How We Got to Now / Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

'Light bulbs, sound recordings, air-conditioning, a glass of clean tap water, a wristwatch, a glass lens': these everyday things are the subjects of Johnson's book. In six chapters on glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light he traces the histories of problems and the attempts to solve them - from Galileo's watching a pendulum swing in Pisa cathedral to atomic clocks keeping time in microseconds - and he considers how these scientific innovations have set in motion social change.

Steven Johnson is the author of the bestsellers Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You, Mind Wide Open, Emergence, and Interface Culture, and is the editor of the anthology The Innovator’s Cookbook. He is the founder of a variety of influential websites and writes for Time, Wired, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Johnson lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and three sons.