Steven Johnson (1) (1968–)

This book was absolutely MADE of context, in a way that I found incredibly satisfying. At its most basic level, this is the story of cholera epidemic in London that led to the discovery (finally) of how cholera is transmitted.

But it is the how, yes? How this happened that is fascinating, and Johnson is all about placing this moment in its proper contexts -- from economics, sanitation, city planning, dominant scientific paradigms, communication, the medical profession...

Sometimes all these layers of context can cause some circling back that may cause impatience if you're just trying to get to the payoff, but for the most part, I was delighted.… (more)

Like James Burke, whose “Connections” series ran on BBC and PBS in the late 1970s, Steven Johnson is interested in how one thing leads to another. Ideas are built on other ideas, often in surprising ways.

Johnson narrated his own BBC and PBS series, and the book based on that series, “How We Got to Now,” was published in 2014. Easier to follow than Burke, Johnson concentrates on six areas of discovery: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light.
The discovery of glass, by accident, led to windows, lenses, fiberglass and eventually modern electronics. "The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass," he writes.

As for cold, for many centuries nobody gave any thought to creating artificial cold, although artificial heat in the form of fire had been around for a long time. But then they started transporting ice in ships, which led to ice boxes, refrigerators, frozen food and air conditioning.

Discoveries lead in unexpected directions, Johnson points out. Because of air conditioning, population centers in the United States have moved south, from New York, Chicago and Detroit to Houston, Los Angeles and Miami. Telephones made skyscrapers possible. Because of barcodes, big stores like Walmart, Lowes and Target came to be.

We celebrate inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell as if their genius was unique. Yet if they hadn't done what they did, somebody else would have. And in many cases somebody else did but never got the credit. Truly unique ideas are rare.… (more)