by Kevin Ashton
This may seem like an amazing mistake, but in 1899 things weren’t so obvious. Glass was not easy to mass-produce, and Candler might have assumed that bottling would be a small business forever. But glass and bottling technologies were improving. In 1870, Englishman Hiram Codd developed a soda bottle that used a marble as a stopper—an ingenious approach that took advantage of the pressure from the carbonation to push the marble up the neck of the bottle to form a seal. Today, these Codd bottles sell at auction for thousands of dollars. As bottle technology improved, Coca-Cola bottling increased. Ten years after Candler sold his bottling rights, there were four hundred Coca-Cola bottling plants in the United States. Coca-Cola, once tied to the soda fountain, had become portable, and it would soon migrate again, from the bottle to the can.
The story of the can begins with Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon, having lost more soldiers to malnutrition than to combat, had concluded that “an army marches on its stomach.” In 1795, the French revolutionary government offered a twelve-thousand-franc prize to anyone who could invent a way to preserve food and make it portable. Nicolas Appert, a Parisian confectioner, spent fifteen years experimenting and ultimately developed a method of preserving food by sealing it in air-tight bottles then placing the bottles in boiling water. As with water for tea, the boiling killed bacteria—in this case, the bacteria that caused food to rot, a phenomenon that would not be understood for another hundred years. Appert sent sealed bottles that included eighteen types of food, ranging from partridge to vegetables, to soldiers at sea, who opened them after four months and found unspoiled, apparently fresh food inside. Appert won the prize, and Napoleon awarded it to him personally.
France’s enemy, Britain, viewed Appert’s preservation technology as a weapon. Preserved food extended Napoleon’s reach. The army that marched on its stomach could now march farther. Britain’s response was immediate: inventor Peter Durand improved upon Appert’s approach by using cans made of tin instead of bottles. King George III awarded him a patent for his invention. Whereas glass bottles were fragile and difficult to transport, Durand’s cans were far more likely to survive the march to war. Canned food quickly became popular among travelers. It helped fuel the voyages of German explorer Otto von Kotzebue and British admiral William Edward Parry, as well as the California Gold Rush—which started in 1848 and saw three hundred thousand people move to California, establishing San Francisco as a major city in the process—and it extended the range of both armies in the American Civil War.
In a coincidence that nods to Napoleon and the origins of canning, Coca-Cola developed the first soda cans during the 1950s to supply American soldiers fighting a distant war in Korea. They were manufactured from tin that had been thickened to contain the pressure of carbonation and coated to prevent chemical reactions, steps that made them heavy and expensive. When cheaper, lighter aluminum cans were invented in 1964, Coca-Cola’s bottlers adopted them almost immediately.
Coca-Cola exists because we get thirsty. It exists because water can be dangerous and we cannot all live next to a spring. It exists because people got sick and hoped that herbs and roots and tree bark from far-off places might help them. It exists because we sometimes need to travel—to flee, hunt, go to war, or search for better places and ways. Coca-Cola may look like a luxury, but it exists because of a need for life.
Yet, like all creations, Coca-Cola is flawed by unforeseen, unintended, and often distant consequences. Aluminum begins in bauxite surface mines, which are devastating to their local environment. In 2002, a British mining company, Vedanta, requested approval to mine bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills of East India, home to an indigenous tribal people called the Dongria Kondh. The plan, which was approved by the Indian government, would have destroyed the tribe’s way of life, and also their sacred mountain. The tribespeople led international protests that put a stop to the mine, but it was a close call—and one that, of course, had no impact on equally destructive bauxite mines in Australia, Brazil, Guinea, Jamaica, and more than a dozen other countries around the world.
High-fructose corn syrup has been cited as a cause of rising obesity, especially in the United States. Americans ate 113 pounds of sugar per person in 1966. By 2009, this had risen to 130 pounds per person, an increase that may, in part, be due to the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup, which, because of import tariffs, is much cheaper in America than sugar. The average American consumes around forty pounds of high-fructose corn syrup a year.
Caffeine can be intoxicating and addictive if overused and if taken in excess can cause vomiting or diarrhea, which can result in dehydration—the opposite of drinking. Caffeine in soda is a particular problem for children: they now drink an average of 109 milligrams per day—twice as much as children in the 1980s.
Even though aluminum is easily recycled, many aluminum cans are disposed of in landfill sites, where they take hundreds of years to decompose. The production and distribution of each can adds around half a pound of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change.
The Coca-Cola Company has been an effective proponent of global trade and has succeeded in manufacturing and selling its product all over the world, a strategy that has caused conflict and concern in many countries, including India, China, Mexico, and Colombia. One issue is water rights: the only local ingredient in Coca-Cola is water, and manufacturing twelve ounces of Coke requires far more than twelve ounces of water because of cleaning, cooling, and other industrial processes. When all the processes in Coca-Cola’s tool chain are taken into account, a twelve-ounce can uses more than four thousand ounces, or over thirty gallons, of water. It will always be cheaper and more efficient to drink water than Coke, and this is a problem in areas suffering from water shortages.
So, do better tools always lead to a better life? Does making better things always make things better? How can we be sure that making things better won’t make things worse?
These are questions we, like the Amish and Evgeny Morozov, must ask. Sometimes technology’s flaws are dangerous—even deadly. Coca-Cola’s early competitors, root beer and sarsaparilla, were both made with fermented roots of the sassafras tree, an ingredient that is now banned because it is suspected of causing liver disease and cancer. Glass once contained enough lead to cause lead poisoning, one consequence of which can be gout, a painful inflammation that usually affects the joint of the big toe. Gout was long known as the “rich man’s disease” because its sufferers were so often from the upper classes of society—people like King Henry VIII, John Milton, Isaac Newton, and Theodore Roosevelt. Benjamin Franklin went so far as to write an essay titled “Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout.” Dated “Midnight, October 22, 1780,” the dialogue recounts a conversation in which Franklin asks his gout to explain what he did “to merit these cruel sufferings.” He assumed they were the result of too much food and not enough exercise, and “Madam Gout” chides him for his laziness and gluttony. In fact, the cause of the “rich man’s disease,” for Franklin and all the others, was lead crystal decanters, which were used by the upper classes for storing and serving port, brandy, and whiskey. “Lead crystal” is not crystal at all but glass with a high lead content. The lead can leach from the glass into the alcohol and cause lead poisoning, which causes gout.
Lead poisoning may also have afflicted the majority of Roman emperors, including Claudius, Caligula, and Nero, who drank wine flavored with syrup made in lead pots. This had consequences far beyond gout. Their lead poisoning was so severe that it probably caused organ, tissue, and brain problems—severe symptoms that affected so many emperors that they likely contributed to the end of the Roman Empire.
As Amish leader Elmo Stoll says, new is neutral, neither good nor bad. As Morozov says, new things tend to be good for some people and bad for others, or good now and bad later, or both.
Not convinced? Let’s return to William Cartwright’s mill.
5 | IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THANK A MILLER
Understanding t
he impact of the past on the present is as hard as predicting the impact of the present on the future. They probably did not know it, but the weavers who attacked William Cartwright’s automatic loom would not have been weavers at all but for automation. Until the thirteenth century, England’s textile industry was centered in the southeast. What moved it north to places like Rawfolds, Yorkshire, the site of Cartwright’s mill, was mechanization—specifically the mechanization of the cloth-cleaning process known as “fulling.” For millennia, fulling cloth was like treading grapes, accomplished by the stomping of naked feet. To pace themselves and stay synchronized, the fullers, usually women, sang special “fulling songs,” slow at the beginning when the cloth was tough, then quickening as it became more supple. The women adjusted the length and tempo of their song to fit the size and type of cloth being fulled. For example, from Scotland, originally sung in Gaelic, with nonsense syllables added here and there as needed:
Come on, my love,
Keep your promise to me,
Take greetings from me,
Over to Harris,
To John Campbell,
My brown-haired sweetheart,
Hunter of goose,
Seal and swan,
Of leaping trout,
Of bellowing deer,
Wet is the night,
Tonight and cold.
In England, the tradition of the fulling song was ended by a technology that revolutionized the world between the first and fifteenth centuries: the watermill.
Watermills were invented two thousand years ago, first spinning horizontally, like Frisbees, then vertically, like cart wheels. By the time the millennium turned, they were everywhere, initially used for grinding grain but soon for fulling cloth—as well as tanning, laundering, sawing, crushing, polishing, pulping, and making “milled” coins.
The new importance of rivers changed the value of land. Sites that could deliver energy to mills were now among the most important places in the world. The work went where the energy was.
During the first millennium, England’s textile trade was centered in its southeastern counties, but mechanized fulling machines needed a type of waterpower that was available only in the northwest. The textile industry relocated. By the end of the thirteenth century, England’s singers of fulling songs were silent.
This revolution in power sowed the seeds of the Enlightenment: the experience of engineering nature’s energy led directly to the development of theoretical physics and the scientific revolution. Newton was probably inspired more by a churning watermill than a falling apple.
By the time William Cartwright was born, at the end of the eighteenth century, textile manufacturing was highly automated and had been for centuries. The difference between Cartwright’s new loom and his old mill was that the loom replaced mental as well as manual labor. Fulling by treading is a rote task. People supply little more than kinetic energy from their muscles. This is why cranks, cams, and gears attached to waterwheels replaced manual labor so quickly: fulling is mainly applied power. But weaving is mental as well as manual work. It takes mind, not just muscle, to interpret and understand weaving patterns. As waterpower increased the volume of the textile industinctive try, demand for weavers grew, which created a need for workers with better-trained brains. A system of apprenticeship arose to meet this need: master weavers taught teenage children the skill of textile making. Weaving apprenticeships were a common form of schooling in the days before public education: in 1812, the year of the Luddites’ attack on William Cartwright’s mill, around one in twenty English teenagers living in or near mill towns became weavers’ apprentices. It was these same workers with better-trained brains who started to demand political reform during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The automated loom threatened the weavers because it could “think,” too, or at least follow directions. Weaving patterns were fed into it using punched cards that could mimic the mind of the weaver, doing his thinking more quickly and precisely, and making him redundant in the process. It was the first programmable machine—in many ways, the first computer. The Luddites were protesting the start of the information revolution.
At the time, the consequences of this revolution seemed bleak. Men descended from manual laborers had been trained to think because mills had reduced the need for manual labor and increased the need for mental work. Now new looms threatened to reduce the need for them, too—perhaps to eliminate the need for workers almost entirely.
What the Luddites could not foresee was that the opposite would happen. The consequence of William Cartwright’s victory was entirely unexpected and unintended. The automated loom did not reduce the need for intelligent labor; it increased it. As simple programmable machines took over simple mental tasks, the manufacturing efficiencies that followed created new jobs in a vast new tool chain—jobs like maintaining, designing, and building ever more sophisticated machines; planning production; accounting for income and expenses; and jobs that, less than a century later, would be called “management.” These jobs required workers who could do more than think. They required workers who could read.
In 1800, one-third of all Europeans could read, in 1850 one-half of all Europeans could read, and in 1900 almost all Europeans could read. After millennia of illiteracy, everything changed in a century. All of your ancestors were probably illiterate until a few generations ago. Why can you read though they could not? The big reason is automation.
The men who attacked Cartwright’s mill in 1812 did not learn to read after they lost their campaign against the automated loom, but their children and grandchildren did. Industrialized nations responded to the need for smarter workers by investing in public education. Between 1840 and 1895, school attendance in these countries grew faster than population.
As automation improved and proliferated during the twentieth century, it both drove and was driven by the continued expansion of education. Every year more children were educated to an ever-increasing level. In 1870, America had 7 million elementary school students, 80,000 secondary school students, and awarded 9,000 college degrees. In 1990, America had 30 million elementary school students, 11 million secondary school students, and awarded 1.5 million college degrees. Relative to population, this is almost the same number of children in elementary school but thirty-five times more children in secondary school and twenty-five times more college graduates. The trend toward higher education continues. The number of Americans earning college degrees almost doubled between 1990 and 2010.
The Luddites did not—and could not—foresee this when they tried to wreck Cartwright’s loom. Cartwright could not have foreseen it, either. Every man was for himself; none could have imagined the far better future automation would bring to his grandchildren.
Chains of tools have chains of consequences. As creators, we can anticipate some of these consequences, and if they are bad, we should of course take steps to prevent them, up to and including creating something else instead. What we cannot do is stop creating.
This is where self-described technology “heretics” like Evgeny Morozov go wrong. The answer to invention’s problems is not less invention but more. Invention is an act of infinite and imperfect iteration. New solutions beget new problems, which beget new solutions. This is the cycle of our species. We will always make things better. We will never make them best. We should not expect to anticipate all the consequences of our creations, or even most of them, good or bad. We have a different responsibility: to actively seek those consequences out, discover them as soon as possible, and, if they are bad, to do what creators do best: welcome them as new problems to solve.
1 | WOODY
In March 2002, Woody Allen did something he had never done. He flew from New York to Los Angeles, put on a bow tie, and attended the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annual awards ceremony, the Oscars. Allen had won three Academy Awards and received seventeen other nominations, including more screenwriting nominations than any other writer, y
et he had never attended a ceremony. In 2002, his movie The Curse of the Jade Scorpion was nominated for nothing. He went anyway. The audience stood and applauded in welcome. He introduced a montage of movie scenes made in New York and encouraged directors to continue working there even though terrorists had attacked the city months earlier. He said, “For New York City, I’ll do anything.”
Why does Allen avoid the ceremony? He gives several tongue-in-cheek excuses—the two most common being that there is nearly always a good basketball game on that night and that he has to play clarinet every Monday with the Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band. Neither reason is real. The real reason, which he explains occasionally, is that he believes the Oscars will diminish the quality of his work.
“The whole concept of awards is silly,” he says. “I cannot abide by the judgment of other people, because if you accept it when they say you deserve an award, then you have to accept it when they say you don’t.”
On another occasion: “I think what you get in awards is favoritism. People can say, ‘Oh, my favorite movie was Annie Hall,’ but the implication is that it’s the best movie, and I don’t think you can make that judgment except for track and field, where one guy runs and you see that he wins; then it’s okay. I won those when I was younger, and those were nice because I knew I deserved them.”
Whatever motivates Woody Allen, it is not awards. His example is extreme—almost all other Academy Award–nominated writers, directors, and actors attend the Oscars—but it points to something important. Prizes are not always carrots of creation. Sometimes, they can inhibit and impair.
Motives are never simple. We are motivated by a soup of things, some we are aware of and some we are not. Psychologist R. A. Ochse lists eight motivations for creating: the desire for mastery, immortality, money, recognition, self-esteem; the desire to create beauty, to prove oneself, and to discover underlying order. Some of these rewards are internal, some external.