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

This book was so incredibly cool that I nearly posted about it several times while I was in the middle of reading it, because I wanted to share it so much.It’s sorta a history-of-a-few-inventions book, but the approach he takes is beautiful. Instead of focusing on the isolated incidents and exaggerated stories we all know (“Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb.“), he takes a very holistic long time frame approach towards storytelling, and how one set of advancements led to others which led to others, sometimes in seemingly unrelated fields.I think it was the first chapter that was on glass, which started off with the fall of Constantinople. That caused several guilds of glassmakers on the coast of Turkey to flee to Venice where they set up shop and would occasionally burn down their neighborhoods. That, in turn, led to the city exiling them to an island just off the coast that they could burn down as much as they wanted to. This concentration of people led to several advancements, including the initial development of truly clear glass (previously glass was opaque or translucent, at best). Translucent glass was a game changer, leading directly to the development of mirrors. He further related the development of mirrors to the ability for people to actually see themselves, which seemed to correspond with the rise of laws benefiting the individual as opposed to the group/family/town. People literally didn’t have as strong a concept of “self” before mirrors.Around the same time, Gutenberg developed the printing press, leading to the first mass market availability of books. Know what else happened at the same time? Everyone discovered we were all far sighted. Nobody really needed excellent up-close vision to that point in time, but once people were reading it became critical. Fortunately, those Venetian glass merchants were developing lenses as well, which were able to correct vision and let people read. And what happens if you stack two of these brand new lenses on top of each other? Why, you end up with microscopes to show us what small biological structures and cells look like, as well as telescopes to see what the largest things in space are like.And on and on and on. 6 chapters of this. Nearly the entire book is not about some brilliant individual inventor, but it’s showing how invention is almost always tightly interwoven. How people literally cannot invent certain things until certain other advancements come about and once they do then huge numbers of people basically get in a race to create something from it.The exception was the concluding chapter, The Time Travelers, mostly talking about people that conceived of devices that they truly couldn’t create yet. Da Vinci and his helicopter drawings were briefly touched upon, but it was mostly about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace and their work on the Analytical Engine, basically a steampunk computer. What I was most impressed with were some of the excerpt’s from Ada Lovelace’s letters - I knew that she was considered to be the world’s first programmer and fairly smart (though most of the stuff I’ve read tends to disparage her as more working under the supervision of Babbage and that hey probably drove things). And the truth is she was absolutely not. Her letters show that she was the one to realize that the Engine wasn’t just a device for doing numeric calculations, but any abstract algebraic or symbolic computation. Basically the concept of a general purpose computer. Now, Babbage was not well regarded for this machine since it didn’t quite work right (his earlier simpler calculators were better received), but neither he nor his few supporters ever made a leap like Ada did. And then most of the work was essentially lost for a century and basically conceived independently by Turing in the ’40s. Ada was way ahead of her time.Anyway, it is a phenomenal book and my summations here do not do it justice. Highly recommended.

I'm not the biggest fun of history books but I definitely loved this one. It brings a different perspective in so many things we take for granted in the present time. Totally recommend.

This one is absolute gem of a book. It is more of a book of history on scientific revolutions viewed through the eyes of invention itself.It tells succinctly about all the butterfly effects and ,in the words of Johnson himself, hummingbird effects.Certain things we have taken for granted in our lives, which we even don't think where they come from.How generalized inventions like glass,cold, sound,clean, time and light shaped our lives and how these concepts evolved through the material discoveries, is all beautifully described.You will feel thankful to all the material inventions you use after the discovery of these concepts after reading this book.

La idea que tenía de este libro era saber cómo se conectaron diversos inventos y/o conceptos que formaron nuestra era. Y si bien en parte el libro cubre ese aspecto, creo que se queda algo corto. Habla muy vagamente y pocas veces entra en detalle, sin embargo está más orientado a la creatividad y "suerte" de algunos inventores por lo que lo considero más apto para alguien que necesite inspiración y no aprender sobre historia (aunque si quisieras aprender sobre historia no sería la mejo opción ¿cierto?). Algo que me gustó es que tiene imágenes bastante detalladas que abarcan casi la totalidad de la hoja. En fin, si te gusta la ciencia, la tecnología y la creatividad es un buen libro. Ideal para pasar el rato ya que te lo podrías leer en unas 2 o 3 semanas.

Most books that I’ve read about past inventions and developing technologies pertain to the history of these devices and their direct impact on society. In this fascinating book, the author does discuss the historical developments and the direct impacts, but he also shows how these new innovations influenced other fields often in unexpected ways – some positive and some negative. The book is well illustrated with a great many useful figures and photographs that help make each story come to life.I found this book to be quite engaging and difficult to put down. The author’s writing style is quite friendly, often lively, cultured and widely accessible. This book can be enjoyed by any interested reader, but I suspect that science and technology enthusiasts as well as science history buffs will likely relish it the most.