I've been a Steven Johnson fan ever since "Everything Bad is Good for You": much like Malcolm Gladwell, he finds interesting, surprising angles in unexpected places. "How We Got To Now" offers essays on serendipity and unexpected connections, unintended consequences, and the not-infrequent phenomenon of innovations emerging from a confluence of similar ideas in a short span of time (rather than from the lone inventor of lore). Each chapter covers the emergence of a basic product or idea (like glass,artificial light, or manufactured cold), the problem it solved, the players and ideas in motion behind it, and the unexpected reach it has had. There are stories of familiar names and unknown backstage figures, punctuated equilibrium and coevolutionary interactions, networked ideas, chaos and change, the social ramifications of innovations, and simple ah-ha moments that proved significant. For instance: the search for a better method of freezing foods links to dehumidification, both of which are tied to air conditioning, which by the mid-20th century was facilitating disruptions in human migration patterns.
Working from a premise outlined in the introduction, "How We Got to Now" provides an intriguing look at history not from the point of view of human accounts -- which would factor in human events like war and political upheavals -- but rather the story that would be recorded by a robot historian. (Or, as Johnson says, what you would get "if a lightbulb had written the story of the past 300 years".) This book is a readable, satisfying,fascinating tour de force long-zoom view of technologies that proved revolutionary -- and how they got that way.