Book review: How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

by Steven Johnson
Riverhead Books
3.5 stars

This cheerful book by journalist Steven Johnson crosses the history of science with sociology. Johnson first describes how six world-changing discoveries came about, and then goes on to explain in what ways they affected human society.

His aim, he says, is to draw a line of causality from the invention itself to the changes it brought about, sometimes accidentally. This is not very original - after all, that is what the discipline of history has always done.

But Johnson's chatty style makes the science accessible for those who have no prior understanding of physics, biology or chemistry, and he expertly presents an overview of the inventions. What's more, he avoids using the language of science - mathematics - opting for clear but basic descriptions in words.

The innovations of the title are so much part of our daily lives that it's difficult to think of a time when they did not exist. Johnson chooses glass, cold (refrigeration), sound, cleanliness (hygiene), time (clocks) and light as his subjects. All of what he writes about has been covered in more detail, in science text books and popular science works.

Still, the long-form view he takes often results in some interesting examples of cause and effect. It's not a great leap to see how the invention of glass ultimately led to the microscope lens, a piece of equipment that spurred the advance of scientific practice as a whole.

But it's less obvious that the invention of the printing press would lead to the mass production of spectacles. That's because before books became easily available outside of monasteries, no one had worried if they couldn't see things up close.