How We Got to Now

Steven Johnson’s How We Got to Now (2014) considers the historical background of many inventions that are today considered works of genius, debunking their origin myths by explaining how they eventuated out of inventors’ hard work and perseverance. Johnson also explains how huge, nebulous inventions, such as the Internet, tend to develop collaboratively over long stretches of time, influenced by both social and technological conditions. Reaching a widespread audience, the book received positive reviews for responding to people’s modern desire to understand the origins of the technology they see and use in everyday life.

Johnson argues that no invention is an end in itself. In fact, each invention introduces the possibility for a multitude of future inventions built on its own wisdom. Innovations do not merely multiply linearly, such as with the development of increasingly better cars, but tangentially. For example, the discovery of viral RNA might have allowed scientists to better understand disease pathology, yet the same discovery opened up the door to gene therapy techniques, in which humans encode desirable genetic instructions inside viral RNA and implant it in human cells.

Johnson asserts that many innovations seem not to create immediate change at all, but instead, foster an ecosystem that enables it. He uses the period known as the Renaissance as an example. During this period, which stretched for four centuries after the Middle Ages, an ecosystem of innovation proliferated in Europe. Each invention fed off many others, causing the rate of invention to increase exponentially. The period gave rise to such inventions as the submarine, the match, gunpowder, and most lens-based devices we still use today. When the Renaissance ended, these pro-innovation conditions diminished. Only in the last half-century has humankind returned to Renaissance-equivalent rates of invention.



Johnson points to one curious invention that, in his opinion, sparked the inventive fire of the Renaissance. In the 1400s, the invention of glassblowing allowed for the rapid production of a device that had already existed: the mirror. Before mirrors were widely available, individuals went years, even decades, without having a clear, reflexive picture of what they looked like. Johnson argues that once mirrors entered domestic spaces in Europe, individuals became more introspective. Soon, self-portraits would be invented as an artistic mode, made possible by the mirror’s lucid reflective surface. Even narrative modes, such as the novel written in the first person, eventuated out of the common adoption of the mirror. Though these inventions were obviously not causally related, they formed a mutualistic relationship with each other.

Johnson explains unanticipated innovations and their unpredictable legal implications. He discusses the invention of the light bulb, which replaced candles. Initially, light bulbs were extremely expensive to produce, mainly because they were constructed from spermaceti, an organic substance from the head of a sperm whale. As a result, sperm whales were hunted to near-extinction. Thomas Edison disrupted this trend when he invented a cheaper, non-organic way to make the same device. Soon, artificial light was present in flash photography and many other kinds of recording equipment. Street photography then gained prominence, most notably when the photographer Jacob Riis exposed the destitution of many residents of New York. When this imagery was brought before the public’s eyes, it catalyzed the passing of new legislation that helped reduce many of their terrible conditions. Johnson believes that technology always acts in these unpredictable innovation cascades, which transcend both the technological and social.

Johnson ends by qualifying an earlier suggestion that all innovations are in some way inevitable or self-evident, mainly taking place atop common knowledge. For an example of an inevitable innovation, he goes back to Thomas Edison, showing that he was among at least twenty other inventors who had made similar prototypes at roughly the same time. Thomas Edison is credited as an “inventor” only because he was most successful in popularizing his version. On the other hand, Ada Lovelace, a proto-computer scientist, made a highly personal invention almost a century ahead of her time when she wrote the first ever algorithm in the 1840s. The invention arose out of her intersecting interests in language and math: she wrote a program that could compute Bernoulli numbers while ruminating on an assignment to translate French to English.



How We Got to Now provides a vast array of examples of inventions that built off each other, yet only manages to show how incomplete our understanding of technological history is. It also suggests that future Renaissances will only multiply the complexity and volume of inventions we will try to understand. Johnson is continually inspired by this problem and the possibilities it opens up.