How We Got To Now Part One - Glass, Cold, Sound

 

During our free reading days, I am currently going through Steven Johnson’s 2014 bestseller How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. The book contains six chapters, each talking about a different discovery that shaped the life we live today. I am about halfway through the book, having gotten through three of the six chapters: Glass, Cold, and Sound, with Clean, Time, and Light to go through. In this blog post, I will go through Glass, Cold, and Sound as part one, and the next blog I’ll post, part two, will go through Clean, Time, and Light, and have a review of this book at the end.

Glass:

One of the first major creations using glass was in Egypt, because glass naturally forms in the desert. It was made from around four thousand years ago, being a carved centerpiece in the shape of a scarab beetle which archaeologists found in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. In the Roman Empire, glass was made to be sturdier and less cloudy as windows for the first time. And, in the 12th and 13th centuries, monks used curved pieces of glass to help them read religious manuscripts, which was the first kind of spectacles. Unfortunately, the general population was illiterate so spectacles were kept as rare and expensive until 1440, when the printing press was invented and many people discovered they were farsighted, causing both the demand for glasses and literacy to increase dramatically. Due to the success of glasses, a pair of spectacle makers in the Netherlands in 1590 lined up spectacle lens on top of each other so that the objects they observed through the stack would magnify what they saw, which created the microscope and which further led to Robert Hooke revolutionizing science and medicine by naming the cell. There are several more major ways that glass changed modern life, but you’re gonna have to read the book to find out.

Cold:

Temperature is not a material, so you might think that coldness would be much more common and less precious than something like glass. However, that is not the case with people living in equatorial climates, such as Martinique, where they have never experienced anything cold. In the 1700s-1800s a young man named Frederic Tudor lived with the conveniences of ice due to the frozen pond his family lived next to. His family stored large frozen lake water blocks in icehouses that wouldn’t melt until summer arrived. They chipped off slices from the ice blocks to make cold drinks, ice cream, and cool down baths. Because of this experience with ice, Tudor knew that if you kept large blocks of ice out of the sun, it could last months into summer, causing him to get an idea to ship these large blocks of ice to tropical, humid islands such as the West Indies and sell them, making him rich. His first trip failed partly because his ice was rapidly melting in the sun, but after discovering new ways to insulate the ice with sawdust and a double-shelled icehouse design, he finally amassed a huge fortune in the 1830s with people in the tropical climates finally discovering the convenience of ice. Ice later became extremely important in keeping foods fresh with ice-powered refrigeration, and it also became useful to make buildings much more comfortable! 

Sound:

Neanderthals used to stand in specific points in caves so the reverberations of the cave shape would widen the sound of their voices. But, for a long time, nobody thought it was possible to record sounds and play them back. However, in the 1950s, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian printer, was studying a detailed anatomy book about the human ear. Then he started thinking of how transcribing voices could be automated, thus inventing the phonautograph, which writes out sound waves, but it lacked playback, so you couldn’t actually relisten the sounds you recorded. Years later, though, Alexander Graham Bell found a way to capture and transmit sound through the first version of a telephone. Around the early 1900s, an inventor named Lee De Forest started creating a device to transmit intelligible signals. This early invention turned out to be a failure, but it inspired many to modify his basic design into a device that boosted the electrical signal of any technology that needed it, leading to the eventual creation of radio that could play melodies in any home in the early 1920s. This, of course, spread different kinds of music all over the United States and played a big role in the evolution of music. Amplifiers connected to microphones allowed people to speak or sing to large numbers of people for the first time, in both speeches and concerts. Transmitted sound waves even helped save ships from sinking and let parents determine the genders of unborn babies. But again, to find out how, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

Glass, Cold, and Sound were only three of the six major innovations discussed in How We Got To Now. I am no doubt going to finish this book, because it’s so cool seeing how simple materials such as glass can have huge impacts in multiple types of study.

Philip Chen