents "cristallo" aka modern glass.
• Glassmakers in Northern Italy shaped pieces of glass into small disks, placed each one in a frame, and joined them together - "roidi da ogli" which translates to "disks for the eyes". They looked like lentil beans, or "lentes"... eventually called "lenses".

Sound:

• Arcy-sur-Cure cave in France is where the second-oldest cave paintings known are located. It is believed that the paintings and red dots are intentionally placed at sonically acoustic 'hotspots' in the cave, suggesting a primitive form of "sound engineering" when they chanted and sang while facing the paintings.
• The first transatlantic line that enabled a call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956. (It's more recent than I thought it would be!)

Time:

• Quartz crystals are made to vibrate at a remarkably stable frequency due to their piezoelectricity".
• The Clock of the Long Now: it is a ten-thousand-year clock, built to promote long-term thinking (the year hand ticks once a year, the century hand ticks once every 100, and a cuckoo will come out at the millennium for the next 10,000 years).  We currently measure our time in seconds and are chained to the concept of seconds with a narrow focus on the short term.  The Clock of the Long Now exists as a reminder of the big picture.

Light:

• Candles used to be made from spermaceti, the 500 gallons of fluid in a sperm whale's brain cavity. The spermaceti candles were preferred to tallow because they gave off a brighter, whiter light.
• Neon lighting is the result of the ionization of isolated gas (argon, mercury) and an electrical current.