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Book: How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Quotes of Book: How We Got to Now: Six
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  1. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning "disks for the eyes." Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans-lentes in Latin-the disks themselves came to be called "lenses.
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  2. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.
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  3. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago.
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  4. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.
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  5. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence of individual liberty in legal codes. That has to count as progress. But reasonable people disagree about whether we have now tipped the scales too far in the direction of individualism, away from those collective organizations: the union, the community, the state. Resolving those disagreements requires a different set of arguments-and values-than the ones we need to explain where those disagreements came from.
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  6. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.
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  7. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces.
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  8. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    Thanks to the printing press, the Continent was suddenly populated by people who were experts at manipulating light through slightly convex pieces of glass. These were the hackers of the first optical revolution.
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  9. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies.
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  10. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    Johannes Gutenberg's printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells.
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  11. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them.
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  12. Steven Johnson _ How We Got to Now: Six

    The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956.
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