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I found this book to be well written, entertaining and very informative. I have not previously read any of Stephen Johnson's books, but now I will be on the lookout for them. This book reminded me of the books by James Burke, "The Day the Universe Changed" and "Connections", which discuss the complex evolution of technology, and the interactions of events leading to our modern world. "How We Got To Here" focuses more on innovation than Burke's books, but like them it is also written for a general audience and requires little or no technical background.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in history, science and technology and to anyone interested in the strange interconnected tales of how the things that we take for granted were developed. My only minor quibble is that the book is a bit light on technical details. For instance, it discusses pendulum clocks and then pocket watches, but does not describe the difference in their operation, or anything about the development of naval chronometers. I would have liked a bit more technical detail, but this was not a big enough problem to reduce my rating from 5-stars.
What is in the book - The book describes six innovations that follow the author's contention that - "An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field end up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether." This idea can best be understood by examining the six innovation chapters and the short conclusion chapter that make up the book. These chapters are as follows:
1. Glass - The first innovation, the development of glass and how it impacted society, starts with the natural pieces of glass found in the Libyan Desert, and goes on to how men eventually learned to make glass.Read more ›
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70 of 75 people found the following review helpful
As a scientist and inventor, I found "How We Got to Now" to be a delightful book on invention and innovation. The author focuses on six area of innovation: glass, cold, sound, clean, time, and light. For instance, he describes the accidental discovery of glass in the desert and traces the development of lenses, eyeglasses, telescopes, and microscopes.
The stories of invention and how society has been changed is fascinating. For instance, ice cutting from frozen lakes leads to cooling machines to population growth in areas of hot climate. Clocks and railroads give us time zones and standardized time based on atomic transitions, not on the rotation of the Earth. The author does miss the role played by glass (silicon oxide) in integrated circuit chips, where the glass is used as an insulator. There are few other omissions in this book.
In the section on light, the author reveals a little-known secret about invention. Edison's most important innovation was the organization of groups of scientists and engineers to find solutions to technical problems. Of my 118 issued United States patents, there are a small number for which I am the sole inventor. These represent the flash-of-genius type of invention. The majority were inventions-by-committee, where typically three or four people of different backgrounds combined their knowledge to come up with new solutions.
The final chapter deals with the work of Ada Lovelace (software), and Charles Babbage (hardware), who designed the first programmable computing machine. This short section could easily have been expanded into a complete chapter on calculation. However, the author uses the story to illustrate an unusual invention that preceded its enabling technology.
The book is full of illustrations and interesting anecdotes. It does a good job of telling the story of technology development and how it can transform the way we live.
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67 of 72 people found the following review helpful
I've been a Steven Johnson fan ever since "Everything Bad is Good for You": much like Malcolm Gladwell, he finds interesting, surprising angles in unexpected places. "How We Got To Now" offers essays on serendipity and unexpected connections, unintended consequences, and the not-infrequent phenomenon of innovations emerging from a confluence of similar ideas in a short span of time (rather than from the lone inventor of lore). Each chapter covers the emergence of a basic product or idea (like glass,artificial light, or manufactured cold), the problem it solved, the players and ideas in motion behind it, and the unexpected reach it has had. There are stories of familiar names and unknown backstage figures, punctuated equilibrium and coevolutionary interactions, networked ideas, chaos and change, the social ramifications of innovations, and simple ah-ha moments that proved significant. For instance: the search for a better method of freezing foods links to dehumidification, both of which are tied to air conditioning, which by the mid-20th century was facilitating disruptions in human migration patterns.
Working from a premise outlined in the introduction, "How We Got to Now" provides an intriguing look at history not from the point of view of human accounts -- which would factor in human events like war and political upheavals -- but rather the story that would be recorded by a robot historian. (Or, as Johnson says, what you would get "if a lightbulb had written the story of the past 300 years".) This book is a readable, satisfying,fascinating tour de force long-zoom view of technologies that proved revolutionary -- and how they got that way.
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This item: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
