Introduction

How was your day?

Did you wake up in a room comfortably cool or warm? Did you shower in a strong, steady stream of water? Could you see to get dressed when it was still dark out? Did you gulp down a carton of milk at lunch even though there isn't a cow in sight? Could you tune out a pesky sibling because your earbuds were firmly implanted?

So the day was OK. Nothing remarkable—until you stop to think about the fact that you can control temperature, light, sound, water; basically everything in your environment.

Most of us in the developed world don't give a passing thought to how amazing it is that we enjoy luxuries like drinking water that won't kill us because of bacterial disease, artificial light that stretches the day into night, or air-conditioning that lets many of us live comfortably in climates that would have been intolerable just sixty years ago. We don't really even consider these luxuries at all. But who made all this possible?

No one.

As in, no one person.

If you want to understand how big ideas truly changed the world, you need to get rid of the myth of the “Eureka!” moment. Brilliant inventions don't come about because some solitary genius is smarter than everyone else. Ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas. We take the tools and metaphors and concepts and scientific understanding of our time, and we remix them into something new. But if you don't have the right building blocks, you can't make the breakthrough, however brilliant you might be.

Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects and systems that are powered by the creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at a problem or refused to let go of what I like to call a “slow hunch,” an idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

These tinkerers and dreamers are the main characters in our story. Their ingenious plans rarely transformed the world immediately. Mostly they had hunches, thoughts that were vague, even wrongheaded, but hinted at something bigger. And eventually, collectively, these ideas ushered in revolutions in the way we live.

Inventions and scientific discoveries tend to come in clusters at specific moments in history, when a handful of geographically dispersed investigators stumble independently onto the very same thing. The electric battery, the telegraph, the steam engine, and the digital music library were all independently invented by multiple people in the space of a few years. Scientists and scholars have tracked hundreds of these simultaneous inventions.

The innovations in this book belong to everyday life, not science fiction: a glass lens, air-conditioning, a sound recording, a cup of clean tap water, a wristwatch, a lightbulb. This is a history worth telling, in part because it allows us to see a world we generally take for granted with fresh eyes. But the other reason to write this kind of history is that these innovations have set in motion a much wider array of changes in society than you might expect.

Innovations usually begin 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. We like to think we are decision-makers in charge of our world. And often change does come about through the conscious planning and actions of political or military leaders, or artists, or scientists or inventors, or voters or protest movements, any of which may deliberately bring about some kind of new reality. But social transformations are not always the direct result of deliberate human choices. In some cases, ideas and innovations take on a life of their own—and they spark changes that were not part of their creators’ vision. You might not think that the invention of air-conditioning would change American politics, or that Gutenberg's printing press would lead directly to the creation of telescopes and microscopes, but that's the unlikely way that important innovations can sometimes shape the world.

Innovations can have mixed consequences as they become more widespread. Cars move us more efficiently through space than horses did, but are they worth the impact on the environment? Cell phones and texting mean almost instant access to people and information, but how does that affect live conversations and other social skills, sharing public spaces, and even driving safety?

I should mention two additional elements of the book's focus: the “we” in this book, and in its title, is largely the “we” of North Americans and Europeans. (The story of how China, India, or countries in the Middle East or South America got to now would be a different one, and every bit as fascinating.) Certain critical experiences—the rise of the scientific method, industrialization—happened in Europe first , and have now spread across the world. ( Why they happened in Europe first is of course one of the most interesting questions of all, but it's not one this book tries to answer.)

Also, while a few brilliant and innovative women appear in this book—like the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace, and the entrepreneur Annie Murray—most of the stories date back to times when women were actively discouraged from pursuing careers as scientists, inventors, or entrepreneurs. Because of that, the vast majority of the innovators profiled in these pages are men. Thankfully, advances in gender equality over the last few decades have made it easier for women to make scientific discoveries and create world-changing devices, though of course there is still work to do to reach a completely level playing field. I have no doubt that future historians writing a new version of this book fifty years from now could feature only female innovators if they wanted.

The story I'm telling is “long-zoom” history: traditionally, we look at history through the narratives of individuals or nations, but on some fundamental level, these boundaries are too limiting. History happens on the microscopic level of atoms, on the vast level of planetary climate change, and on all the levels in between. To get the story right, we need a framework that does justice to all those different levels. For example, to understand why transparent glass came to change so much of the modern world, we have to peer into the subatomic properties of silicon dioxide, the material that glass is made from—and we have to zoom out to see the impact of the glassmaking industry on the city of Venice.

From the places we live, to the food we eat, to what we produce and consume, to how we inform or entertain ourselves, I want to show you how these seemingly unconnected worlds are linked by the unsung heroes whose questions, curiosity, and doggedness led to the inventions and chain reactions that shape our modern world.

In other words: how we got to now.

Marin County, California
August 2017