>> Mike Egan: MS PEC and MS Research welcomes you today for this combined lunch event. I
just want a little plug for a MS PEC please go to whack, whack[phonetic] MS PEC, find out a little
bit more about our political efforts and our speaker series. We've had over 40 events so far this
year, a few more coming up. Just jump right into it. Stephen Johnson, who is the author of
nine books featuring everything including, Everything Bad is Good for You, Where Good Ideas
Come From, and the Invention of Error. In addition to his columns in WIRED and Discover he's
published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other periodicals. He has
cofounded three influential websites including Feed, F-e-e-d. Newsweek named him one of the
50 people who matter most on the Internet, and he's appeared on the Daily Show with Jon
Stewart, the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and his most recent foray into television is for this
book, a six part miniseries on PBS exploring the history and power of great ideas. Please give a
warm Microsoft welcome to Steven Johnson.
>> Steven Johnson: Thanks. It's funny how certain things kind of show up in your bio like the
Newsweek thing about 50 people who matter most on the Internet? That was from 1995. It
was a real honor, but unfortunately there were only 50 people on the Internet so it really, so
I'm really glad to be here, let me just get rid of this little message. This is my ninth book; and
I’m actually I’m trying to get back home to New York. I was in the Bay Area yesterday and took
this little detour through Seattle on my way back to New York so that I could be here because I
have come to Microsoft for all nine books even dating back to my first one, Interface Culture, so
I couldn't not be here.
And the difference is with this one is for the first time there is a whole television series with me
in it accompanying this book. So this is the first project that I have kind of c-developed as a
book and as a TV show in parallel basically. So it's a whole new kind of adventure. The show
started airing last week, Wednesday nights. We ran two episodes. Another episode aired last
night. It’s going to run for the next three weeks, available online. And I thought it would be fun
to just to show you this little trailer we have, just 90 seconds to give you a sense of what the
show is like if you haven't gotten a chance to see it, and then I'll tell you more about it.
I don't know if we want to, I don’t think we need to dim the lights. There we go.
[trailer demo]
Imagine observing Earth from a distance for the last hundred thousand years. People who
actually made the modern world, people you’ve probably never heard of. I'm Stephen Johnson.
I write about ideas and innovation. This is the untold story of how we got to that. It's here that
Clarence Birdseye will have the beginning of an idea that will turn out to be one of the most
transformative ones of the 20th century. I think it will probably take us about three days.
>>: It would take you three days.
>> Steven Johnson: Birdseye's hunch will take decades to finally pay off. The modern world of
cold does not get any weirder than this.
>>: You're getting a dolphin hug.
>> Steven Johnson: It's the idea behind it that’s important.
>>: They put a kid inside the whale’s head.
>> Steven Johnson: You guys get me out of here? It was an epic achievement. We make our
ideas and they make us in return.
[end demo]
>> Steven Johnson: So there you go. That's the big television program. I hope we can see just
from that how fun it was to make. It has, I mean it was a lot of work; I've never worked so hard
on anything in my life. And I was writing the book while we were making the show, so we shot
it all over the world and so we would do these ten-hour shoots and then I would go back to the
hotel room and work on the book. It was crazy, but it was a great kind of collaborative process
in a show and a book that really is in many ways the celebration of collaborative innovation.
Working with the team on that was really, really extraordinary.
It turns out to be actually this is something we didn't really think about consciously as we were
making it but I think it turns out to be a really good show to watch with your kids. It plays really
nicely, the stories and the kind of history I think, we spent a lot of time trying to make sure that
the stories would be fresh to a well-educated erudite historically well-read adult, so we came
up with a bunch of things that I think most of you would not have heard, but to an 11-year-old
or a 12 year old or a 13-year-old it's presented in a way that doesn't quite look like your normal
history show and it's kind of playful in this way. So I've watched it with my kids, and the fact
that I'm in it is a liability to them. They're like oh dad, don't do that, it's so embarrassing. But
you can see them getting kind of pulled into the narrative, into the storytelling and kind of
adventure of it.
And let me tell you a little bit about what the book and the show is trying to do. So it's a
historian account of innovation. And of course, you know this even better than I do, innovation
is this really kind of abused buzzword now. Everybody talks about innovation. How do we
make our society more innovative? How do we make our companies more innovative? How do
we make schools encourage innovation? But a huge part of the conversation and the kind of
default settings in a way to the way that we define innovation is really focused on the tech
sector on companies like Microsoft and companies like Facebook and kind of the start up
culture in Silicon Valley and along the West Coast in places like Seattle. And so when we think
about innovation there’s kind of this default tendency to think of it in terms of the 25-year-old
who's got a new app that maybe is going to go public and make a billion dollars. Like that's the
narrative that we have in so many places now.
And that's fine. I mean, I love this part of the world, I've been a participant in this part of the
world, I love my gadgets as much as the next person. But I wanted to remind people with this
project that innovation is actually broader than that. And our lives are kind of populated by all
these things that are so kind of commonplace now, so ubiquitous that we don't even think of
them as technologies or as innovations and yet they have this amazing long history of creativity
and human ingenuity and collaboration that brought things into our lives.
When you think about things in our lives, for instance we have a show and a chapter on
innovation of clean drinking water. The fact that we all, in this part of the world, can go to a
faucet and pour ourselves a glass of water and drink it and not worry about dying of cholera 48
hours later as we would have just 130 years ago in any large city in Europe or the United States.
That is an extraordinary thing. That is an amazing achievement that you can have cities of a
million people or 10 million people and waterborne disease is really is not an issue anymore,
again, in the developed world. And the story of the people who kind of contributed to that
situation is a long and rich and extraordinary series of breakthroughs and big projects that are
just as important to our daily lives and to our standards of living as the smart phones and the
gadgets and the computers, and yet we don't celebrate those achievements nearly enough.
And so what we've tried to do is basically each chapter and each episode is kind of one thing
and we kind of unwind the 500 year history or the thousand year history of this thing. So last
night we had an episode about glass and about how glass was arguably the most important
material of the last thousand years. We have one about clean and clean drinking water and
light and sound and cold and time. There’s a wonderful episode about clocks that aired last
week. So it's a fun adventure. And one of the things that makes that I think really fun, one of
our kind of narrative devices that we have at our disposable in this is, we talk a lot about, and I
write a lot about it in the book, about the unlikely hard to predict kind of secondary effects of
new innovations as they ripple through society. In the book I started calling these hummingbird
effects as kind of an elaborate metaphor.
You think about the hummingbird is this creature, I was writing the book largely in California
and our little garden has a lot of hummingbirds there and I got kind of interested in the
evolutionary history of hummingbirds, and you think about flowers, flowering plants and
insects kind of evolve together and create this complicated symbiotic relationship, the kind of
relationship with pollination. And that, over evolutionary time, seems to be largely kind of
confined to the flowers and the insects. But then at some point in kind of deep history this bird
slowly evolved the strategy to hover next to plants in a way that no other bird can do which
involves incredible extensive kind of reengineering of the wing of the hummingbird so that it
can hover and flap its wings at this extraordinary rate. And it starts to participate in this
process, and so it seems to be in nature a relationship between insects and plants ends up rearchitecting the wing of a bird.
And I thought that is kind of a nice metaphor for what happens with technology all the time
where new ideas in science or new ideas in the machines and the tools we use, someone is
designing a tool, inventing a tool for one specific purpose trying to solve a very kind of locally
defined problem, but in doing that they set off kind of a set of chain reactions that affect
completely different parts of the world in ways that would've been very hard to predict in
advance.
So one of the classic examples of this, one of my favorite stories from the book, is a story about
air conditioning. So air conditioning is invented at the beginning of the 20th century by a guy
named Willis Carrier who goes on to found the Carrier Corporation. And initially he's hired out
by this printing shop in Brooklyn that is trying to deal with, they're having difficulty with
humidity levels in the kind of hot summer months and they’re printing these color magazines
and the ink is running because it's too humid in the print shop. So they hire this young
engineer, Carrier, to come in and basically build a big dehumidifier which he does, but it has this
kind of secondary effect of making the air cool as well as drier, and it successfully solves this
problem of causing the ink of keeping the ink from running on the page as they print.
But they notice that everyone suddenly wants to have their lunch in the room with the giant
dehumidifier, and so Carrier start to think I could probably do something with this. And so he
goes off and kind of invents this whole new technology of air-conditioning. But the big change,
the kind of full hummingbird effect of it doesn't really kick in until after World War II when the
Carrier Corp. and a couple of others introduce home air-conditioning units. They’ve condensed
the technology down to the size of a window and then there’s central air gets introduced for
people's homes. And that sets in motion almost immediately the largest migration of human
beings in the history of the United States. All of these people move to the Sunbelt, the desert
states, to Florida, to places that were borderline uninhabitable. At the turn-of-the-century
there were 107 people living in Las Vegas, right? And it has been recently the fastest-growing
city in the United States which tells us something about the United States. But, whatever.
So all these people moved to these places like Phoenix that were very hard to live in because it
was 110 degrees during the day, but once you had air-conditioning it changed the whole
balance. And that sets in motion a dramatic re kind configuring of the geopolitical map of the
United States. There's like a 60 vote swing in the Electoral College from the northern states to
the southern states. And it's that southern Sunbelt coalition that is central to Ronald Reagan's
successful bid for the presidency in 1980. It is entirely possible that Ronald Reagan would've
been elected president in 1980 if air conditioning had not been invented. But it is absolutely
true that he would've had to have built a different political map in his route to the White House
without air conditioning. So you cannot tell the story of Reagan's presidency without somehow
telling the story about air-conditioning and Willis Carrier. It's not a six degrees of Kevin Bacon
thing, right? It’s two degrees. It's a real part of the story, but we tend to not talk about history
this way.
And you can see these effects going back and even into things that we think, stories that we
really know. One of my favorite stories involves Gutenberg. Like most of you in this room I'm
sure I've felt like I had a pretty clear understanding of Gutenberg and the importance of the
printing press and its interesting effects, transformative, probably the most important
communications revolution of all time.
But there's a side of it that I hadn't kind of stumbled across until I started researching this
project which is to say that when the printing press gets introduced to Europe and all of a
sudden literacy rates start to rise and people who are not monks basically begin to read
something interesting happens to a significant portion of the European reading population
which is that they start going, I can't read this. I am farsighted. I can't make out these letters
on the page. And what's interesting about this is that there was a significant portion of the
population, particularly those who made it to being 40 years or older, who were farsighted all
along but they never noticed this because they had almost no need to look at very small objects
this close to their eyes unless you were like a seamstress. You really didn’t have occasion for
that using that part of your visual faculties which may be one reason why it's so common that
we lose our kind of reading vision when we hit the age of 40. It’s just there wasn't an
evolutionary penalty for that in the past. You just didn't have to look at things like that.
So all of a sudden this new technology exposes this flaw in our biology on some level and that
requires a new other technology to get into circulation which is reading glasses or spectacles
which had in fact originally, not surprisingly, been invented by monks who were the only people
who were reading in the society, in the kind of monasteries before Gutenberg. And so all of a
sudden thanks to the introduction of the book, in a sense a kind of a market signal goes out
through Europe saying, if you make lenses and kind of put them in the form of these spectacles
you can make some money.
So suddenly Europe is awash in kind of these pools of expertise in lens making. And for the first
time there are all these people who are very good at creating these little objects of glass. This
is part of the importance of glass in society. And because people have a natural tendency to
kind of tinker with their inventions once they come up with these new technologies, before
long people start saying hey, if I take a couple of these lenses and put them next to each other I
can make things that are very far away look very close, and if I actually put them in this other
way here I can make these very small objects look much bigger and the telescope and the
microscope are invented.
This revolutionizes science on so many levels. Galileo takes the telescope within five years of its
invention and sees the moons of Jupiter and overthrows 1000 years of theology. The
microscope takes a little bit longer. It takes about 70 years to really make a dent in the
universe. When Robert Hooke takes his microscope and he starts doing these detailed
drawings and his amazing work, this is a flea, and one of the most important ones, actually one
of the most important images really in the history of science, he analyzes the tissue of a cork
and he notices these little boxes in the cork which he calls the cells and this is really the first
time anyone had visualized and named the cellular basis of life.
So just think of all the extraordinary things that came out of our ability to look through
microscopes. Think of what health and medicine would be like if we didn't have microscopes.
And so this understanding, this kind of scientific revolution that came from telescopes and
microscopes is again, directly but kind of a surprisingly connected to Gutenberg. We think of
Gutenberg as being involved with science in the sense that people were able to share and store
and circulates their information and their studies and cite other people's research thanks to the
printing press, but he also triggered it in this way that he never thought of which is that he had
made the world kind of interested in lenses which led them to telescopes and microscopes.
So that's one of the things that the book and the show tries to do is to take you through these
kind of surprising connections. But the other thing I think it's important to do and that we
spend a lot of time with is, in this project is looking in a sense at people's mistakes and their
kind of failures to see things that should've seemed obvious to them or obvious to us now
looking back with hindsight. We tend to tell the story of technological progress or scientific
progress as a series of successes. The history is kind of written by the victors. So every school
kid learns, okay then Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. But in fact if you go back
and look at the history of innovation it is littered with all these kind of weird dead ends or
places where very brilliant people failed to see some obvious thing. And I think it's important to
teach this because one, it's an important part of the story, it is what happened, and two, if we
are thinking about encouraging innovation in our own society in the sense in the present tense
we want to do it, we are guilty of or we fall victim to these blind spots ourselves all the time. So
learning from kind of the historical stories I think it's really important.
And I think the best example of this is this story about this French inventor, had a great French
name, Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville, and he was a guy who invented a device for recording
audio in the early 1850s. It was called the phonautograph. He got a patent for it in 1855, and I
know what you're thinking, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph 20 years later. What's up
with this? This doesn't sound like the story we know. But in fact it was this brilliant invention,
it took in the sound waves at kind of the back of this vessel here and kind of frame of it was
made of this parchment that would vibrate and it would pass those vibrations onto this little
pig’s bristle at the end of it which would then write the wave forms onto the rotating cylinder
which you could then unfold a piece of paper and you can see this recorded wave form for the
first time. No one had ever done this before.
So it was a brilliant invention, almost a generation ahead of Thomas Edison. You know you're
doing something right when you're that far ahead of Edison. So why have we never heard of
this guy? The answer is that he forgot one key feature which was playback. There was no way
to listen to the audio that you had recorded. So you could look at these nice wave forms but
you couldn't actually hear what you’d recorded. This turns out to be a feature that people find
very desirable in their audio products. Who would've thunk it? And it raises, what I love about
this is he didn't, it wasn’t like he was trying to add the playback feature. It never even occurred
to him. It was in his blind spot. He couldn't see this kind of basic functionality that you would
think would now seem obvious.
And it raises the question of, on some level, what the hell was he thinking? Why would
anybody want this? And the answer is that he was obsessed with stenography and dictation
and shorthand. And he'd seen how people had developed this technique of listening to
someone speaking and creating this little code that they could scribble out in real time and they
could learn to read that code and turn those symbols back into an imagined kind of language in
their heads. He thought well that's great, I can kind of cut out the middleman; I can just
automate that process, and I'll convert, people will speak, we’ll convert it into sound waves and
then people will learn how to read those sound waves and you'll have this kind of automated
transcription. And if you think about it that actually was a pretty good bet. Human beings have
been very good since the invention of alphabets at taking weird little scribbles and turning
them into an imagined language in our heads, so why not assume that we would do that with
sound waves? It just turns out that what for whatever reason it is not part of our cognitive
toolkit. No human being has ever learned how to turn that into a language. So it was a dead
end on some level.
They actually, and we interviewed these guys, there was a great kind of audio historians group
called the First Sounds and they found these scrolls, they were called phonautograms, in the
Paris archives. And so they scanned them and brought them, digitized them and converted
them back into sound just a few years ago, like 150 years later. And they played it, and this is in
the show, we listened to it actually, they play it and initially their like oh, we’re listening to a
little girl singing and they realized they're playing it at twice the speed and they slow it down
and it's Scott's voice singing Au clair de la lune from the grave 150 years later. So he finally got
his playback function it just took a little while. And it’s amazing.
The other thing that's interesting about it is it's very statically. In the show I say that it sounds a
little bit like a horror movie soundtrack, but it's also kind of first instance of static, of kind of
mechanical noise. The sound that we’ve become, our ears have become very familiar with, but
this is kind of the first place where was created, it just wasn't heard for 150 years. Anyway, it's
a crazy story.
So there are a lot of examples of that, of trying to kind of go back and look at places where
people failed to see something that they should’ve seen because that’s a part of the story as
well; and sometimes a dead end for a person like Scott, who more or less died penniless, no
one ever heard of him, the idea that they set out into the world ends up having a life of its own
even if it doesn't work out for the inventor. So no one really ever bought a phonautograph, it
didn't become a popular technology, but in the audio community people were tinkering with
them and about 15 years later another inventor was tinkering with the phonautograph and
figured out a way to add audio come output to it and that inventor was Alexander Graham Bell
inventing the telephone. So it ended up setting the stage for the true breakthrough that did
become a commercially viable product. So even the blind spots can sometimes be productive
ones.
And the other theme that I think is interesting, particularly in the context of a company like
Microsoft, is thinking about platforms as a way of engendering innovation. And when I say that
I understand everybody in this room goes yes, obviously we know, you create a big platform
that everybody uses and it creates a higher level innovation on top of that. That's the history of
software. But one of the things that we try to do is to say that that process is actually much
longer, it kind of predates software, and then when society comes around and agrees on a set
of standards or kind of units or kind of measuring terms or some other kind of basic agreement
about how things should be kind of classified or the language we should use to describe
phenomena in the world, that creates kind of an intellectual platform that encourages a lot of
innovation and actually ends up encouraging a lot of hummingbird-like effects where someone
was trying to solve a specific problem and it ends up doing something completely different.
There's a great example of that in the time chapter and episode of the history of standardized
time zones. You have no idea how hard it is to make compelling television about standardized
time zones. We really spent a lot of time; it's actually one of my favorite sequences of the
whole show. So until around 1880 every single town in the United States was on its own time.
You would do a local reading of where the sun was in that town, at the point where the Sun
was highest in the sky that was 12 noon and you set your clocks off of that, which meant that as
you move from east to west across the country each town was a little bit off compared to the
town a few miles over. So it would be at 12 noon in New York and 11:57 in Jersey City and if
you went up to New Haven t would be a little later, it would be 1:206 or something like that.
And as you moved around you would jump around minute by minute by minute.
And just like farsightedness in the European population this was a problem that nobody
noticed. It was a problem that wasn't a problem because nobody had any need to coordinate
schedules in a sense in real time with people in other towns. This was something that never
even occurred to you as a problem. Like you got on your horse and your wagon or whatever
and went over to some other town, it took you an hour or two to get over there, and when he
got there if it was three minutes later who cared, right? No one even bothered with this.
What changed all that was the railroad. The railroad technology exposed this, up until that
point invisible flaw, in the way we were measuring time because suddenly people were moving
around at high speeds between towns on a very regimented schedule where if you didn't know
what time it was messed up all your plans. And so you would have these situations where you
would leave New York at noon and you would travel an hour and half to New Haven and your
watch would say it was 1:30 but you are on the New Haven time so actually it was 1:37, only
the train you were traveling on took it's time from its originating station which was in DC, so it
was 1:37 in New Haven time, 1:30 New York time, but the train time was actually 1:54 and you
were connecting to a Boston-based to train, so according to the Boston-based train nobody
could tell what time it was anymore. It was just impossible to figure out. And there were these
elaborate charts that were made where it was like how to calculate what time it is in all the
stations if you are starting in Washington DC. And it was like, literally like 400 numbers on this
tiny piece of paper and you'd be like okay, I'm in Wilmington, I think it's 12:54.
So, people realized that this wasn't going to work. And so they had to come up with this
convention of standardizing time, agreeing on a time and then they also added this feature of
time zones. And this was an idea that had started in Canada and in the UK and took a long time
to come to the US. Actually it was really funny, there's a quote from a couple of these letters.
A lot of people resisted the idea because they thought it was unnatural to not have noon be the
point at which the sun was highest in the sky. So there were all these kind of angry
[indiscernible] 19th-century [indiscernible] letters to the editor written by people saying like,
we will not have this devil’s time brought to Cincinnati, that kind of stuff.
But eventually, largely led by this guy William Allen, who was this railway clerk who became this
big evangelist for this idea, they came up with a standardized time system. And in the original
map that was used for 20 or 30 years the time zones did not follow state lines the way they do
now, they followed the rail lines. And so Allen devised a map so that at the termination point
for each of the rails that's where the time zone would switch over. It shows you how much our
sense of time was being driven by railroad technology at that moment.
So that gets set in place. Again, this is the kind of thing we never even think about this as an
innovation, but it made a whole way of life possible. And in fact, in the 20th century, enabled
something completely different because it had created this platform for time that Allen and his
peers weren’t thinking about it at all which is that it enabled mass media. It enabled radio and
television to coordinate air dates and air times for shows. Not something that was on the
agenda at all in the 19th century, but suddenly once you had this it was possible for the first
time to say tune in at 10 PM Pacific time on Wednesdays on PBS, as you should because that's
when my show airs, see how I did that? You can't do that unless you agree on what time 10 PM
Pacific Standard Time is. And so that's the power of kind of platforms like this. This agreeing on
some kind of convention enables all these other inventions down the line that aren't even in
your field of vision at all.
Now when you look at history this way, this is really history that differs from the traditional kind
of telling. There are characters and people that are important to these stories. But I think
there's an inevitable sense that in a way that the ideas and the machines and the technologies
and the platforms are kind of driving the process as much as the individual human beings in a
funny way, right? We tend to tell history in terms of the great figures of history, the great men
of history, as they often are or big in military battles and things like that, but if you look at the
last 500 years from this angle what you see is that once ideas get into circulation, once these
technologies start to circulate through society, in a way they have a life of their own and
sometimes people almost feel like a kind of vehicles for those ideas or those technologies, not
so much the creators, but more almost like a vessel.
But I don't, I spent a lot of time, particularly in the book, trying to stress that it's not purely a
case of kind of crude technological determinism. It's not just that the kind of the new
developments in technology dictate the way everybody lives. What happens is actually there's
kind of a complicated dance and interaction between those two layers. Humans choosing,
making choices about how they want to live and the technology kind of pushing them towards
certain solutions, certain formations, certain ways of being social or organizing decision-making
and things like that.
And one of the best examples of the power of kind of individuals to shape the way technology
is used is in the chapter and the episode on light. It’s the last little story I want to tell you, and
then we can open it up for questions. And it involves Jacob Riis, who is actually one of the
better-known people that we talk about in the show, the great late 19th century kind of
muckraking progressive, a journalist of Danish origin working in downtown New York City at a
time when the neighborhoods like Five Points were among the most dangerous, most deadly,
most diseased-ridden and really most awful places to live on the face of the planet, one of the
most kind of densely populated neighborhoods, a whole kind of condition of slum living that
really hadn't existed in that modern form until the 19th century in cities like London and New
York.
And because it was such a novel experience people outside of the city just had no idea the
conditions people were living in, that they were cramped into these single room tenement
houses with 20 people living in a room with no windows and terrible epidemic disease, terrible
conditions; and in the beginning there were people tried to write about it, there was actually a
small kind of cottage industry of tourism to go to places like Five Points. The phrase slumming
it is actually invented around that time where there would be guidebooks. You could go down
to these neighborhoods and see these wretched people. But there was no political outrage
about it, there was no sense of we need to change this; this is not right that people are living in
these conditions. And Riis was, as a reporter he was intimately involved in this and he was
trying to get the word out to the wider population and get politicians and get the general public
mobilized in a sense to give them a proper sense of outrage about what was happening in a city
like New York.
So he wrote all these articles, but somehow the words just wouldn't do it. And he actually had
kind of line drawings commissioned to show the conditions, but they all looked kind of quaint.
Oh, look at the poor people. It just wasn't gripping. And he had this idea, photography had
been around for 30, 40 years at this point and he was an amateur photographer, and he had
this idea if he photographed these lives and these conditions that would be the thing that
would finally change public opinion. But the problem was it was just too dark. One of the
things that make these places really awful places to live is they often had no windows and there
were very low light conditions, and photography at that point was entirely dependent on the
full daylight. You could not photograph outside of full daylight in any shape or form. And in
fact, even in full daylight as you know from looking at these old pictures, you had to stand still
for like 30 seconds which is why every picture from the middle of the 19th century is, you know,
no action shots.
And so he's trying to photograph inside a room, much less inside a room with no windows, you
literally wouldn't get an image. So there were people who were starting to experiment with the
idea of what we now call flash photography. And people worked with limelight, which they’d
used in kind of illuminating theaters but everybody looks like basically a cadaver when he
photographed them with limelight, and there were other things that were just dangerous and
would just set fire to things.
But one day in the 1870s, Reese is at home and he reads this little four line item in a New York
paper over breakfast about a new technology that had been invented by a pair of German
scientists called blitzlicht which literally means flashlight. It was this new way of illuminating
photographs. It’s basically a small controlled explosion but it shoots off a kind of a pretty good
light that you can photograph to. And we actually re-created those exposures. You saw it
briefly in the video. We got an old kind of photography historian or kind of person to actually
re-create this blitzlicht powder and we set off about 20 of them with me setting them off with
high-speed film. So we have these amazing slow-mo images of these explosions going off and
really a look of tremendous courage onto my face. I captured that. I was literally like I'm going
to blow my hand up for this stupid show. I can't believe I have to do this. Anyways, it's a really
cool thing.
So Riis hears about this blitzlicht technology and he goes and races off, get some, and within a
matter of weeks he is going into these Five Points slums and into people's houses and kind of
storming in and setting off small explodes in their houses which was alarming, but he gets his
pictures. And he puts his pictures into a very famous book now called How the Other Half Lives,
and he also goes around the country showing these images in public lectures with a magic
lantern. And it's a big event throughout the country, and it’s an interesting thing because that
practice of going into a darkened room with hundreds of other people and looking at glowing
images on a screen would become very commonplace in the 20th century and it would be a
space of kind of wish fulfillment and fantasy. But in many cases the first time that Americans
actually had that experience were looking at these images, looking at conditions of terrible
poverty and deprivation. And that book and those images turn the tide.
I mean if you have to figure out where the progressive movement started, what were the key
events of started the wave of reform that cleared out a lot of those slums and that Teddy
Roosevelt and others really begin to kind of champion, this book and Jacob Riis’ work is clearly
one of the defining kind of early causes of that. And there's no way this happens without flash
photography, without blitzlicht.
Here's the point. It was inevitable that someone was going to invent flash photography by the
end of the 19th century. There were so many people working on it, and as so often happens
with technology, an idea becomes kind of ripe, the building blocks of the idea, the existing
technologies and materials, the concepts, the market come together and that idea becomes
part of what we sometimes call the adjacent impossible. And simultaneously all around the
world there were people working on that problem. That happens again and again and again in
the history of technology and it certainly was happening with flash photography. It was going
to become a mainstream technology by the end of the 1800s. But what was not inevitable is
that one of the very first uses of that technology would be to transform public opinion about
the conditions in the slum neighborhoods like Five Points. That was Jacob Riis. That was his
intervention into that kind of inevitable march of technology.
And I think that's what we have to keep in mind that there is kind of beautiful and amazing
dance between progress and technological progress and scientific project, that has its own logic
sometimes and we have to understand the logic, and there is some inevitable sequence of what
gets invented after what. You can't invent a microwave oven in 1650 however smart you are.
You have to work within your moment in time; and when those inventions do come out they
end up transforming us in ways that the inventors don't necessarily predict. That’s the
hummingbird effect. But we also have choices. And we have the ability as individuals or as
groups and as organizations to take those technologies, to take the new openings they have
and use them for purposes that we think are ethically or morally or socially valuable. And we
have to kind of, in a sense, keep our eye on both of those balls at the same time because they
are an important and I think essential part of where progress comes from.
So that's a little overview of the book and the show. I hope you guys get a chance to check it
out. I'd love to hear your questions or thoughts. Yes.
>>: One of the online questions is, what is your favorite blind spot moment in inventions?
>> Steven Johnson: Well, I think actually the story of Scott, the question is what is my favorite
blind spot moment in inventions? Scott is certainly probably my favorite, but since I already
told you that story. The other one that is really great, I wrote about it a little bit in Where Good
Ideas Come From, the book I wrote four or five years ago, is Lee de Forest and the vacuum
tube. One of the co-inventors of the vacuum tube invented this thing called the Audion, and de
Forest is this beautiful figure. He's a brilliant guy but just wrong again and again in
understanding what he was inventing.
So he's this kind of classic tinkerer, he's like I invented something incredible, and then he
completely misunderstood why it was working; and he built this early vacuum tube, he was
really into the idea of amplifying audio signals to make radio so that radio would be loud
enough and have enough bandwidth to basically transmit music. He was a big audio buff, a big
opera buff. And so he set up this, using this new invention he had, he set up this demo of radio
music broadcasting in New York; in 1912 I think it was. And he set up these microphones at the
opera in New York and then invited journalists to listen to radios that he designed all around
the city to hear this amazing music kind of wafting through the air onto their radios. And he
gets the New York Times to cover it and all this kind of stuff and they all sit there and turn it on
and it just sounds awful, like the technology is not ready, it doesn't sound like music at all. It's
just like pure static and noise and so he ends up getting, almost going to jail because his
investors are like what are we doing investing in this? You just completely made a fool of
yourself. And he sells off the technology to what becomes Bell Labs. And Bell Labs takes this
prototype kind of vacuum tube, and discovers that while de Forest had invented a lot of clever
things he'd gotten it all wrong. He thought that the gas inside the tube was really important. In
fact it needed to be a vacuum, hence vacuum tube, so once you take the air out of it it actually
was much better at its job and then became known as a vacuum tube. And a couple other
things he just kind of mangled.
So again, he made a huge contribution but it was through these series of missteps, and the
other funny thing was, once radio became a successful technology it was in fact used to
transmit music almost immediately, but the music that it was used to transmit was jazz. Jazz
went, because of radio, almost entirely because of radio Jazz went from being a very local
regional music like Mississippi Delta and Chicago and New York to a national music. A crucial
turning point in the history of race relations in the United States. This was the first time that
African-American culture was coming into white American homes and African-Americans had
radio shows like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington from the Cotton Club and so on that were
broadcast all around the world. So big change in the role of African-Americans because of radio
combined with Jazz. And de Forest hated jazz. He was like an opera buff and so he would write
these angry [indiscernible], I could write a whole book just on angry [indiscernible] that were
like, what have you done to my invention? You have debased it with this boogie-woogie. He’s
kind of check of tragic figure, so that's another good one. Yeah. Let's go here and then we’ll go
you.
>>: So you talked about this juxtaposition, you said tinkering. So how do you see this balance
between production engineering, which Microsoft and a lot of established companies are very
good at, and experimentalist engineering for people who are leveraging things they don't really
know about making lateral jumps. Something like Arduino in the Internet of Things and the
maker space. I think it's not that everybody it’s that now everybody’s a better electrical
engineer it’s that it’s democratized that so that kids can tinker. So how do you see technology?
Do you see this trend accelerating? Is the power dynamic shifting? What is your view on that?
>> Steven Johnson: That's a terrific question. That's the kind of question you get when you go
to Microsoft. I love it. I've written a lot about tinkerers, right? So invention of error, for
instance, Frances [inaudible] Priestly the chemist, who did all of his experiments in his home
lab, in his kitchen at the end of the 18th century; and John Snow and the ghost map was
basically an independent kind of researcher. So I've had kind of an almost like a kind of
romantic interest in those figures, they make for good stories and there's something appealing
about it.
But, as you said, what happened kind of between now and then is that a whole system of kind
of industrial innovation in a sense got developed whereas there is a system now, we have these
large teams, large corporate entities and Edison is a really interesting transition point, the
transition from Edison to Bell Labs to then the kind of modern world, I talked about this in the
light chapter, that Edison figured out this system of like we're going to have a team of
multidisciplinary people and we are going to be in the lab, we are going to kind of define our
problems, there is going to be some experimentation in here but we are going to work within
these constraints, we are going to give them, for instance, options in the company like there
was early compensation structures that then would become really important in the text sector.
So then that becomes the dominant model for the 20th century is that the new ideas come
out of these large organizations you start to see that break a little bit with the startup culture
and the garages of the 1970s there was some company in Seattle, there were those two kids,
and I did an interview with your founder Mister Gates three weeks ago. It was so great. I got to
meet him, and we did is interview about progress which is online, you should check it out, but I
have them sign a book for my kids and he wrote a wonderful thing about like I can't wait to
hear about your innovations. But I really wanted to say like dear Clay, Ronan, and Dean, do not
drop out of Harvard because all my kids are constantly like why do we care about get good
grades dad? Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.
So anyway, and I think what we're seeing now exactly with that kind of maker movement is the
revitalization of that kind of tinkerer tradition; and I hope we can get this kind of an interesting
balance going where the companies, I mean I see it in my kid’s schools, they’ve got like a maker
room now with like some 3-D printers and stuff like that. To my mind that is as interesting
intellectually as well as professionally for the kids because it creates a space that is all about
your own weird curiosity about how the world works. And so we have that kind of open-ended
exploratory model of innovation thriving again which I think it really is and certainly in this part
of the world that that's terrific.
You know there are certain big problems; it's hard to ship very complicated big software
without kind of traditional structure and there are other big engineering problems that are hard
to do, but that we have that tinkerer culture back. I think it’s a really good thing. Yeah. Right
up front.
>>: So in listening to your lecture today it seems like I can't help but draw parallels between
your work and your series and James Fergus so there’s a connection. So did you draw
inspiration from that? Would you say that this is sort of the modern day extension of that?
>> Steven Johnson: I would be very flattered if people think that. So for those of you who
don't know there's was series and a series of books by a wonderful, super-interesting British
guy named James Burke called Connections, then there was Connections two and three and
also a show called the Day the Universe Changed produced by the BBC but they ran on PBS
here. Interestingly I didn't, they were running on PBS when I was a kid but I never saw them,
and then after I wrote my second book Emergence, which I have this very Berkean kind of
subtitle of the connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software, people started to say your
books remind me of, did you ever see the show James Burke whatever? And so then I went
back and kind of rediscovered them and so certainly influence and inspiration.
They’re different; the show is very different stylistically. If you go back and look at the
Connections they’re different, let me just say it like that. It's just more contemporary. It's
almost 40 years old. But the thing that I think is really interesting about it is when you think
about telling history this way, particularly on television, that to come up with an analog of
another show that approached history this way on television you have to go back 40 years
because to me that seems really bizarre. Like I should feel like there should be half of all history
shows should be told this way. It's great to have big, I love Ken Burns, I love The Roosevelts was
a great series, I love let’s do a big show about the Civil War, that's great. That's an important
part of history, but this version of history it seems to me in terms of what our actual lives are
made up of and what our day-to-day existence is made up of compared to, think about how
many shows are just kind of weird old aristocracy, it's almost like gossip about kings and
queens. Those people are not relevant to our lives; they’re interesting and salacious but it’s
something important whereas this is really what the modern world is made of. And so I think
it's weird that there aren't like ten connections between me and James Burke rather than just
kind of the two of us out there.
But anyway, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's room for more. And I think it actually is true in books.
There's a genre of kind of historical book that is a little bit more common and that have done
well, like Cod or Longitude where you take this kind of, I'm going to write a whole book about a
fish and talk about how this fish changed the world in all these surprising ways. Those folks
actually do really well. So in terms of the historical writing there is more of that kind of mode
out there, but it hasn't been as popular on TV. So it may just be that it's really hard and nobody
likes shows like that and I'm going to feel embarrassed about it. But I don't know. We seem to
be doing all right in the first three weeks so we'll see. Yeah?
>>:. How did you pick your innovations? So you had eight>> Steven Johnson: There's six episodes. It was an interesting process. Again, this was the
most collaborative writing project I've ever been on my life which is great because I've been
preaching the importance of collaboration but actually writing my books I would kind of write
them alone in my study. So you guys should really collaborate but not me. So this was,
because we were developing a show and a book at the same time so we had this team mostly
in London and I was in California so the time zone issues were a little complicated; and we knew
that, we went into it with the idea of the episode on cold because I had written a little bit about
the Willis Carrier story and the Reagan thing just as an aside in Where Good Ideas Come From.
That's what often happens with my books is I have like, I write a whole book about something
and there's like two paragraphs about some other random thing that I've just stumbled across
and I’m like that should be the next book and I kind of blow that up and I turn it into my next
book.
So I knew that that was a good story, and then executive producer, Jane Rute, had come to me
with this story about this guy Frederic Tudor who was the ice king of the early 19th century. He
built a multi-hundred million dollar business shipping frozen blocks of ice from lakes in New
England to like India and Brazil and the Caribbean and made a vast fortune doing this which was
an incredible story because he basically took something that was free and abundant and took it
to someplace where it was so rare that if you grew up in the Caribbean the 1800s you would
have never seen ice in your whole life. And that's actually the beginning of One Hundred Years
of Solitude, if you guys remember this, it’s about the time that ice came to whatever the name
of the imaginary country is in that book. So that's a great story and a crazy story.
So we knew we had kind of, we could start with Tudor and end with Reagan and AC so we
knew there was an episode there. And then because I'd written the ghost map about Snow and
cholera we thought an episode about clean drinking water would be good and we could tell the
ghost map story in there which I didn't tell in the book actually because I was like we have a
little ghost map segment about that 1854 outbreak in the show; but in the book I was like I've
already written a book on this I’m not going to bore somebody who's already heard it. So we
had those two episodes, and they were kind of our template, and we wrote scripts and I kind of
co-wrote and I wrote the chapters at the same time.
And then the discussion about what the other four were going to be. We looked at about 12 or
13 different things and it was, the variables were we didn't want them to be high tech things, so
we didn't want to have an episode on the smart phone or something like that, it had to be
ubiquitous, it had to be something we don't think of as technology anymore, it had to be
interesting characters, particularly for the show. Producers are always like there have to be
people that we can talk about that have personality, which I realized actually in doing this talk
about collaboration and working in a different medium that all my books have been in a sense
skewed towards the ideas away from the people, and every time I found myself in a book
having to do something like describe what somebody look like I would always be like this is so
stupid who cared what he looked like. I just thought let's get to the idea that he had which is
why I would be like the worst novelist in the world. I'd be like, here's John. He had a nose and
two eyes.
So we had to have people in them. We had to have those hummingbird effects, like it had to
set in motion all these changes. So we threw around a bunch of, we talked about doing money
and currency, we talked about doing skyscrapers, we talked about, I had this idea which we
may do more seasons of this which would be really great, and one of the ones that I really want
to do is the history of illusion, of technologies that trigger our eyes into seeing something that
isn't there like perspective in painting or moving images and so on. But I couldn't persuade
anyone else that that was a good one.
So it's this kind of process and we had, the episode that aired last night if anybody saw it, was
really interesting because it was the one all about glass. And we kept going back and forth
trying to decide whether it was an episode about vision and technologies of seeing basically
which involved a lot about glass, or whether it was about this kind of magic material that made
all these things possible some of which involved vision. And we actually shot a version of it that
was really vision first and then we changed it around and made it more about glass, but I wrote
the chapter all along knowing that it was going to be about glass; and actually the chapter is the
first one, and I think it's actually my favorite chapter in the whole book.
So even once we kind of hit on a basic structure we sometimes had some tinkering to do, but it
was very, we were working on it for four years, so it's been a long time. We shot in about nine
months once we really got going, but it was a long preamble. Okay. One last question, I guess,
if there is one. Okay, great.
>>: What software are you using mainly to capture and work with ideas?
>> Steven Johnson: Oh, yeah. I've written about my, I'm obsessed with this program called
DEVONthink and they actually started this company with data work called Findings which didn't
unfortunately really work out. So I am basically, so I have this thing called a spark file where I
just write down every random idea that I use at and that file itself is like 75000 word long now
I've been keeping it, and I just do that in a Google Doc actually so I can keep it, but in terms of
managing all my notes and things that I grab from stories, from research I now really try and
read everything on the Kindle and I use the highlighting feature in the Kindle which then you
can get to at the Kindle page at Amazon. But it doesn't have the features that I used to love in
DEVONthink where I could generate interesting connections between small chunks of text. But
it's too much of a pain to get it, this is what we are trying to do with Findings, but then Amazon
shut us down. By the way if anybody knows anybody in Amazon I'm angry at them like some
other people in the publishing business.
So they just sit there at Amazon and I can search them and I can grab the quotes and paste
them and that makes life a lot easier than having to transcribe them, but I used to be able to,
with this program, to kind of say hey, I'm looking at this quote from this book; find me other
quotes from everything I've ever read that are related to that, and I've kind of lost the ability to
that so my brain is slowing down because of this.
All right. Thank you all so much. It's so great to be back. It was really fun to see you all.