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

by Steven Johnson

  By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation. But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius. His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative: assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere. “I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention… . It’s their ‘ideas’ that appeal to me,” Edison famously said. “I am quite correctly described as ‘more of a sponge than an inventor.’”

  Early Edison carbon filament lamp, 1897

  The lightbulb was the product of networked innovation, and so it is probably fitting that the reality of electric light ultimately turned out to be more of a network or system than a single entity. The true victory lap for Edison didn’t come with that bamboo filament glowing in a vacuum; it came with the lighting of the Pearl Street district two years later. To make that happen, you needed to invent lightbulbs, yes, but you also needed a reliable source of electric current, a system for distributing that current through a neighborhood, a mechanism for connecting individual lightbulbs to the grid, and a meter to gauge how much electricity each household was using. A lightbulb on its own is a curiosity piece, something to dazzle reporters with. What Edison and the muckers created was much bigger than that: a network of multiple innovations, all linked together to make the magic of electric light safe and affordable.

  New York: Adapting the Brush Electric Light to the Illumination of the Streets, a Scene Near the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

  Why should we care whether Edison invented the lightbulb as a lone genius or as part of a wider network? For starters, if the invention of the lightbulb is going to be a canonical story of how new technologies come into being, we might as well tell an accurate story. But it’s more than just a matter of getting the facts right, because there are social and political implications to these kinds of stories. We know that one key driver of progress and standards of living is technological innovation. We know that we want to encourage the trends that took us from ten minutes of artificial light on one hour’s wage to three hundred days. If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections. The lightbulb shines light on more than just our bedside reading; it helps us see more clearly the way new ideas come into being, and how to cultivate them as a society.

  Artificial light turns out to have an even deeper connection to political values. Just six years after Edison lit the Pearl Street district, another maverick would push the envelope of light in a new direction, while walking the streets just a few blocks north of Edison’s illuminated wonderland. The muckers might have invented the system of electric light, but the next breakthrough in artificial light would come from a muckraker.

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  BURIED DEEP NEAR THE CENTER of the Great Pyramid of Giza lies a granite-faced cavity known as “the King’s Chamber.” The room contains only one object: an open rectangular box, sometimes called a “coffer,” carved out of red Aswan granite, chipped on one corner. The chamber’s name derives from the assumption that the coffer had been a sarcophagus that once contained the body of Khufu, the pharaoh who built the pyramid more than four thousand years ago. But a long line of maverick Egyptologists have suggested that the coffer had other uses. One still-circulating theory notes that the coffer possesses the exact dimensions that the Bible attributes to the original Ark of the Covenant, suggesting to some that the coffer once housed the legendary Ark itself.

  In the fall of 1861, a visitor came to the King’s Chamber in the throes of an equally outlandish theory, this one revolving around a different Old Testament ark. The visitor was Charles Piazzi Smyth, who for the preceding fifteen years had served as the Royal Astronomer of Scotland, though he was a classic Victorian polymath with dozens of eclectic interests. Smyth had recently read a bizarre tome that contended that the pyramids had been originally built by the biblical Noah. Long an armchair Egyptologist, Smyth had grown so obsessed with the theory that he left his armchair in Edinburgh and headed off to Giza to do his own investigations firsthand. His detective work would ultimately lead to a bizarre stew of numerology and ancient history, published in a series of books and pamphlets over the coming years. Smyth’s detailed analyses of the pyramid’s structure convinced him that the builders had relied on a unit of measurement that was almost exactly equivalent to the modern British inch. Smyth interpreted this correspondence to be a sign that the inch itself was a holy measure, passed directly from God to Noah himself. This in turn gave Smyth the artillery he needed to attack the metric system that had begun creeping across the English Channel. The revelation of the Egyptian inch made it clear that the metric system was not just a symptom of malevolent French influence. It was also a betrayal of divine will.

  Smyth’s scientific discoveries in the Great Pyramid may not have stood the test of time, or even kept Britain from going metric. Yet he still managed to make history in the King’s Chamber. Smyth brought the bulky and fragile tools of wet-plate photography (then state of the art) to Giza to document his findings. But the collodion-treated glass plates couldn’t capture a legible image in the King’s Chamber, even when the room was lit by torchlight. Photographers had tinkered with artificial lighting since the first daguerreotypes were printed in the 1830s, but almost all the solutions to date had produced unsatisfactory results. (Candles and gaslight were useless, obviously.) Early experiments heated a ball of calcium carbonate—the “limelight” that would illuminate theater productions until the dawn of electric light—but limelit photographs suffered from harsh contrasts and ghostly white faces.

  The failed experiments with artificial lighting meant that by the time Smyth set up his gear in the King’s Chamber, more than thirty years after the invention of the daguerreotype, the art of photography was still entirely dependent on natural sunlight, a resource that was not exactly abundant in the inner core of a massive pyramid. But Smyth had heard of recent experiments using wire made of magnesium—photographers who twisted the wire into a bow and set it ablaze before capturing their low-light image. The technique was promising, but the light was unstable and generated an unpleasant amount of dense fumes. Burning magnesium wire in a closed environment had a tendency to make ordinary portraits look as though they were composed in dense fog.

  Smyth realized that what he needed in the King’s Chamber was something closer to a flash than a slow burn. And so—for the first time in history, as far as we know—he mixed magnesium with ordinary gunpowder, creating a controlled mini-explosion that illuminated the walls of the King’s Chamber for a split second, allowing him to record its secrets on his glass plates. Today, the tourists that pass through the Great Pyramid encounter signs that forbid the use of flash photography inside the vast structure. They do not mention that the Great Pyramid also marks the site where flash photography was invented.

  Or at least, one of the sites where flash photography was invented. Just as with Edison’s lightbulb, the true story of flash photography’s origins is a more complicated, more networked affair. Big ideas coalesce out of smaller, incremental breakthroughs. Smyth may have been the first to conceive of the idea of combining magnesium with an oxygen-rich, combustible element, but flash photography itself didn’t become a mainstream practice for another two decades, when two German scientists, Adolf Miethe and Johannes Gaedicke, mixed fine magnesium powder with potassium chlorate, creating a much more stable concoction that allowed high-shutt
er-speed photographs in low-light conditions. They called it Blitzlicht—literally, “flash light.”

  Word of Miethe and Gaedicke’s invention soon trickled out of Germany. In October 1887, a New York paper ran a four-line dispatch about Blitzlicht. It was hardly a front-page story; the vast majority of New Yorkers ignored it altogether. But the idea of flash photography set off a chain of associations in the mind of one reader—a police reporter and amateur photographer who stumbled across the article while having breakfast with his wife in Brooklyn. His name was Jacob Riis.

  Charles Piazzi Smyth

  Then a twenty-eight-year-old Danish immigrant, Riis would ultimately enter the history books as one of the original muckrakers of the late nineteenth century, the man who did more to expose the squalor of tenement life—and inspire a progressive reform movement—than any other figure of the era. But until that breakfast in 1887, Riis’s attempts to shine light on the appalling conditions in the slums of Manhattan had failed to change public opinion in any meaningful way. A close confidant of then police commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, Riis had been exploring the depths of Five Points and other Manhattan hovels for years. With over half a million people living in only fifteen thousand tenements, sections of Manhattan were the most densely populated places on the planet. Riis was fond of taking late-night walks through the bleak alleyways on his way back home to Brooklyn from the police headquarters on Mulberry Street. “We used to go in the small hours of the morning,” he later recalled, “into the worst tenements to count noses and see if the law against overcrowding was violated, and the sights I saw there gripped my heart until I felt that I must tell of them, or burst, or turn anarchist, or something.”

  Appalled by what he had discovered on his expeditions, Riis began writing about the mass tragedy of the tenements for local papers and national magazines such as Scribner’s and Harper’s Weekly. His written accounts of the shame of the cities belonged to a long tradition, dating back at least to Dickens’s horrified visit to New York in 1840. A number of exhaustive surveys of tenement depravity had been published over the years, with titles like “The Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health.” An entire genre of “sunshine and shadow” guidebooks to Five Points and its ilk flourished after the Civil War, offering curious visitors tips on exploring the seedy underbelly of big-city life, or at least exploring it vicariously from the safety of a small-town oasis. (The phrase “slumming it” originates with these tourist expeditions.) But despite stylistic differences, these texts shared one attribute: they had almost no effect on improving the actual living conditions of those slum dwellers.

  Jacob Riis, 1900s

  Riis had long suspected that the problem with tenement reform—and urban poverty initiatives generally—was ultimately a problem of imagination. Unless you walked through the streets of Five Points after midnight, or descended into the dark recesses of interior apartments populated by multiple families at a time, you simply couldn’t imagine the conditions; they were too far removed from the day-to-day experience of most Americans, or at least most voting Americans. And so the political mandate to clean up the cities never quite amassed enough support to overcome the barriers of remote indifference.

  Like other chroniclers of urban blight before him, Riis had experimented with illustrations that dramatized the devastating human cost of the tenements. But the line drawings invariably aestheticized the suffering; even the bleakest underground hovel looked almost quaint as an etching. Only photographs seemed to capture the reality with sufficient resolution to change hearts, but whenever Riis experimented with photography, he ran into the same impasse. Almost everything he wanted to photograph involved environments with minimal amounts of light. Indeed, the lack of even indirect sunlight in so many of the tenement flats was part of what made them so objectionable. This was Riis’s great stumbling block: as far as photography was concerned, the most important environments in the city—in fact, some of the most important new living quarters in the world—were literally invisible. They couldn’t be seen.

  All of which should explain Jacob Riis’s epiphany at the breakfast table in 1887. Why trifle with line drawings when Blitzlicht could shine light in the darkness?

  Within two weeks of that breakfast discovery, Riis assembled a team of amateur photographers (and a few curious police officers) to set off into the bowels of the darkened city—literally armed with Blitzlicht. (The flash is produced by firing a cartridge of the substance from a revolver.) More than a few denizens of Five Points found the shooting party hard to comprehend. As Riis would later put it: “The spectacle of half a dozen strange men invading a house in the midnight hour armed with big pistols which they shot off recklessly was hardly reassuring, however sugary our speech, and it was not to be wondered at if the tenants bolted through windows and down fire-escapes wherever we went.”

  Before long, Riis replaced the revolver with a frying pan. The apparatus seemed more “home-like,” he claimed, and made his subjects feel more comfortable encountering the baffling new technology. (The simple act of being photographed was novelty enough for most of them.) It was still dangerous work; one small explosion in the frying pan nearly blinded Riis, and twice he set fire to his house while experimenting with the flash. But the images that emerged from those urban expeditions would ultimately change history. Using new halftone printing techniques, Riis published the photographs in his runaway bestseller, How the Other Half Lives, and traveled across the country giving lectures that were accompanied by magic-lantern images of Five Points and its previously invisible poverty. The convention of gathering together in a darkened room and watching illuminated images on a screen would become a ritual of fantasy and wish fulfillment in the twentieth century. But for many Americans, the first images they saw in those environments were ones of squalor and human suffering.

  Riis’s books and lectures—and the riveting images they contained—helped create a massive shift in public opinion, and set the stage for one of the great periods of social reform in American history. Within a decade of their publication, Riis’s images built support for the New York State Tenement House Act of 1901, one of the first great reforms of the Progressive Era, which eliminated much of the appalling living conditions that Riis had documented. His work ignited a new tradition of muckraking that would ultimately improve the working conditions of factory floors as well. In a literal sense, illuminating the dark squalor of the tenements changed the map of urban centers around the world.

  New York City: A shelter for immigrants in a Bayard Street tenement. Photo taken by Jacob Riis, 1888.

  Here again we see the strange leaps of the hummingbird’s wing at play in social history, new inventions leading to consequences their creators never dreamed of. The utility of mixing magnesium and potassium chlorate seems straightforward enough: Blitzlicht meant that human beings could record images in dark environments more accurately than ever before. But that new capability also expanded the space of possibility for other ways of seeing. This is what Riis understood almost immediately. If you could see in the dark, if you could share that vision with strangers around the world thanks to the magic of photography, then the underworld of Five Points could, at long last, be seen in all its tragic reality. The dry, statistical accounts of “The Report of the Council of Hygiene and Public Health” would be replaced with actual human beings sharing physical space of devastating squalor.

  The network of minds that invented flash photography—from the first tinkerers with limelight to Smyth to Miethe and Gaedicke—had deliberately set out with a clearly defined goal: to build a tool that would allow photographs to be taken in darkness. But like almost every important innovation in human history, that breakthrough created a platform that allowed other innovations in radically different fields. We like to organize the world into neat categories: photography goes here, politics there. But the history of Blitzlicht reminds us that ideas always travel in networks. They come into being through networks of collaboration, and once unl
eashed on the world, they set into motion changes that are rarely confined to single disciplines. One century’s attempt to invent flash photography transformed the lives of millions of city dwellers in the next century.

  Riis’s vision should also serve as a corrective to the excesses of crude techno-determinism. It was virtually inevitable that someone would invent flash photography in the nineteenth century. (The simple fact that it was invented multiple times shows us that the time was ripe for the idea.) But there was nothing intrinsic to the technology that suggested it be used to illuminate the lives of the very people who could least afford to enjoy it. You could have reasonably predicted that the problem of photographing in low light would be “solved” be 1900. But no one would have predicted that its very first mainstream use would come in the form of a crusade against urban poverty. That twist belongs to Riis alone. The march of technology expands the space of possibility around us, but how we explore that space is up to us.

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  IN THE FALL OF 1968, the sixteen members of a graduate studio at the Yale School of Art and Architecture—three faculty and thirteen students—set off on a ten-day expedition to study urban design in the streets of an actual city. This in itself was nothing new: architecture students had been touring the ruins and the monuments of Rome or Paris or Brasília for as long as there have been architecture students. What made this group unusual is that they were leaving behind the Gothic charm of New Haven for a very different kind of city, one that happened to be growing faster than any of the old relics: Las Vegas. It was a city that looked nothing like the dense, concentrated tenements of Riis’s Manhattan. But like Riis, the Yale studio sensed that something new and significant was happening on the Vegas strip. Led by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, the husband-and-wife team who would become founders of postmodern architecture, the Yale studio had been drawn to the desert frontier by the novelty of Vegas, by the shock value they could elicit by taking it seriously, and by the sense that they were watching the future being born. But as much as anything, they had come to Vegas to see a new kind of light. They were drawn, postmodern moths to the flame, to neon.