Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, has a new book about six inventions that “got us to now”. The list he has come up with is “glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light“. I’ll put it on my short to medium term reading list, because it doesn’t sound extremely exciting to me, but I did like his first book and its focus on the “adjacent possible”. His point there was that every once in a while you might have an Einstein with major breakthroughs that seem far ahead of their time, but for the most part progress is incremental, and what seems like a breakthrough in retrospect is made possible by a series of earlier incremental steps. Digital computers are a good example – Charles Babbage and others came up with all the necessary theory to build them in the 18th century, but they would have to have been built out of gears and powered by steam. The invention of electricity, transistors, silicon chips, etc., and the building of all the infrastructure systems to support them, eventually paved the way for our laptops, smartphones, and supercomputers today.

This also reminded me of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” novel in which the British and French governments actually build the enormous computers envisioned by Babbage, and put them to various bureaucratic and nefarious purposes.