by Kevin Ashton
After the aluminum bar makes landfall, a truck takes it north on Interstates 37 and 35 to a bottling plant on Burnet Road in Austin, where it is rolled flat in a rolling mill and turned into aluminum sheets. The sheets are punched into circles and shaped into a cup by a mechanical process called drawing and ironing—this not only forms the can but also thins the aluminum. The transition from circle to cylinder takes about a fifth of a second. The outside of the can is decorated using a base layer called “urethane acrylate,” then up to seven layers of colored acrylic paint and varnish, which are cured using ultraviolet light. The inside of the can is painted, too—with a chemical called a “comestible polymeric coating,” to prevent aluminum from getting into the soda. So far, this vast tool chain has produced only an empty can with no lid. The next step is to fill it up.
Coca-Cola is made from syrup produced by the Coca-Cola Company of Atlanta, Georgia. The syrup is the only thing the Coca-Cola Company provides; the bottling operation belongs to a separate, independent corporation called the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. The main ingredient in the syrup used in the United States is a sweetener called high-fructose corn syrup 55, so named because it is 55 percent fructose, or “fruit sugar,” and 42 percent glucose, or “simple sugar”—the same ratio of fructose to glucose as in natural honey. High-fructose corn syrup is made by grinding wet corn until it becomes cornstarch, mixing the cornstarch with an enzyme secreted by a bacillus, a rod-shaped bacterium, and another enzyme, this one secreted by an aspergillus mold, and then using a third enzyme, xylose isomerase, derived from a bacterium called Streptomyces rubiginosus, to turn some of the glucose into fructose.
The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring; Coca-Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (created by heating phosphate rock in an arc furnace) and processing it to remove arsenic.
High-fructose corn syrup and caramel coloring make up most of the syrup, but all they add is sweetness and color. Flavors make up a much smaller proportion of the mixture. These include vanilla, which—as we have already seen—is the fruit of a Mexican orchid that has been dried and cured; cinnamon, which is the inner bark of a Sri Lankan tree; coca leaf, which comes from South America and is processed in a unique U.S. government–authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant, cocaine; and kola nut, a red nut found on a tree that grows in the African rain forest (this may be the origin of Coca-Cola’s distinctive red logo).
The final ingredient, caffeine, is a stimulating alkaloid that can be derived from the kola nut, coffee beans, and other sources.
All these ingredients are combined and boiled down to a concentrate, which is transported from the Coca-Cola Company factory in Atlanta to the Coca-Cola Bottling Company factory in Austin, where it is diluted with local water infused with carbon dioxide. Some of the carbon dioxide turns to gas in the water, and these gas bubbles give the water effervescence, also known as “fizz,” after its sound. The final mixture is poured into cans, which still need lids.
The top of the can is carefully engineered: it is aluminum, too, but it has to be thicker and stronger than the rest of the can to withstand the pressure of the carbon dioxide gas, and so it is made from an alloy with more magnesium. The lid is punched and scored, and a tab opening, also made of aluminum, is installed. The finished lid is put on top of the filled can, and the edges of the can are folded over it and welded shut. Twelve of these cans are packaged into a paperboard box called a fridge pack, using a machine capable of producing three hundred such packs a minute.
The finished box is transported by road to my local H-E-B grocery store, where—finally—it can be bought, taken home, chilled, and consumed. This chain, which spans bauxite bulldozers, refrigerators, urethane, bacteria, and cocaine, and touches every continent on the planet except Antarctica, produces seventy million cans of Coca-Cola each day, one of which can be purchased for about a dollar on some close-by street corner, and each of which contains far more than something to drink. Like every other creation, a can of Coke is a product of our world entire and contains inventions that trace all the way back to the origins of our species.
The number of individuals who know how to make a can of Coke is zero. The number of individual nations that could produce a can of Coke is zero. This famously American product is not American at all. Invention and creation, as we have seen, is something we are all in together. Modern tool chains are so long and complex that they bind us into one people and one planet. They are chains of minds: local and foreign, ancient and modern, living and dead—the result of disparate invention and intelligence distributed over time and space. Coca-Cola did not teach the world to sing, no matter what its commercials suggest, yet every can contains humanity’s choir.
The story of Coca-Cola is typical. Everything we make depends on tens of thousands of people and two thousand generations of ancestors.
In 1929, Russian Ilya Ehrenburg described how a car was made, much as I have done here for Coca-Cola, in a book called The Life of the Automobile. He begins with Frenchman Philippe Lebon developing the first internal combustion engine at the end of the eighteenth century and ends with the emergence of the oil industry. On the way, Ehrenburg shows contributions from, among others, Francis Bacon, Paul Cézanne, and Benito Mussolini. He writes of Henry Ford’s conveyor belts—“It’s not even a belt. It’s a chain. It’s a miracle of technology, a victory of human intelligence, a growth of dividends.”
In 1958, Leonard Read traced the history of a yellow “Mongol 482” pencil, made by the Eberhard Faber Pencil Company, from the growth and logging of a cedar tree in Oregon, through its transportation to a milling and painting factory in San Leandro, California, and onward to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where it is grooved, laid with lead made from Sri Lankan graphite and Mississippian mud, lacquered with the refined oil of castor beans, and topped with brass and a material called factice, “a rubber-like product made from reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulphur chloride,” to make an eraser.
And, in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. told a similar story while preaching to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, in a sermon called “Peace on Earth”:
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that’s handed to you by a Pacific islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that’s given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning, and that’s poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that’s poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you’re desirous of having cocoa for breakfast, and that’s poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that’s given to you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you’ve depended on more than half of the world.
Half the world and the two thousand generations that came before us. Together, they give us what computer scientists call “tool chains”—the processes, principles, parts, and products that let us create.
King described tool chains to argue for world peace. But the politics and morality of our long and ancient tool chains are complicated. Ilya Ehrenburg described the chain that built the automobile to argue for Marxism: he believed that the industrial processes of mass production endangered and dehumanized workers. Leonard Read saw the pencil’s journey as
an argument for libertarianism: he claimed that such spontaneous complexity was possible only when people were free of central control from government “masterminds.” Clearly we are tempted to ascribe meaning to the complexity of creation. But should we?
3 | AMISH LESSONS
There is a real-life model for exploring the relationship between creation and its consequences: America’s Amish people—a group of Mennonite Christians descended from Swiss immigrants. The Amish value small, rural communities, and their way of life includes protecting these communities from external influence. As electrification spread through America during the twentieth century, the Amish resisted it. They did the same with other inventions from the period, notably the car and telephone. As a result, the Amish, particularly traditional or “Old Order” Amish, have a reputation for being old-fashioned, frozen in time, and opposed to technology.
But the Amish do not avoid new technology. They are as creative and resourceful as anybody, and more creative and resourceful than most. They generate electricity with solar panels, have invented sophisticated systems for using batteries and propane gas, use LED lighting, operate machines powered by gas engines or compressed air, make photocopies, refrigerate food, and use computers for word processing and making spreadsheets. The thing they avoid as much as possible is using this technology to connect to the non-Amish, or “English,” world. This is why they generate their own power and do not have their own long-distance transportation—they take taxis to travel beyond the range of their horse-drawn buggies—and why their computers do not have Internet access. They are not practicing self-sufficiency. Most of the tools the Amish use are like Coca-Cola: they contain ideas from across the globe; could not be made without large-scale power plants, water-treatment facilities, oil refineries, and information systems; and cannot be sourced locally. The Amish do not have a puritanical preference for manual labor, either: the line between convenience and efficiency is fine, and while the Amish value work, they do not treasure inefficiency. Amish clothes dryers and word processors do things that the Amish could also do—and have previously done—by hand.
Contrary to their reputation, the Amish are among the most conscious, thoughtful tool users in the world. Amish leader Elmo Stoll explains: “We do not consider modern inventions to be evil. A car or television set is a material thing—made of plastic, wood, or metal. Lifestyle changes are made possible by modern technologies. The connection between the two needs to be examined with care.”
The Amish approach to technology only seems arbitrary. The Amish are cautious about technology because they are cautious about how it shapes their communities.
The most unusual thing about the Amish may be that they walk their talk. They are not the only people with objections to creation, change, and technology. Some believe that not all technology is good, therefore most technology is bad; that because technology cannot solve all problems, it cannot solve any problems; and that anyone who thinks technology can do good is a naïve optimist, ignorant of technology’s harmful consequences. One example is writer and technology critic Evgeny Morozov, who argues against what he calls “the folly of technological solutionism”:
Not everything that could be fixed should be fixed—even if the latest technologies make the fixes easier, cheaper, and harder to resist. Sometimes imperfect is good enough; sometimes, it’s much better than perfect. What worries me most is that, nowadays, the very availability of cheap and diverse digital fixes tells us what needs fixing. It’s quite simple: the more fixes we have, the more problems we see.
What’s more, he says, technology is
embedded in a world of complex human practices, where even tiny adjustments to seemingly inconsequential acts might lead to profound changes in our behavior. It might very well be that by optimizing our behavior locally … we’ll end up with suboptimal behavior globally.… One local problem might be solved—but only by triggering several global problems that we can’t recognize at the moment.
Morozov is right. “The more fixes we have, the more problems we see” is a good description of Karl Duncker’s problem-solution loops, discussed in chapter 2. Problems lead to solutions, which lead to problems, and—Morozov’s second point—because solutions are assembled across the world and inherited by future generations, the problems a solution creates may be felt only far away or in the future. Creating can cause problems unintended, unforeseen, and often unknowable, at least in advance. To illustrate, we return to our can of Coca-Cola.
4 | A CAN OF WORMS
Once we knelt by a stream to scoop water with bare hands. Now we pull a tab on an aluminum can and drink ingredients we cannot name from places we may not know mixed in ways we do not understand.
Coca-Cola is a branch on our fifty-thousand-year-old tree of new. It is there because water is our most important nutrient. If we do not drink water, we die within five days. If we drink the wrong water, we die of waterborne diseases like cyclosporiasis, microsporidiosis, coenurosis, cholera, and dysentery. Thirst should limit us to places within a day or two’s walk of potable water and make migration and exploration dangerous. But the two thousand generations developed tools to make water portable and potable and allow us to live far away from rivers and lakes.
Early technologies for carrying and storing water included skins, hollowed gourds called calabashes, and—eighteen thousand years ago—pottery. Ten thousand years ago we developed wells, which allowed constant access to fresh groundwater. Three thousand years ago, people in China started drinking tea, a step that coincided with drinking boiled water, a practice that—coincidentally—killed disease-bearing microorganisms. The existence of these organisms was not discovered for another twenty-five hundred years, but as the technology of tea spread gradually from China through the Middle East and eventually, around 1600 C.E., to Europe, tea drinkers began to suspect that water was healthier when boiled. Boiling also enabled free-ranging travel, as water found along the way could now be made safe.
The best source of pure water is the spring—nature’s equivalent of a well, where groundwater flows up from an aquifer. This water, clean and rich in minerals, has been revered for thousands of years; natural springs are often considered sacred sites of healing. Some spring water is naturally effervescent.
As bottles—first developed by the Phoenicians of the Middle East twenty-five hundred years ago—became more common, it was at last possible to transport sacred water, with its healing purity and high mineral content, from springs to other places. Once bottled and transported, these “mineral waters” could also be flavored.
Some of the earliest flavored waters were Persian sharbats, or sherbets, made using crushed fruits, herbs, and flower petals, and first described in Ismail Gorgani’s twelfth-century medical encyclopedia, Zakhireye Khwarazmshahi. About a hundred years later, people in Britain drank water mixed with fermented dandelions and the roots of the burdock plant, which made it effervescent. Hundreds more years later, similar drinks were made in Asia and the Americas, using parts of a prickly Central American vine called sarsaparilla or the roots of sassafras trees. All of these variants on the theme of sparkling water and drinks made with natural ingredients were thought to have health benefits.
In the late 1770s, chemists began to replicate the properties of springwater and herbal drinks. In Sweden, Torbern Bergman made water effervescent using carbon dioxide. In Britain, Joseph Priestley did the same. Johann Jacob Schweppe, a Swiss German, commercialized Priestley’s process and started the Schweppes Company in 1783. The mineral content of springwater was replicated with phosphate and citrus to make drinks called orange or lemon “phosphates,” or “acids”; these terms were popularly used for flavored effervescent water in the United States into the twentieth century.
As mineralization and carbonation became common, the healing properties associated with springwater receded in favor of remedies and tonics that contained exotic ingredients, such as the fruit of the African baobab tree and roots supposedly extracted from swa
mps. Many of these “patent medicines” contained cocaine and opium, which made them effective in treating pain (if nothing else) and also addictive.
One of these medicines, invented by chemist John Pemberton in Georgia in 1865, was made from ingredients including kola nut and coca leaf, as well as alcohol. Twenty years later, when parts of Georgia banned alcohol consumption, Pemberton made a nonalcoholic version, which he called “Coca-Cola.” In 1887, he sold the formula to a drugstore clerk named Asa Candler.
A few years earlier, Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and other European scientists had discovered that bacteria caused disease, marking the beginning of the end for remedies and tonics. During the next two decades, medicine became scientific, and also regulated. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture, led a crusade that culminated in the signing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 and the creation of the government agency that became the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In retreat as a medicine, Coca-Cola syrup was mixed with carbonated water in drugstores and sold as a beverage, its health claims softened to ambiguous adjectives such as “refreshing” and “invigorating.” At first, the carbonated water was added manually, and the drink was available only at soda fountains. Bottling was such a foreign idea that, in 1899, Candler licensed the U.S. bottling rights, in perpetuity, to two young lawyers for one dollar, because he thought that all the money in cola would come from selling the syrup.