How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson is subtitled "Six Innovations that Made the Modern World". Those Big Six are its chapter titles (and a six-part PBS tv series):
- Glass — bottles, lenses, optical fibers, etc
- Cold — refrigeration, air conditioning, etc
- Sound — phonographs, telephony, sonar, etc
- Clean — sewers, chlorination, etc
- Time — clocks, navigation, etc
- Light — artificial lighting, flash photography, etc
The book is a well-written, fast-reading, general-audiences history of important technologies. But alas, despite occasional disclaimers and caveats, it tells complex stories of science and engineering largely as single-threaded chains of events, rather than more realistic tapestries of progress. Like many other popularizations it skips past alternatives that didn't happen, the might-have-beens that could have replaced what seem to be extraordinary conjunctions of genius and luck.
Also alas, How We Got to Now is also just plain wrong (or woefully incomplete) in its explanations of some physics (esp in describing atomic clocks, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, etc). A picky technical editor could have caught and fixed those glitches. Maybe in some future edition!
(cf Celebrity History (1999-05-08), Threads of History (2001-06-06), Foxy Fables (2002-04-23), True Story (2002-11-30), Wee Bit More Complicated (2007-08-29), Two Concepts of Liberty (2010-06-27), ...) - ^z - 2023-08-11