Bringing history into focus

The invention of printing meant we needed glasses and they led to changes we can hardly comprehend. Richard Fitzpatrick on history’s game changers.

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

Steven Johnson

Particular Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, €22.00

JOHANNES GUTENBERG was a blacksmith and a publisher. When he came up with the idea of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century, it had huge knock-on effects. Books became more affordable. Literacy increased. The intellectual battles of the Reformation and Enlightenment followed. It is a story that is well known.

What isn’t as familiar to us is that it spawned the invention of reading glasses. Farsightedness was a problem people didn’t realise they had. Suddenly folk realised they needed glasses to help them read small print. Within 100 years of Gutenberg’s innovation, there were over 1,000 manufactures around Europe making reading glasses.

Glasses became the first piece of advanced technology that people wore regularly on their bodies since someone decided to put on clothes in Neolithic times. It is one of the unusual insights that Steven Johnson outlines in his book and BBC television series, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World.

“Each episode is one facet of the modern world that crucially didn’t feel like technology,” he says. “I didn’t, for example, want to do a chapter that was ‘the roots of the smartphone’. I wanted it to be things like glass or clean drinking water or refrigeration, things that have been around long enough that they are givens in our world. To take these ordinary objects and take the long view of their evolution and talk about the history of creative problem-solving, which in the case of glass dates back a thousand years or longer.

“The other thing that I was interested in talking about was unintended consequences — what I call in the book ‘the hummingbird effect’ where one new technology comes along and it ends up changing all these facets of society that you wouldn’t think were related to this new technology.”

Johnson’s unspooling of the history of glass — which, in its modern guise, dates back to the Roman Empire when glass windows were first built — is enthralling.

Hans and Zacharias Janssen, father and son spectacle makers from the Netherlands, lined up lenses on top of each other rather than side by side one day to come up with the magnifying effect of a microscopic, a tool that, of course, has revolutionised science and medicine and the fight against murderous bacteria and viruses.

Some 20 years afterwards, Zacharias Janssen was part of a cohort of Dutch lens-makers who helped invent the telescope, which allowed Galileo to observe moons orbiting Jupiter and thus refute the Aristotelian paradigm that assumed all heavenly bodies circled the earth.

That realisation changed our view of the gods and the stars. It was the mirror, however, that altered our view of ourselves, converging with forces like the rise of capitalism to invent the modern self.

Before the mirror, people could go through life without ever seeing their visage except, perhaps, for a hazy reflection from a pool of water. Now humankind started looking inward.

It was hip to be introspective. The world’s most powerful prince built a hall full of mirrors.

Hamlet ruminated on stage. The novel, which mined the strange, inner recesses of the mind, became the dominant form of storytelling. Property rights and law hinged on the individual rather than the tribe. Johnson notes, too, that before 1400 self-portraiture didn’t exist in Europe as an artistic convention.

“Yesterday I went over to the National Gallery here in London to see the late Rembrandt show. The first half of it is filled with self-portraits that he did.

It’s funny if you think of it in terms of the ‘selfie’ — everybody makes fun of selfies but the one thing that you can say about it is that as soon as the technology emerged that enabled people to do accurate representations of themselves through the most advanced technology of the day, which was basically oil paints and mirrors, people started to do painted selfies.

People like to have images of themselves and now you don’t need to be a great master to do it because you have this machine that will do it for you.”

Johnson peppers his narrative with stories of the inventors, hobbyists and reformers who made possible so many breakthroughs. Many of them stumbled upon their innovation.

Clarence Birdseye, for example, was a naturalist who had retreated to Labrador when he hit upon the idea of flash freezing while ice fishing for trout. It’s a concept that’s used in the cryopreservation of human semen, eggs and embryos today.

At a time that New York State prisons banned frozen food because it was below culinary standards for its convicts, Birdseye developed a method of artificial refrigeration that turned frozen food into a staple of American diet within a decade.

“There are people that I don’t particularly like but are amazing, like Frederic Tudor, who was kind of a jerk,” says Johnson.

“He had this vision — ‘I’m going to ship ice from New England lakes to the Caribbean’ and eventually ships it to India and Brazil. He goes through this crippling, catastrophic 10 years where he runs out of money, everyone makes fun of him, but eventually he successfully invents this ice trade. He makes a vast fortune, but more importantly he sets up the idea that there is a market for taking cold things from cold places and moving them as quickly as possible to hot places before they melt.

“I love the idea he had that you take something free in New England, to somewhere it was extremely rare, in the Caribbean, and thus make a lot of money. He managed to get the box of ice to the Caribbean but effectively the response of the people there was, ‘What are we going to do with ice?’

If you were living in Martinique in 1800, and you’d been there your whole life, you would have never seen ice. He had to educate the market — ice cream is very nice; take a cold bath; have a cold drink on a nice summer’s day. These are nice things to do.

Eventually they came around.”