CityReads│How Our Modern Urban Life Came to Being?

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How Our Modern Urban Life Came to Being?

The book, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, and the PBS documentary series with the same name explore the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences.

Steven Johnson, 2014. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, Riverhead books.

How We Got to Now, 2014. PBS documentary.

Source: https://www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-now/

Most of us don't pause to think how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera. Thanks to air-conditioning, many of us live comfortably in climates that would have been intolerable just fifty years ago. Our modern lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so that we can enjoy those luxuries today without a second thought, without even thinking of them as luxuries in the first place

In his book and the PBS documentary series with the same name, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (lightbulbs, sound recordings, air-conditioning, a glass of clean tap water, a wristwatch, a glass lens, 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. Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. You wouldn’t think that printing technology would have anything to do with the expansion of our vision down to the cellular scale, just as you wouldn’t have thought that the evolution of pollen would alter the design of a hummingbird’s wing. But that is the way change happens.

These innovations have set in motion a much wider array of changes in society than you might reasonably expect. Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This book is partially about these strange chains of influence, the “hummingbird effect.” An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether. Hummingbird effects come in a variety of forms. Some are intuitive enough: orders-of magnitude increases in the sharing of energy or information tend to set in motion a chaotic wave of change that easily surges over intellectual and social boundaries.

But other hummingbird effects are more subtle; they leave behind less conspicuous causal fingerprints. Breakthroughs in our ability to measure a phenomenon—time, temperature, mass—often open up new opportunities that seem at first blush to be unrelated. (The pendulum clock helped enable the factory towns of the industrial revolution.) Sometimes, as in the story of Gutenberg and the lens, a new innovation creates a liability or weakness in our natural toolkit, that sets us out in a new direction, generating new tools to fix a“problem” that was itself a kind of invention. Sometimes new tools reduce natural barriers and limits to human growth, the way the invention of air-conditioning enabled humans to colonize the hotspots of the planet at a scale that would have startled our ancestors just three generations ago.

Observing hummingbird effects in history makes it clear that social transformations are not always the direct result of human agency and decision-making. Sometimes change comes about through the actions of political leaders or inventors or protest movements, who deliberately bring about some kind of new reality through their conscious planning. But in other cases, the ideas and innovations seem to have a life of their own, engendering changes in society that were not part of their creators’ vision. The inventors of air-conditioning were not trying to redraw the political map of America when they set about to cool down living rooms and office buildings, but, as we will see, the technology they unleashed on the world enabled dramatic changes in American settlement patterns, which in turn transformed the occupants of Congress and the White House.

1 Clean

Today people can even have dinner on the spotless street while garbage, excreta, poison gas, infectious diseases still flooded the streets 150 years ago. How did we do that in just a hundred years? Clean and dirty, darkness is always two sides of the same coin. The first stop of the clean revolution was the construction of sewer lines. In the mid-19th century, Chicago was about to shut down because of poor drainage and disease. Railway engineer Ellis Chesbrough shouldered the great responsibility of building drainage system. As Chicago itself is low-lying, the usual plan of tunneling down did not work in this city. He thought he could lift the building with screw jacks and then fill the ground. Such a crazy idea was really realized. Chicago had the first comprehensive sewer system in the United States, which became the clean start for American cities. Not only that, the subway, sidewalks, electrified highways are also in full swing.

The sewers did not solve the problem once and for all. Dirty water flew through sewers into the drinking water source, and the following consequence is deadly cholera. At that time, the medical profession generally believed that cholera was transmitted by the odor. John Snow, a young England intern, came up with a whole new idea after a field survey that cholera is in the water. In 1854, during the outbreak of cholera in London’s Soho, Snow mapped the data of cholera infection. The map showed the highest number of death was near a water pump on Broadway street and workers at a brewery escaped cholera because the brewing process of beer that workers often drink killed bacteria. Snow’s map both reveals the importance of clean drinking water and spawns new epidemiological science, some researchers begin to replace laboratory experiments with maps and surveys.

John Snow's map

In the 20th century, amateur John Lille made a bold experiment by secretly adding potentially deadly calcium hypochlorite to the whole city’s drinking water and discovered that liquid chlorine could be used to clean water. So the public bath and other modern new forms of entertainment and peripheral fashion industry can emerge. A brilliant wife’s idea of small bottled, low-concentration chlorine bleach nurture household cleaning industry. Today, the digital revolution enables us to think about cleanliness from the perspective of microns.

2 Time

Inspired by swinging altar lamp, Galileo finds that the pendulum oscillates in equal times. This casual discovery completely changed people’s natural timing after many years. During the great voyage of exploration, ships generally calculate longitude by the local time on board and the time of departure, so as to determine the position. But time calculations and measurements vary from place to place, it is difficult to get an accurate time. A Dutch astronomer follows the idea and makes the first truly accurate clock. Since then, doctors with clocks have been able to provide patients with better medical care. More than 100 years later, John Harrison, an Englishman, invents the navigational theodolite. Maritime trade and exploration entered a period of great prosperity with its help. By the 18th century, the British clock making technique could have been able to make tiny gears and other precision parts, which prepared for complex machines such as steam engines and mechanical looms and kicked off the industrial revolution. Gradually people walked out of the countryside into the factories, changes in work mode and the invention of the clock transformed the experience of time.

In the 19th century, Ellen Denison set up the first mechanical watch production line, which greatly reduced the cost. While the civil war, he developed affordable watches under the name of patriotism. Time is no longer the prerogative of the aristocracy, but in the hands of the general public.

The first mechanical watch production line in Massachusetts

There is, however, another problem that plagues people. At that time, the railway network had been able to connect all parts of the country, but local time was different in hundreds of American towns, and each railway company had its own time. Finally, in 1881 general time secretary William Allen brought the idea of time zones. He divided the country into four time zones, not along state borders but along the geographical lines of railroads. Greenwich mean time was set to be the primary meridian in 1884. And it means a globalized standardized time was achieved.

Atomic clock

With the breakthrough of atomic physics in the 20th century, time measurement entered the atomic age. In the 1950s, The first atomic clock capable of breaking down the second was made. Moreover, atomic time also help us determine that earth’s rotation is slowing down. When tyrannosaurus dominated the world, it was only 23 hours a day. Atomic physics not only revolutionized the way of measuring time, but also brought about another revolution. In 1890 Madame Curie and her husband noticed that radioactive atoms would decay at a fixed rate, and radiocarbon Dating was born.

3 Glass

Stained glass of thousands of years ago

Glass is a magical material with great usability that occupies an important position in modern life. Our ancestors worked out how to make stained glass thousands of years ago, but it wasn’t until modern times that the idea of how to make transparent glass really made history. In the 13th century, due to a combination of war, politics and commercial competition, an entire of glassmakers were forced to stay on the island of Murano near Venice. Under collective wisdom and efforts, glass making technique was increasingly sophisticated. Young Angelo Barovier is one of the glass craftsmen on the island. Acquiring enlightenment from philosophers and alchemists, He succeeded in extracting minerals from seaweed and created the clearest glass, cristallo. It marked the birth of modern glass. After that, glass flasks, test tubes and large Windows began to appear; people’s diet, science and office environment (modern glass skyscrapers) changed accordingly.

Modern glass

In addition, the invention of transparent glass extends our vision. Convex glass can amplify. If the lens is fixed in the frame, it becomes the first pair of glasses in the world. However in the early 1400s, eyeglasses were only a hot topic in churches and monasteries. Its popularity thanks to medieval European grape press. Gutenberg invented the printing machine with reference to grape press’s basic structure, benefit from which books were mass-produced. As more people were reading, demand for eyeglasses exploded. With the development of lens technology, in the 16th century, the father and son in a small town in Holland invented the microscope. Humans expanded their horizons to microbes, and the subsequent invention of antimicrobials, antibiotics and vaccines was also closely related to the use of microscopes. Twenty years later, another glassmaker in the same town, illuminated by children’s play, invented the telescope. In the 19th and 20th centuries, lens materials played a more extensive role. Camera, movie, television and video camera came out one after another.

Back in sixteenth Century, there was another great invention of glass, the mirror. Mirror especially deeply influences Renaissance art and philosophy. People no longer evaluate themselves from others’ eyes, and there is a burst of democratic thinking. Not only that, because simple glass lenses are limited in their ability to collect light, the mirrors actually assist optical telescopes currently used to look at faint galaxies. To cope with the refraction of atmosphere, self-tuning optics use deformable mirrors to make the images presented by the telescope continuously clear.

In 1887, Charles Vernon Boys conducted a daring experiment, producing glass fibers at one strike., and it is widely used in shipbuilding, wind power and computer industries. Ultra-thin glass fibers have changed the 21st century. The ability of optical fiber to carry information allow the “global village” take root.

4 Light

From candles thousands of years ago, to modern oil lamps, flashlights, bulbs that provide a constant source of light, and modern laser technology, artificial light sources have undergone several innovations.

Simple candles took people out of the darkness for the first time, but the burning was always accompanied by an unpleasant smell and smoke. In 1712, captain Harsey found spermaceti on a sperm whale. Although it is not easy to hunt whales and artificially extract oil from the guts of corpses, it burns with a very bright light, no smell or smoke, and is easy to operate by simply hanging a wick on the oil. This is indeed a step forward for artificial light. By the 19th century, spermaceti not only brightened the night, but also lubricated the steam engines of the industrial revolution and the first-class trains. Of course, the advances in artificial lighting have had the unintended consequence of squeezing natural sleep and people having to fall asleep at night for two periods.

Then people started thinking about how to create bright and lasting light. Edison’s light bulb gave the answer. He was dissatisfied with the durability of previously invented light bulbs, so he hired his own team and eventually developed incandescent bulbs that could last 1200 hours. After mass production, incandescent lamps are far more cost-effective than spermaceti wax lamps. Light bulbs made a huge difference. 24 hours of factory shifts are available; Crime rate goes down at night; Entertainment industry rises; Its making also paved the way for other appliances such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners that liberate women from the home. More importantly, Edison created new workspaces — research LABS, new business models — giving away shares of the company as a bonus.

Of course, artificial lighting is more than just lighting. In the late 19th century journalist Jacob Riis took on the a German’s idea of firing magnesium with gunpowder and created a flash. Thus, the small and dark “Five Points” slum can be presented in the camera. The exhibition of How the Other Half Lives has finally caught the attention of the American middle class and kicked off a great social reform movement. Science fiction loving chemists used nitrogen to create the first tube of neon, working with franchises and sign-shop entrepreneurs to light up the entire entertainment and marketing industry. Today, the laser scan code innovation provides solid technical support for the operation and maintenance of large retail networks. In the future, laser light may play a role in humanity’s ambition to recreate the sun’s center.

Photo of “Five Points” slum

5 cold

Frederic Tudor

Frederic Tudor, 21, visited South Carolina in 1805, where the hot weather gave him a big bang. In the intense heat of summer, he thought that the upper classes of New England would store ice in the winter for use in the summer. Why not give the people of the south the inexhaustible ice from the glacial lakes? However, the first shipment of ice was not successful and almost all the ice melted during long distance transportation. Ten years later, the unexpected discovery of sawdust insulation finally revived his ice transport program. Accordingly, southern people also made great efforts to preserve the ice, for example, setting up a structural cavity at the bottom of the house as a double insulation layer. Since then new food supply chains and creative platforms about ice have sprung up.

Next the cold enters its second phase: artificial cold.

Gorrie's idea: artificial cold

In the 1841 outbreak of yellow fever in the south, Dr. John Gorrie at first tried to ease the suffering of his patients by cooling the air flow in the room with ice. However, bad weather makes the ice transport very unstable. Gorrie was forced to make his own ice, and then the first artificial refrigeration was born in America. But artificial cold has not caught on because of the obstacles from competitors. During the civil war, the north issued a natural ice embargo. Thanks to the smugglers’ spread of the French ice maker to the south, artificial ice has become a real hit, and many inventors have finally taken Gorrie's ideas seriously.

Clarence Birdseye’s study of “eating” changed the 20th century. An experience living in the snow prompted him to think: how to save fresh food for winter? The inspiration this time was the Inuit frozen food method, and his own experiments showed that the shorter the freeze, the better the freshness of the food. Later, the idea was extended to multi-plate rapid freezing, which, of course, required the help of ice. In order to solve the problem of easy melting of ice, Jones designed a motorized refrigerated truck, which brought the ice industry to an end. Nowadays, our diet life relies on the frozen warehouse and refrigerator everywhere. Even human reproduction requires the assistance of freezing, such as the technique of freezing sperm, eggs and embryos.

Refrigeration technology redefines where we live. In 1902 Willis invented an air conditioner to prevent ink from running on printed matter. A few years later, he noticed a dramatic drop in attendance on hot summer days, and might try installing a prototype air-conditioning system in the theater’s basement. The cool environment finally made the summer theater lively. In 1951, the air conditioner entered the mass market, and the resident population in southern area showed a multiple growth.

6 Sound

The ancestors may have tried to express themselves in the echo of the cave a thousand years ago. When time is cut back to modern times, human beings are still obsessed with the art of sound. Printer Scott built phonautograph to serve as an auditory camera. The sound waves move through a membrane-covered funnel and touch a needle, as a result the track of the sound can be recorded on carbon black paper around a rotating cylinder. Unfortunately, this design has no playback function. Although not well-known, it inspired Edison’s phonograph and bell’s telephone, both of which have had a huge social impact.

Telephone lines can only connect two ends while Lee De Forest wants to use electromagnetic radio waves to transmit sound to more people at the same time. The use of radio waves is not his first initiative, but the signals are very weak and difficult to capture. He proposed that the triode could amplify the signal, a gas-filled bulb with three electrodes. Too much noise declared the display a failure, and he was accused by shareholders of bragging about the value of his innovation. In 1913, AT&T bought a patent for his triode and turned it into a tri-pole vacuum tube that can amplify the electrical signals required for any technology, triggering a revolution in electronics. In addition, the popularity of radio has created important conditions for the introduction of new music like jazz. The combination of music and technology has even ushered in the democratic social movement in the United States. To cope with the noise of urban noise, people set up the measurement unit "decibel", which prompted the government to make various measures to reduce noise. In response to the noisy city noise, people set up the measurement unit “decibel” and prompted the government to make various measures to reduce noise.

Open radio frequencies were originally designed to share sound with the public, but the advent of war has created a challenge of how to deliver information in secret without being bugged. Unexpectedly, the puzzle-solving man was a movie star and a music-loving weapons inspector. In addition to being used for confidential information processing, their fantasy is still brilliant in the 1980s. The advent of a new era of secure radio communications has made its representative cell phones inseparable from us.

In many strange and mysterious waters, we also need sound to extend our vision. Using echolocation, Reginald Fessenden designed the Fessenden vibrator for Navigation detection. Water can either be used as a transmitter in the water or as a receiver, we converting incoming vibrations into sounds to produce submarine telegrams. Shoals of fish, deep-sea landscapes, and resources are emerging before the human eye in the upswing ranging. The technology is now moving out of the water towards health, appearing in the face of ultrasound in people’s life.

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