How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

  Lee De Forest, American inventor, at the end of the 1920s

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  RADIO BEGAN ITS LIFE as a two-way medium, a practice that continues to this day as ham radio: individual hobbyists talking to one another over the airwaves, occasionally eavesdropping on other conversations. But by the early 1920s, the broadcast model that would come to dominate the technology had evolved. Professional stations began delivering packaged news and entertainment to consumers who listened on radio receivers in their homes. Almost immediately, something entirely unexpected happened: the existence of a mass medium for sound unleashed a new kind of music on the United States, a music that had until then belonged almost exclusively to New Orleans, to the river towns of the American South, and to African-American neighborhoods in New York and Chicago. Almost overnight, radio made jazz a national phenomenon. Musicians such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong became household names. Ellington’s band performed weekly national broadcasts from the Cotton Club in Harlem starting in the late 1920s; Armstrong became the first African-American to host his own national radio show shortly thereafter.

  All of this horrified Lee De Forest, who wrote a characteristically baroque denunciation to the National Association of Broadcasters: “What have you done with my child, the radio broadcast? You have debased this child, dressed him in rags of ragtime, tatters of jive and boogie-woogie.” In fact, the technology that De Forest had helped invent was intrinsically better suited to jazz than it was to classical performances. Jazz punched through the compressed, tinny sound of early AM radio speakers; the vast dynamic range of a symphony was largely lost in translation. The blast of Satchmo’s trumpet played better on the radio than the subtleties of Schubert.

  Composer Duke Ellington performs onstage, circa 1935

  The collision of jazz and radio created, in effect, the first surge of a series of cultural waves that would wash over twentieth-century society. A new sound that has been slowly incubating in some small section of the world—New Orleans, in the case of jazz—finds its way onto the mass medium of radio, offending the grown-ups and electrifying the kids. The channel first carved out by jazz would subsequently be filled by rock ’n’ roll from Memphis, British pop from Liverpool, rap and hip-hop from South Central and Brooklyn. Something about radio and music seems to have encouraged this pattern, in a way that television or film did not: almost immediately after a national medium emerged for sharing music, subcultures of sound began flourishing on that medium. There were “underground” artists before radio—impoverished poets and painters—but radio helped create a template that would become commonplace: the underground artist who becomes an overnight celebrity.

  With jazz, of course, there was a crucial additional element. The overnight celebrities were, for the most part, African-Americans: Ellington, Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday. It was a profound breakthrough: for the first time, white America welcomed African-American culture into its living room, albeit through the speakers of an AM radio. The jazz stars gave white America an example of African-Americans becoming famous and wealthy and admired for their skills as entertainers rather than advocates. Of course, many of those musicians also became powerful advocates, in songs such as Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” with its bitter tale of a southern lynching. Radio signals had a kind of freedom to them that proved to be liberating in the real world. Those radio waves ignored the way in which society was segmented at that time: between black and white worlds, between different economic classes. The radio signals were color-blind. Like the Internet, they didn’t break down barriers as much as live in a world separate from them.

  The birth of the civil rights movement was intimately bound up in the spread of jazz music throughout the United States. It was, for many Americans, the first cultural common ground between black and white America that had been largely created by African-Americans. That in itself was a great blow to segregation. Martin Luther King Jr. made the connection explicit in remarks he delivered at the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964:

  It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of “racial identity” as a problem for a multi-racial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world.

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  LIKE MANY POLITICAL FIGURES of the twentieth century, King was indebted to the vacuum tube for another reason. Shortly after De Forest and Bell Labs began using vacuum tubes to enable radio broadcasts, the technology was enlisted to amplify the human voice in more immediate settings: powering amplifiers attached to microphones, allowing people to speak or sing to massive crowds for the first time in history. Tube amplifiers finally allowed us to break free from the sound engineering that had prevailed since Neolithic times. We were no longer dependent on the reverberations of caves or cathedrals or opera houses to make our voices louder. Now electricity could do the work of echoes, but a thousand times more powerfully.

  Amplification created an entirely new kind of political event: mass rallies oriented around individual speakers. Crowds had played a dominant role in political upheaval for the preceding century and a half; if there is an iconic image of revolution before the twentieth century, it’s the swarm of humanity taking the city streets in 1789 or 1848. But amplification took those teeming crowds and gave them a focal point: the voice of the leader reverberating through the plaza or stadium or park. Before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time. (The elaborate vocal stylings of opera singing were in many ways designed to coax maximum projection out of the biological limitations of the voice.) But a microphone attached to multiple speakers extended the range of earshot by several orders of magnitude. No one recognized—and exploited—this new power more quickly than Adolf Hitler, whose Nuremberg rallies addressed more than a hundred thousand followers, all fixated on the amplified sound of the Führer’s voice. Remove the microphone and amplifier from the toolbox of twentieth-century technology and you remove one of that century’s defining forms of political organization, from Nuremberg to “I Have a Dream.”

  Tube amplification enabled the musical equivalent of political rallies as well: the Beatles playing Shea Stadium, Woodstock, Live Aid. But the idiosyncrasies of vacuum-tube technology also had a more subtle effect on twentieth-century music—making it not just loud but also making it noisy.

  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. An entirely new symphony of discord suddenly entered the realm of everyday life, particularly in large cities: the crashing, clanging of metal on metal; the white-noise blast of the steam engine. The noise was, in many ways, as shocking as the crowds and the smells of the big cities. By the 1920s, as electrically amplified sounds began roaring alongside the rest of the urban tumult, organizations such as Manhattan’s Noise Abatement Society began advocating for a quieter metropolis. Sympathetic to the society’s mission, a Bell Labs engineer named Harvey Fletcher created a truck loaded with state-of-the-art sound equipment and Bell engineers who drove slowly around New York City noise hot spots taking sound measurements. (The unit of measurement for sound volume—the decibel—came out of Fletcher’s research.) Fletcher and his team found that some city sounds—riveting and drilling in construction, the roar of the subway—were at the decibel threshold for auditory pain. At Cortlandt Street, known as “Radio Row,” the noise of storefronts showcasing the latest radio speakers was so loud it even drowned out the elevated train.

  But while noise-abatement groups battled modern noise through regulations
and public campaigns, another reaction emerged. Instead of being repelled by the sound, our ears began to find something beautiful in it. The routine experiences of everyday life had been effectively a training session for the aesthetics of noise since the early nineteenth century. But it was the vacuum tube that finally brought noise to the masses.

  Starting in the 1950s, guitarists playing through tube amplifiers noticed that they could make an intriguing new kind of sound by overdriving the amp: a crunchy layer of noise on top of the notes generated by strumming the strings of the guitar itself. This was, technically speaking, the sound of the amplifier malfunctioning, distorting the sound it had been designed to reproduce. To most ears it sounded like something was broken with the equipment, but a small group of musicians began to hear something appealing in the sound. A handful of early rock ’n’ roll recordings in the 1950s features a modest amount of distortion on the guitar tracks, but the art of noise wouldn’t really take off until the sixties. In July 1960, a bassist named Grady Martin was recording a riff for a Marty Robbins song called “Don’t Worry” when his amplifier malfunctioned, creating a heavily distorted sound that we now call a “fuzz tone.” Initially Robbins wanted it removed from the song, but the producer persuaded him to keep it. “No one could figure out the sound because it sounded like a saxophone,” Robbins would say years later. “It sounded like a jet engine taking off. It had many different sounds.” Inspired by the strange, unplaceable noise of Martin’s riff, another band called the Ventures asked a friend to hack together a device that could add the fuzz effect deliberately. Within a year, there were commercial distortion boxes on the market; within three years Keith Richards was saturating the opening riff of “Satisfaction” with distortion, and the trademark sound of the sixties was born.

  A similar pattern developed with a novel—and initially unpleasant—sound that occurs when amplified speakers and microphones share the same physical space: the swirling, screeching noise of feedback. Distortion was a sound that had at least some aural similarity to those industrial sounds that had first emerged in the eighteenth century. (Hence the “jet engine” tone of Grady Martin’s bass line.) But feedback was an entirely new creature; it did not exist in any form until the invention of speakers and microphones roughly a century ago. Sound engineers would go to great lengths to eliminate feedback from recordings or concert settings, positioning microphones so they didn’t pick up signal from the speakers, and thus cause the infinite-loop screech of feedback. Yet once again, one man’s malfunction turned out to be another man’s music, as artists such as Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin—and later punk experimentalists like Sonic Youth—embraced the sound in their recordings and performances. In a real sense, Hendrix was not just playing the guitar on those feedback-soaked recordings in the late 1960s, he was creating a new sound that drew upon the vibration of the guitar strings, the microphone-like pickups on the guitar itself, and the speakers, building on the complex and unpredictable interactions between those three technologies.

  Sometimes cultural innovations come from using new technologies in unexpected ways. De Forest and Bell Labs weren’t trying to invent the mass rally when they came up with the first sketches of a vacuum tube, but it turned out to be easy to assemble mass rallies once you had amplification to share a single voice with that many people. But sometimes the innovation comes from a less likely approach: by deliberately exploiting the malfunctions, turning noise and error into a useful signal. Every genuinely new technology has a genuinely new way of breaking—and every now and then, those malfunctions open a new door in the adjacent possible. 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.

  Taxonomy of sound diagram featured in the book City Noise

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  FROM THE NEANDERTHALS chanting in the Burgundy caves, to Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville warbling into his phonautograph, to Duke Ellington broadcasting from the Cotton Club, the story of sound technology had always been about extending the range and intensity of our voices and our ears. But the most surprising twist of all would come just a century ago, when humans first realized that sound could be harnessed for something else: to help us see.

  The use of light to signal the presence of dangerous shorelines to sailors is an ancient practice; the Lighthouse of Alexandria, constructed several centuries before the birth of Christ, was one of the original seven wonders of the world. But lighthouses perform poorly at precisely the point where they are needed the most: in stormy weather, where the light they transmit is obscured by fog and rain. Many lighthouses employed warning bells as an additional signal, but those too could be easily drowned out by the sound of a roaring sea. Yet sound waves turn out to have an intriguing physical property: under water, they travel four times faster than they do through the air, and they are largely undisturbed by the sonic chaos above sea level.

  In 1901, a Boston-based firm called the Submarine Signal Company began manufacturing a system of communications tools that exploited this property of aquatic sound waves: underwater bells that chimed at regular intervals, and microphones specially designed for underwater reception called “hydrophones.” The SSC established more than a hundred stations around the world at particularly treacherous harbors or channels, where the underwater bells would warn vessels, equipped with the company’s hydrophones, that steered too close to the rocks or shoals. It was an ingenious system, but it had its limits. To begin with, it worked only in places where the SSC had installed warning bells. And it was entirely useless at detecting less predictable dangers: other ships, or icebergs.

  The threat posed by icebergs to maritime travel became vividly apparent to the world in April 1912, when the Titanic foundered in the North Atlantic. Just a few days before the sinking, the Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden had run across an engineer from the SSC at a train station, and after a quick chat, the two men agreed that Fessenden should come by the office to see the latest underwater signaling technologies. Fessenden had been a pioneer of wireless radio, responsible for both the first radio transmission of human speech and the first transatlantic two-way radio transmission of Morse code. That expertise had led the SSC to ask him to help them design their hydrophone system to better filter out the background noise of underwater acoustics. When news of the Titanic broke, just four days after his visit to the SSC, Fessenden was as shocked as the rest of the world, but unlike the rest of the world, he had an idea about how to prevent these tragedies in the future.

  Fessenden’s first suggestion had been to replace the bells with a continuous, electric-powered tone that could also be used to transmit Morse code, borrowing from his experiences with wireless telegraphy. But as he tinkered with the possibilities, he realized the system could be much more ambitious. Instead of merely listening to sounds generated by specifically designed and installed warning posts, Fessenden’s device would generate its own sounds onboard the ship and listen to the echoes created as those new sounds bounced off objects in the water, much as dolphins use echolocation to navigate their way around the ocean. Borrowing the same principles that had attracted the cave chanters to the unusually reverberant sections of the Arcy-sur-Cure caves, Fessenden tuned the device so that it would resonate with only a small section of the frequency spectrum, right around 540hz, allowing it to ignore all the background noise of the aquatic environment. After calling it, somewhat disturbingly, his “vibrator” for a few months, he ultimately dubbed it the “Fessenden Oscillator.” It was a system for both sending and receiving underwater telegraphy, and the world’s first functional sonar device.

  Once again, the timing of world-historical events underscored the need for Fessenden’s contraption. Just a year after he completed his first working prototype, World War I erupted. The German U-boats roaming the North Atlantic now posed an even greater threat to maritime travel than the Titanic’s iceberg. The t
hreat was particularly acute for Fessenden, who as a Canadian citizen was a fervent patriot of the British Empire. (He also seems to have been a borderline racist, later advancing a theory in his memoirs about why “blond-haired men of English extraction” had been so central to modern innovation.) But the United States was still two years away from joining the war, and the executives at the SSC didn’t share his allegiance to the Union Jack. Faced with the financial risk of developing two revolutionary new technologies, the company decided to build and market the oscillator as a wireless telegraphy device exclusively.

  Fessenden ultimately traveled on his own dollar all the way to Portsmouth, England, to try to persuade the Royal Navy to invest in his oscillator, but they too were dubious of this miracle invention. Fessenden would later write: “I pleaded with them to just let us open the box and show them what the apparatus was like.” But his pleas were ultimately ignored. Sonar would not become a standard component of naval warfare until World War II. By the armistice in 1918, upward of ten thousand lives had been lost to the U-boats. The British and, eventually, the Americans had experimented with countless offensive and defensive measures to ward off these submarine predators. But, ironically, the most valuable defensive weapon would have been a simple 540hz sound wave, bouncing off the hull of the attacker.

  Radio developer Reginald Fessenden testing his invention, 1906

  In the second half of the twentieth century, the principles of echolocation would be employed to do far more than detect icebergs and submarines. Fishing vessels—and amateur fishers—used variations of Fessenden’s oscillator to detect their catch. Scientists used sonar to explore the last great mysteries of our oceans, revealing hidden landscapes, natural resources, and fault lines. Eighty years after the sinking of the Titanic inspired Reginald Fessenden to dream up the first sonar, a team of American and French researchers used sonar to discover the vessel on the Atlantic seabed, twelve thousand feet below the surface.