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    How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
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    How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
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    How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
    Audiobook6 hours

    How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

    Written by Steven Johnson

    Narrated by George Newbern

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In this illustrated history, 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 virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateSep 30, 2014
    ISBN9780698181892
    Unavailable
    How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
    Author

    Steven Johnson

    Steven Johnson is the internationally bestselling author of several books, including How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map and Everything Bad is Good for You. The founder of a variety of influential websites, he is 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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    Reviews for How We Got to Now

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      5643. How We Got to Now Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, by Steven Johnson (read 9 Aug 2019) This book, published in 2014, gives the six innovations as glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light. With good insight he discusses developments in each of those areas which have led to the good things we now possess. Some of what he says is insightful and thought-provoking. For instance, the ability to keep food cold and air conditioning have led to the huge growth of population in warm areas of the earth, and the sanitary sewer systems have reduced the awful death rates that prevailed well into the19th century, simply by realizing that germs cause sickness and death. Some of what he discusses is surprising. He reminds me of Bill Bryson at times but Johnson is less superficial than Bryson I was surprised how much I enjoyed at least the earlier part of the book, which is basically an optimistic book.
    • 4/5
      A case could be made for other innovations, but Johnson does make his case well for these six (glass, cold, sound, clean, time, light). These are presented a lot like James Burke's Connections, except that Johnson's direct linear and singular approach, as opposed to Burke's butterfly effect approach, is often more acceptable (to me, anyway...not that I don't enjoy Burke's forays.)

      Nicely written popular science.
    • 5/5
      Steven Johnson looks at the history of six different kinds of technologies that have been instrumental in shaping the world we live in today: glassworking, refrigeration, sound transmission and recording, sewers and hygiene improvements, timekeeping, and artificial light. But he's not simply telling us the backstories of these technologies we've come to take for granted. He also talks a bit about how innovations happen, including what it means to be an idea whose time has come (although he doesn't use that particular phrase) and how inventions like the light bulb are almost always messy endeavors involving lots of people working independently, not the lone genius eureka moments we like to imagine. (This, by the way, is a subject he goes on about at much greater length in his earlier book, Where Good Ideas Come From.)More than that, though, he shows how inventions designed solely to solve one particular limited problem can have direct but unexpected consequences that lead not just to the development of still further technological developments, but also to influences on society, history, and art. To me, this weird, tangled web of causality and influence Johnson illuminates is by far the most fascinating thing about the book, whether he's drawing a direct line from Clarence Birdseye ice-fishing with Inuits to the existence of sperm banks, or outlining how the invention of the laser led to the growth and expansion of big-box retail stores. It reminds me a little of James Burke's TV show/ book Connections and its follow-up, The Pinball Effect, but where Burke is random and rambly, Johnson is more focused and concise. Each of the chapters here is short, and the entire book is only about 200 pages. Meaning this isn't the book you want if you're looking for a really detailed and in-depth history of any of the topics it covers. But Johnson does manage to pack a lot of worthwhile thought and information into such a small amount of space, and he does it in his usual zippy, highly readable style.I'd actually already read a fair bit about most of these subjects, and wondered going in if I were going to find some of the chapters a bit boring since they were talking about things I already knew, but Johnson includes so many odd and interesting little details that I'd either forgotten or never heard of, and he provides so many new perspectives and draws so many surprising connections between things that I never felt the least bit bored.Rating: 4.5/5. If only just for including so many little things that made me go, "Oh, neat!"
    • 4/5
      Through the history of Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time and Light, the author helps us to see behind our everyday conveniences. He used the history of these things to show how ideas take root and how they lead to products and inventions never dreamed of by the original inventor. I found this a very interesting read, tracing the history of things we take for granted now and finding the little threads of ideas which brought us to where we are."You don't need to know any of these things to tell the time now, but that's the way progress works; the more we build up these vast repositories of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them. Your mind is silently assisted by all that knowledge each time you check your phone to see what time it is, but the knowledge itself is hidden."I think that is a very important statement of the human experience and how much our future is determined by the past. In addition to making me say, "Wow!" this book also led me to think and ponder on the human condition without leading me to conclusions, something I always enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Excellent way to look at history. Johnson takes sic topics; glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light and develops their empact on earth from beginnings to now. Each topic moves through the inventors and thinkers who developed or enhanced their role. Example would be the whale oil dug out of the brains of sperm whales in the 1800 for produce a better candle and light and now unused so that the whale continues to be .Wonderful way to look at the history of humans. Recommended for both teenagers and adults.
    • 5/5
      Glass, cold, sound, clean, time, and light - these are the six innovations that Steven Johnson describes in his book about how we got to now. These aren't the innovations that first popped to my mind when I started listening to this book, but Johnson deftly shows how inventions like cold or time enabled so many other seemingly unrelated inventions.
    • 4/5
      How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World by Steven JohnsonThis book is the companion book to a new PBS series of the same name. I really wanted to give this book a five star review but am going to knock it back a star. My complaint about the book is three fold: 1) large sections of the book are verbatim from the TV show; 2) some of the connections that Johnson makes are pretty attenuated in my opinion - like he is trying to hard to make the connection between various technologies; 3) Johnson regurgitates some of his material from earlier books.Now to the caveats on my complaints. I am a pretty big fan of Steven Johnson's work. As I noted in my review of The Invention of Air, he is an excellent writer and has a remarkable capacity to cast events in a different light. Johnson wrote The Ghost Map, which remains a favorite of mine. Johnson gives a synopsis of The Ghost Map in the section of How We Got to Now on water. Because Johnson did such a masterful job of explaining the discovery in The Ghost Map the discussion of the same story in How We Got to Now is a bit of a let down.As for the book being identical to the dialogue of the TV show, this wouldn't be a complaint except that I have been watching all of the episodes of the shows (usually with my kids). This is one of the rare times where I think the TV show is better than the book. This isn't a knock on the book so much as a compliment on the show which does an excellent job illustrating some of the connections that Johnson is talking about. Bits like Johnson going to a water park on the show would feel unnecessary to me but illustrate the point to the kids in a way that makes them understand the concept he is talking about.As for the last complaint, that some of the connections are a bit attenuated, it is a minor quibble. The advances in technology that Johnson is seeking to illustrate are fascinating even if some of the connections seem less logical than others.If you don't watch the show the book is solid and worth your time. However, this is one of those rare times where I would encourage people to try watching the TV show first, especially if you have children who are interested in science or that you want to be interested in science. Every once in awhile the TV is the superior medium and with How We Got to Now I think that is the case here.
    • 5/5
      Great, thought provoking book with a very compelling alternate historical view on the evolution of technology and society. One major takeaway for me is how counter to innovation our current patent system is, as ideas need to be shared and built upon in order for real breakthroughs and positive societal change to occur.
    • 4/5
      Upon finishing the book I discovered that this was published in coordination with a PBS series. I will have to investigate that further as the stories brought to life in the text would play well on video.The six innovations: Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time and Light make excellent conversational threads, woven through history, and resulting in a tapestry of "connectiveness". These threads further illustrate the concept that a technology is not inherently a machine. Rather, it is a process. Each of these stories describe new processes that were developed to solve a problem.The Hummingbird Effect is described by Johnson as an unintended benefit of the introduction of a technology. This metaphor is used to first describe the quick adoption of "orbs" (i.e. reading glasses), after the creation of the Gutenberg press. While the technology of reading glasses existed for centuries before the printing press, the need did not exist.I also found the chapter on Time to meet a specific interest of mine in addition to having recently read a similar account in Time's Pendulum.I look forward to viewing the PBS series next.
    • 5/5
      If you have ever been curious about how stuff works, like I am, you will probably enjoy this book. The Author takes 6 very general topics: Glass, Cold, Sound, clean, time, and light, at starting at the beginning shows how the evolution of these topics resulted in life as we know it now. This is another amazing fantastic book by a very gifted writer, who can take the complex and bring it down to a level most people can understand.
    • 5/5
      Author Steven Johnson takes a big picture look at six areas of scientific discovery and technological innovation that have had a major impact on civilization: glass, artificial cold, sound, cleanliness, time measurement, and artificial light. As new technologies are discovered and adopted, they trigger unintended or unexpected consequences. For example, Johnson traces the history of artificial cold from ice harvesting to refrigeration to air conditioning, which made geographic regions with inhospitably hot climates inhabitable. The population shift in the United States from the colder northern states to the warmer southern and southwestern states led to a reconfiguration of the electoral college and U.S. politics. This is popular science at its best. Recommended.
    • 5/5
      This book reminded me of Connections, the PBS series by James Burke in (I just looked it up) 1978. (I can't believe it was that long ago.) Apparently, How We Got to Now is also a TV series. (I didn't know this when I picked up the book. I pretty much gave up on TV about 15 years ago. Books are SO much better - and there's no commercials.) Anyway, like Burke's Connections, this book shows how certain inventions led to others, and ended up changing the world. It's informative and entertaining. I learned stuff. That, along with the good writing, earns it full marks from me.
    • 4/5
      A nice light audiobook, for when you want something interesting to listen to while you have work to do.
    • 4/5
      In this book Steven Johnson considers six innovation that the modern world really cannot live without. These are cold, glass, sound, light, time and clean. Slightly obscure you might think, but these six objects have given us so many things like air conditioning, microscopes, clean water, time zones, lasers and the telephone.

      As he writes about each subject, he reminds you of life before these inventions, with no artificial light, drinking water that could kill you in 48 hours and food that spot quickly in the summer. He tells about the characters that put their reputations and money on the line to get these things off the ground. Others then saw the potential of the ideas and the spinoff ideas from the initial one have been phenomenal. For example before Gutenberg, it was only a handful of monks that needed glasses for near sighted work. After the first books appeared, people realised that they couldn't see the text and the market for reading glasses, using the newly developed lenses took off. The most fascinating was the way that the entire city of Chicago was jacked up to allow space underneath to install a sewerage system.

      Johnson has a way of conveying ideas and concepts that make this a pleasure to read, well worth reading.
    • 2/5
      I obviously didn't pick the most favourable way to encounter Johnson. As the tie-in book of a TV series, this is obviously limited by the need to comply with all the structural clichés of 45-minute documentary episodes, and you don't get the same sort of freedom to explore ideas in depth that you would in something written purely as a book. And the publishers don't see why any sane person would listen to the audiobook rather than watching the original show, so they make that in the cheapest way possible. The reading is so dry that I assumed "George Newbern" must be a conventional alias publishers use for a text-to-speech engine, but it turns out that he's a well-known voice actor with a Wikipedia page and everything. Who must have done so many audiobooks that he can read them without engaging with the text in any way at all...So much for the form. As to the content, it's fairly unobjectionable. Some of the science is simplified to the point where it's borderline misleading, and some of the leaps he makes are too extreme, for instance in the chapter on Time, where he jumps straight from the 16th century to the 19th, leaving the naive reader with the impression that it must have been Galileo's pendulum clock that enabled ships to determine longitude. But those are constraints due to the need to fit everything in to a TV show. The producer obviously told him they could shoot on location in Pisa or Greenwich, but not both... Obviously, this isn't a book that's addressed at readers who already know a little bit about the history of technology: most of the stories he tells here are very familiar ones, and there was very little that I hadn't already met many times in other places. After six chapters I caught myself thinking that we'd had just about all the usual suspects except Albert Einstein and Ada Lovelace - imagine my surprise when Ada turned up in the Conclusion after all! Johnson's discussion of how innovation comes about is rather more interesting than the actual examples he brings in, but it's all very anecdotal and not developed enough here to be really worth reading this book for. He has written another book devoted to that topic, of course. The other inevitable topic in books about the history of technology is "unintended nasty consequences of progress" - that's something Johnson touches on a few times here and there, but again he doesn't really get the chance to develop it.
    • 5/5
      Steven Johnson takes on the history of innovation – how six technologies brought things we today deem essential to our well being: refrigeration, clocks, lenses, water purification, recorded sound, and artificial light. Think how their absence would change our lives. That’s just what the author does, and in a fascinating way.The non-fiction book discussion group at my public library chose the author’s, “The Ghost Map,” for one of its reads – and years later, we are still talking about it. Steven Johnson is a wonderful writer, and his books make for engaging reads and they give much food for thought. I plan to seek out more of them. I usually don’t comment on a book’s physical appearance, but this book (in hardcover) is stunning, with great paper and page design. Photos add a lot, too.
    • 4/5
      Johnson does a fabulous job tracking down innovations and how they came into being and their subsequent repercussions. Brilliant ideas are often not the ‘light bulb’ moments but long journeys with remarkable unpredictable changes in culture. This is accompanied by a six part PBS series that is also fascinating, which follow the book rather closely
    • 5/5
      Steven Johnson has written a fascinating history book. He focuses on six innovations; glass, sewers, refrigeration, sound reproduction, timekeeping, and artificial light. This is not the sort of straight-forward history where the well-read will already know the story. Johnson chronicles the interactions between innovations, the “adjacent possibilities” .For example, spectacles weren’t developed until the wide-spread availability of printed books made the need for them obvious. Before that, the technology existed, but not the need. This book is full of insights like that, things which become obvious once Johnson points them out. Great book.
    • 5/5
      This was a fascinating look at innovation and discovery. Concentrating on just six areas – glass, cold, sound, clean, time, light – and using what he calls the “hummingbird effect,” the author demonstrates how discoveries build upon one another and bring about changes in seemingly unrelated areas, leading us in directions we never imagined.For example, glass: before the 15th century, most people were farsighted and never knew it; most couldn’t read and had no need to see tiny shapes formed into words. Therefore, spectacles remained rare and expensive items. The invention of the printing press changed that when it brought the written word to the masses, creating a market for spectacles. People began experimenting with lenses; microscopes, telescopes, and cameras were invented, creating a multitude of new discoveries in the sciences as a result.The author discounts the lone genius theory where one person magically came up with an idea and “invented” it. He demonstrates how most innovations were collaborations. An example was the light bulb: multiple individuals were working on developing a light bulb, and many “invented” it, but the person known for the light bulb was the one whose bulb outperformed the others and was most successful in bringing it to market. And that was Thomas Edison.I could babble on a lot about this book and how much I enjoyed it. But instead I’m going to encourage you to give this a read or a listen and have fun learning about how all the things we take for granted became part of our daily lives. And no, you do not need to know one bit about science to enjoy this – just curiosity about the world around us.Audio production:I can be a bit of a science nerd and once I started reading this I didn’t want to stop and switched between audio and print so I could keep going. The audio was competently read by George Newbern in a very listenable but documentary-like style. For those who prefer the visual, there were some very cool drawings, photos, and illustrations that make having a print copy worth while. But in either format it was an enjoyable read.
    • 4/5
      Any time a book tries to popularize science there is very little chance it will be fantastic. I'm not trying to make any comment other than popularization of any kind has a tendency to bring delivery of the subject to a lower common denominator. Now, throw in that a book wants to cover a number of subjects, and the approach will generally be surface at best.Johnson overcomes much of this. He tells a good story. And in this book there are a number of very good stories to tell. And he has done an excellent job of finding the stories we may not be as familiar with. (Heck, this makes only the second time I learned that Edison was electrocuting elephants – the first time being during an episode of Bob's Burgers.) And he has definitely identified defining discoveries – the key things without which we couldn't be where we are today.But Johnson doesn't overcome all of it. They are good stories, and I learned some things I didn't know. But some of the connections may well overreach. And, as should be expected, the book merely scratches the surface of a number of very deep subjects. It is also interesting that throughout this discussion of how specific innovations made all the difference in the world, he also makes the case (one you will often hear in scientific circles) that certain discoveries will happen simply because it is the time for them to be discovered. (This isn't some mythological discussion; it is much more about the synergy of events which lead to discoveries.)However, the connections are interesting. And, as I've already mentioned, the writing is very good. And Johnsons makes his case with some authority – that is, he lays out excellent evidence of how important specific discoveries were to our becoming the world we are today.As long as you approach this as a book that is more entertainment than deep understanding, then you should be fine. That isn't to say it is incorrect. It is just to say that it is only correct as far as it goes.