How We Got to Now

How We Got to Now Plot Summary

Introduction

History is often told through the lens of kings, wars, and political movements, but there is another perspective—one that examines how physical materials and technological innovations have quietly shaped human civilization. From the transparent mysteries of glass to the revolutionary impact of artificial cold, the history of human progress can be traced through our relationship with specific materials and technologies that fundamentally altered how we live, work, and understand our world. This perspective reveals surprising connections across time and disciplines. We discover how the development of glass lenses led not only to spectacles but eventually to microscopes that revealed the microbial world, revolutionizing medicine. We see how the ability to record sound would transform not just entertainment but politics, warfare, and social movements. By examining these material transformations, we gain insight into the often overlooked foundations of modern life—the physical innovations that made possible everything from global trade networks to instantaneous worldwide communication. This approach offers a fresh understanding of our past, valuable to anyone interested in how ordinary materials have extraordinary impacts, and how technological breakthroughs in one area often trigger unexpected revolutions in seemingly unrelated domains.

Chapter 1: The Transparent Revolution: Glass and the Extension of Human Vision

In the thirteenth century, something remarkable happened on the small Venetian island of Murano. Glassmakers who had settled there after fleeing Constantinople began creating a new type of glass—cristallo—that was clearer than anything previously made. This innovation, perfected by the glassmaker Angelo Barovier, would eventually transform human civilization in ways that extended far beyond decorative glass vessels. What made Murano special wasn't just the quality of its glass but the concentration of expertise. After the city authorities confined glassmakers to the island in 1291 (ostensibly for fire safety), they unwittingly created one of history's first innovation hubs. Isolated but interconnected, these artisans developed techniques and shared knowledge across generations, perfecting their craft through what economists now call "information spillover." The island became an early example of how geographic concentration can accelerate technological development—similar to modern Silicon Valley. The true revolution began when this expertise in glass merged with the spread of literacy following Gutenberg's printing press in the 1440s. As books became more available, people discovered they were farsighted—they couldn't see small text clearly. This created unprecedented demand for spectacles, which had been luxury items but were now needed by a growing reading public. Spectacle makers across Europe multiplied, and soon their expertise in manipulating light through curved glass led to even more transformative inventions: microscopes and telescopes. These instruments fundamentally altered humanity's perception of reality. Galileo pointed his telescope skyward in 1609 and discovered Jupiter's moons, challenging the Earth-centered model of the universe. Later, Robert Hooke used the microscope to reveal the cellular structure of life, coining the term "cell" after observing cork under magnification. These weren't merely scientific curiosities—they represented a radical extension of human vision into realms previously invisible, upending centuries of understanding about our place in the cosmos and the nature of life itself. Glass would continue its transformative journey through human history. In the nineteenth century, glass mirrors became common enough to change human self-perception, contributing to new concepts of individuality that influenced everything from art to political systems. By the twentieth century, glass fibers were enabling the information revolution through fiber-optic cables that now form the physical backbone of the internet. What began as a curiosity—a material that could be both solid yet transparent—became the literal lens through which we perceive and communicate with our world, extending human vision from the microscopic cell to the distant stars.

Chapter 2: The Cold Conquest: From Ice Trade to Climate Control

In the summer of 1805, a young Boston entrepreneur named Frederic Tudor wrote in his diary that he and his brother had "determined to get together what property we have and embark in the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies." This seemingly preposterous idea—shipping frozen New England lake water to tropical countries—would eventually transform global trade, food systems, and ultimately human settlement patterns. Tudor's early voyages were disasters. When his ship arrived in Martinique with its frozen cargo, locals had no interest in ice—they literally had no concept of what to do with it. But Tudor persisted, gradually developing both the market and the technology. He discovered that sawdust, a waste product from lumber mills, made an excellent insulator. By packing ice blocks in sawdust and storing them in double-walled icehouses, Tudor could preserve ice for months. After nearly a decade of failures and even imprisonment for debt, Tudor's ice trade finally became profitable by the 1820s. By mid-century, his ships were delivering New England ice to India, China, and South America. The ice trade triggered far-reaching changes in American society. It transformed eating habits as people gained access to refrigerated foods. More significantly, it revolutionized the meat industry. In Chicago during the 1870s, Gustavus Swift and others developed refrigerated railcars that could transport freshly slaughtered beef across the country. This innovation centralized meat processing in Chicago, creating the massive stockyards and slaughterhouses immortalized in Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle." The environmental historian Donald Miller called this development "the most powerful environmental force in transforming the American landscape since the Ice Age glaciers began their final retreat." The next great breakthrough came from artificial refrigeration. In 1851, Dr. John Gorrie, a physician in Florida trying to cool hospital rooms for fever patients, patented a mechanical ice-making machine. Though Gorrie died in poverty (partly due to smear campaigns by the natural ice industry), his invention paved the way for mechanical refrigeration. By the early twentieth century, Clarence Birdseye had developed flash-freezing techniques for food after observing Inuit ice fishing practices in Labrador. His innovation preserved food's texture and flavor, eventually revolutionizing the American diet with frozen foods. The conquest of cold reached its apotheosis with air conditioning. Developed by Willis Carrier in 1902 (initially to control humidity in a printing plant), air conditioning transformed how and where people lived. After World War II, as home units became affordable, population patterns shifted dramatically. Cities in America's "Sun Belt"—previously limited by brutally hot summers—experienced explosive growth. Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, and Miami became major metropolitan areas. This demographic shift altered American politics as electoral power moved south and west. Today, air conditioning continues to reshape global urbanization, enabling the growth of tropical megacities like Bangkok, Dubai, and Singapore—a pattern that represents perhaps the largest climate-driven migration in human history. The conquest of cold demonstrates how innovations can trigger unforeseen transformations. What began as Tudor's seemingly impractical scheme to ship ice to the tropics ultimately allowed humans to reshape their environment and settlement patterns on a global scale, defying natural climate limitations and creating new vulnerabilities in our dependence on artificial cooling.

Chapter 3: The Sonic Evolution: Recording Sound and Reshaping Communication

In 1857, a French printer named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a remarkable invention called the "phonautograph." This device could capture sound waves and etch their patterns onto soot-blackened paper. Scott had achieved something extraordinary—the first recording of sound in human history. Yet remarkably, he never intended his machine to play back these recordings. He imagined people would learn to "read" sound waves visually, the way they read text. Scott's blind spot—forgetting to include playback—illustrates how innovations often emerge through unexpected pathways. It would take Thomas Edison's phonograph, invented twenty years later in 1877, to complete the circuit by both recording and reproducing sound. Even then, the inventors misunderstood how their creations would be used. Edison envisioned the phonograph primarily for business dictation and "audio letters" sent through mail, while Alexander Graham Bell imagined the telephone would primarily be used to broadcast music performances to distant listeners. They had it exactly backward—phonographs became music players, while telephones became communication devices. The ability to record and transmit sound triggered profound changes across society. After the invention of radio amplification through vacuum tubes (pioneered by Lee De Forest around 1906), radio broadcasts in the 1920s helped popularize jazz music nationally, exposing white America to African-American culture in unprecedented ways. As Martin Luther King Jr. later observed, "Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music." The technology that had begun with Scott's curiosity about sound waves had become a vehicle for cultural and political transformation. Sound technology's impact extended far beyond entertainment. Vacuum tubes also enabled public address systems that transformed political gatherings. For the first time in history, a single voice could address tens of thousands of people simultaneously. This new form of mass communication was exploited by political movements across the spectrum—from Hitler's massive rallies at Nuremberg to King's "I Have a Dream" speech. The nature of political persuasion fundamentally changed as leaders could directly address masses without intermediaries. Perhaps most surprisingly, sound technology revolutionized how we see the world. In 1912, after the sinking of the Titanic, inventor Reginald Fessenden developed sonar—using sound waves to detect underwater objects. This technology not only transformed naval warfare but eventually led to ultrasound imaging, allowing doctors to visualize a developing fetus in the womb. Similarly, during World War II, Bell Labs developed digital sampling technology to secure military communications, laying groundwork for modern digital communications and computing. The evolution of sound recording illustrates how technologies often yield their most profound impacts in domains far from their original purpose. What began as a curious method to visualize sound waves ultimately reshaped politics, medicine, warfare, and even our fundamental understanding of life before birth. By extending human hearing across time and space, these technologies created new forms of connection, influence, and knowledge that would have been unimaginable to their inventors.

Chapter 4: The Sanitation Breakthrough: Fighting Disease Through Clean Water

In December 1856, a middle-aged engineer named Ellis Chesbrough traveled across the Atlantic to tour the great cities of Europe. Unlike typical American travelers who came to admire cathedrals and palaces, Chesbrough had a different destination in mind: he came to study sewers. As Chicago's newly appointed chief engineer, he was tasked with solving an existential problem for the rapidly growing frontier city—how to manage human waste in a place built on perfectly flat, impermeable clay. Chicago's sanitation crisis was dire. The city had tripled in population during the 1850s, reaching nearly 100,000 residents with no effective waste disposal system. Streets became channels of filth, especially after rainstorms when the nonporous ground couldn't absorb water. Disease ran rampant, with cholera killing dozens daily during the 1854 epidemic. The solution Chesbrough devised was audacious: if Chicago couldn't build downward due to its flat terrain, it would build upward. Beginning in 1858, the entire city was literally raised—buildings were lifted on jackscrews while workers constructed sewers underneath them, then streets were raised with landfill from the Chicago River. This herculean feat of engineering created America's first comprehensive sewer system. Yet sewers alone didn't solve the problem of disease. Throughout the nineteenth century, cities continued to suffer epidemics because sewage typically emptied into the same water bodies used for drinking water. The missing piece was understanding what actually caused these diseases. When John Snow mapped cholera deaths in London during the 1854 outbreak, he proved the disease spread through contaminated water, not through "miasma" or bad air as commonly believed. Later, scientists like Robert Koch used newly improved microscopes to identify specific bacteria responsible for diseases like cholera and typhoid. The crucial breakthrough came in 1908 when a New Jersey physician named John Leal took an extraordinary risk. Without permission or public announcement, he began adding chlorine to Jersey City's water supply. Though potentially poisonous in large amounts, Leal had determined that small quantities of chlorine would kill bacteria without harming humans. His unauthorized experiment worked spectacularly—waterborne diseases declined dramatically. When challenged in court, Leal defended his actions: "It has never been tried... but it will be used many times in the future." He was right. Within decades, water chlorination spread worldwide, becoming one of public health's greatest triumphs. The impact of clean water systems on human civilization can hardly be overstated. Research by economists David Cutler and Grant Miller found that clean water technologies reduced total mortality in American cities by 43 percent between 1900 and 1936, with even greater reductions in infant mortality. For the first time in history, urban centers could grow beyond a few hundred thousand people without being decimated by disease. Cities that had been death traps became engines of innovation and prosperity. The massive infrastructure projects needed to provide clean water and remove waste also created a template for the modern city—a system supported by invisible networks underground. The triumph over waterborne disease represents one of humanity's greatest achievements, yet it remains incomplete. Today, more than three billion people worldwide still lack access to safe water and basic sanitation. The challenge now is bringing these technologies to rapidly growing informal settlements in developing countries, possibly by bypassing traditional infrastructure with innovative approaches like self-contained toilet systems that don't require sewers. The history of sanitation reminds us that some of our most important innovations aren't flashy consumer technologies but basic systems that enable human thriving at unprecedented scales.

Chapter 5: The Temporal Precision: How Accurate Timekeeping Structured Society

In 1583, a nineteen-year-old student named Galileo Galilei attended prayers at the cathedral in Pisa. While his peers focused on worship, Galileo became fascinated by the swinging of an altar lamp suspended from the ceiling. He noticed something remarkable—no matter how wide the arc of its swing, the lamp seemed to take the same amount of time to complete each oscillation. To confirm this observation, he measured the lamp's movements against his own pulse. This simple insight would eventually transform humanity's relationship with time. Galileo's observation led him to develop the first pendulum clock decades later, providing a far more accurate measure of time than had previously been possible. Earlier mechanical clocks could lose twenty minutes per day, but pendulum clocks were accurate to within a minute per week. This leap in precision occurred just as global exploration was creating urgent demand for better timekeeping. Ship navigators needed accurate clocks to determine longitude at sea—a problem so important that governments offered enormous prizes for its solution. By the early eighteenth century, pendulum clocks had become common in European cities, marking a profound shift in human experience. The new precision of timekeeping was essential to the industrial revolution. Factory owners needed to coordinate the actions of hundreds of workers with the mechanical tempo of machines. The historian E.P. Thompson documented how industrialization required a profound reshaping of human perception of time. In agricultural communities, people measured time by tasks—how long it took to milk a cow or plow a field—and work patterns were irregular. Factory discipline demanded a new "time-discipline" that divided the day into abstract units. The invention of "clocking in" at factories, the standardization of working hours, and the concept of hourly wages all emerged from this new temporal regime. As Thompson noted, "Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent." Time standardization accelerated with railroads, which required coordinated schedules across vast distances. Until the 1880s, every town in America kept its own local time based on the sun's position, creating chaos for rail travelers. In 1883, railroad engineer William Allen developed the four standard time zones still used in the United States today. On November 18 of that year, America experienced "the day of two noons" as local times were synchronized to the new standard. Within a year, the entire globe was divided into time zones based on Greenwich Mean Time. The quest for temporal precision continued with revolutionary new timekeeping technologies. In the 1920s, scientists discovered that quartz crystals vibrate at remarkably stable frequencies when electrified, enabling clocks accurate to a thousandth of a second per day. These quartz oscillators became essential to computers, providing the timing signals that coordinate billions of operations per second. By the 1950s, atomic clocks measuring the vibrations of cesium atoms achieved accuracy to billionths of a second. In 1967, scientists officially redefined the second in terms of atomic oscillations rather than the earth's rotation, which had proven surprisingly irregular. The revolution in timekeeping has shaped modern life in countless ways. Global positioning systems (GPS) rely on atomic clocks in satellites to triangulate positions. Financial markets depend on nanosecond precision for transactions. Yet this same period has also given us new tools to measure deep time through radiocarbon dating, allowing us to understand prehistory with unprecedented accuracy. As humanity enters the digital age, we live simultaneously in ever-shorter increments of time and with awareness of ever-longer timescales—from the nanosecond to the millennium—a temporal perspective unimaginable to our ancestors.

Chapter 6: The Illumination Journey: From Whale Oil to Electric Power

For thousands of years, artificial light remained remarkably stagnant as a technology. After the mastery of fire, humans relied primarily on candles and oil lamps for indoor lighting until the nineteenth century. These sources produced meager light, consumed expensive fuels, created noxious smoke, and posed constant fire hazards. This limitation profoundly shaped human experience—from work patterns to sleep cycles. Historical evidence suggests that before modern lighting, people typically slept in two distinct four-hour phases separated by a wakeful period in the middle of the night, a pattern disrupted only when artificial light became abundant. The first major breakthrough in artificial lighting came from an unlikely source: the head of a sperm whale. Around 1712, New England whalers discovered that the massive head cavity of these marine mammals contained a waxy substance called spermaceti that produced brilliant, clean-burning candles. Spermaceti candles offered light several times brighter than tallow candles without the offensive smoke and smell. By the late eighteenth century, they had become the premium lighting technology, sparking a whaling industry that would eventually hunt nearly 300,000 sperm whales to the brink of extinction. The true lighting revolution began with the electric lightbulb, though its development followed a more complex path than the "Eureka!" moment commonly attributed to Thomas Edison. Numerous inventors had been working on incandescent lighting for decades before Edison, including Joseph Swan who demonstrated working electric lamps a year before Edison. What distinguished Edison's approach was his systematic research process and his recognition that a practical lighting system required more than just bulbs—it needed a complete infrastructure of generators, distribution wires, and meters. When Edison illuminated Manhattan's Pearl Street district in 1882, he wasn't just demonstrating a superior bulb; he was unveiling an integrated system that made electric lighting practical. Edison's workshop at Menlo Park also pioneered an organizational approach that would become crucial to modern innovation: the research and development laboratory. His team, known as the "muckers," combined diverse skills from mechanics to mathematics. They received equity in Edison's companies rather than just salaries, creating alignment between individual creativity and organizational success. This model—interdisciplinary teams with financial incentives tied to outcomes—would later become standard in technology companies from Bell Labs to Google. The social impact of artificial lighting was profound. Electric streetlights transformed urban experience, extending activity into the night and reducing crime. Photographer Jacob Riis used artificial flash photography in the 1880s to document the squalid conditions of New York tenements, creating powerful images that sparked social reforms. Mass electrification brought artificial light into homes, extending productive hours and enabling new forms of leisure. Electric illumination altered human settlement patterns, making previously uninhabitable regions livable and changing architectural design by reducing dependence on natural light. The journey of artificial light continues with new innovations. Neon lighting transformed commercial landscapes in the twentieth century, particularly in places like Las Vegas. Lasers, once considered primarily weapons in science fiction, became essential tools for everything from bar code scanning to fiber-optic communication. Today, scientists at facilities like the National Ignition Facility use lasers to create nuclear fusion—essentially producing artificial suns—potentially leading to clean, limitless energy. What began with dangerous, smoky candles may culminate in solving humanity's energy challenges, demonstrating how a seemingly simple innovation—controlling light—can ultimately transform civilization in ways its pioneers could never have imagined.

Summary

Throughout history, material transformations have driven profound social changes through complex chains of cause and effect that often defy conventional historical narratives. When glass lenses made spectacles possible, they unexpectedly led to microscopes that revealed the microbial world, revolutionizing medicine. When refrigeration was developed to preserve food, it enabled population shifts that transformed political power. These technological breakthroughs repeatedly demonstrate what might be called the "hummingbird effect"—innovations in one field triggering transformations in completely different domains, just as flowers evolving to attract insects ultimately transformed the wings of hummingbirds. These material innovations offer important lessons for understanding technological and social change today. First, they remind us that progress rarely follows a single genius's vision but emerges from networks of knowledge and experimentation that accumulate over time. The most transformative breakthroughs often come from interdisciplinary connections—when knowledge from different fields unexpectedly combines. Second, they suggest that cultivating innovation requires both specialized expertise and opportunities for cross-pollination between disciplines. The glassmakers isolated on Murano, Edison's diverse team at Menlo Park, and the scientists at Bell Labs all thrived because they combined deep expertise with exposure to different perspectives. As we face contemporary challenges like climate change and emerging technologies, this history suggests our solutions will likely come not from isolated specialists but from unexpected connections across boundaries of discipline, geography, and perspective.

About Author

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Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Wonderland, How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You.He's the host of the podcast American Innovations, and the host and co-creator of the PBS and BBC series How We Got to Now. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, and Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.

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