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Loading... How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (original 2014; edition 2014)by Steven Johnson (Author)
Work InformationHow We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson (2014)
  
Books Read in 2016 (2,493) Book Club List (6) No current Talk conversations about this book.  yates9 | Feb 28, 2024 |   It may give you a sense that, sometimes, the world really does make sense, and it will make history seem just a little bit smaller and more closely intertwined. (  ) AdioRadley | Jan 21, 2024 |  ) BBrookes | Dec 5, 2023 | Johnson narrated his own BBC and PBS series, and the book based on that series, “How We Got to Now,” was published in 2014. Easier to follow than Burke, Johnson concentrates on six areas of discovery: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light. The discovery of glass, by accident, led to windows, lenses, fiberglass and eventually modern electronics. "The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass," he writes. As for cold, for many centuries nobody gave any thought to creating artificial cold, although artificial heat in the form of fire had been around for a long time. But then they started transporting ice in ships, which led to ice boxes, refrigerators, frozen food and air conditioning. Discoveries lead in unexpected directions, Johnson points out. Because of air conditioning, population centers in the United States have moved south, from New York, Chicago and Detroit to Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. Telephones made skyscrapers possible. Because of barcodes, big stores like Walmart, Lowes and Target came to be. We celebrate inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as if their genius was unique. Yet if they hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have. And in many cases somebody else did but never got the credit. Truly unique ideas are rare. ( ) hardlyhardy | Nov 11, 2023 |  ) SandyRedding | Jul 4, 2023 |
 While we appreciate it in the abstract, few of us pause to grasp the miracles of modern life, from artificial light to air conditioning, as Steven Johnson puts it in the excellent How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, “how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera.” Understanding how these everyday marvels first came to be, then came to be taken for granted, not only allows us to see our familiar world with new eyes — something we are wired not to do — but also lets us appreciate the remarkable creative lineage behind even the most mundane of technologies underpinning modern life. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, 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. "-- No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.064Social sciences Economics Production Efficiency Effect Of InnovationLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.99)
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Wikipedia in English (4)
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The book is a fun romp across connected technologies and how they enabled each other leading to deep changes in culture and society. (