31 October 2018 HOW WE GOT TO NOW: SIX INNOVATIONS THAT MADE THE MODERN WORLD by Steven Johnson, adapted for young readers by Sheila Keenan, Viking, October 2018, 180p., ISBN: 978-0-425-28778-1

“Sometimes change comes at you

Like a broadside accident

There is chaos to the order

Random things you can’t prevent”

-- Joni Mitchell, “Good Friends” (1985)

“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 or microscopes, but that’s the unlikely way that important innovations can sometimes shape the world.”

My grandfather was a toddler when the Wright Brothers first flew an airplane. My mother was a schoolchild when penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming. I’m old enough to remember when TVs were black and white, not color, decades before the dawn of cable TV.

Change is exciting. For me, changes seem to happen more quickly and be more significant over time.

In HOW WE GOT TO NOW: SIX INNOVATIONS THAT MADE THE MODERN WORLD, we learn that the big inventions of our lifetimes are all related to foundational innovations that brought us into the modern world. For those of us who spent most of our lives with a telephone wired to the wall, recent technological inventions seem mind-blowing. But those inventions all derive from the six innovations discussed in this book.

The author categorizes these six foundational innovations as Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, and Light. Each chapter leads us through the interconnectedness of numerous inventions and twists upons the inventions. Venetian glass blowing leads to eyeglasses to microscopes and telescopes to cameras and televisions and fiberglass and fiber optics and the Internet. By the end of the Glass chapter, you realize that you owe nearly everything in life to the fact that some talented people in fourteenth-century Venice figured out how to fabricate clear glass. The other five chapters are similarly eye-opening.

One of my favorite stories in the book (in the section on Clean) involves the literal lifting up of a significant portion of the big buildings in Chicago in the mid-1800s. There is much to marvel at as the author walks us through the interconnectedness of hundreds of inventions and innovations discussed in the book.

One idea the author reinforces is that many earth-shaking inventions are the result of collaboration by many innovators. It would be great for young people to recognize that, in many areas of life, working collaboratively can better solve so many of our problems.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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