![]() Gutenberg's invention, which made books more widely available by cutting their costs, helped create a demand for glasses.īut of course, the innovative streak didn't stop with glasses: microscopes and telescopes followed within the next two centuries, which allowed humans to study their bodies and galaxy with ease, which led to even more breakthroughs. All of a sudden, everyone was aware that they needed little discs made of glass to help them read. Glassmakers in Northern Italy had a similar idea, and manipulated tiny disks of glass into curvy lenses, creating roidi da ogli (discs for the eyes), history's first glasses.Ĭonrad von Soest, "Brillenapostel." ( Wikipedia Commons )Īt first, there wasn't much of a demand for glasses - most people at that time were farsighted, they just didn't know they were farsighted because, well, why would they? You weren't reading unless you were a monk. Enter Gutenberg's moveable type printing press in the early 1440s. Pretty soon, monks began using glass as makeshift magnifiers to help them study and transcribe religious texts. Discovered in the Libyan Desert, the substance made its way to the Roman Empire, then to the Isle of Murano, and eventually throughout Western Europe, where it became something of a status symbol. How the Libyan Desert led to the RenaissanceĬonsider, for example, the profound effect that the development of glass had on Western civilization, which Johnson meticulously outlines in his first chapter. We'll continue to reinforce the misguided notion that innovation happens best when one person pulls herself up by her own bootstraps, and, as a result, large swaths of our population - who are perhaps poised to be some of history's greatest innovators! - won't be able to take their ideas to the next level. In other words, if our paradigm for innovation is the myth of Thomas Edison's lone invention of the lightbulb - a myth which Johnson debunks, or at least contextualizes, in his book - then we're going to continue to support educational aims and political programs that are premised upon that. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms. … If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. it's more than just a matter of getting the facts right, because there are social and political implications to these kinds of stories. They're important because of what they teach us about how innovation happens, as Johnson writes in his chapter on light: But the innovation histories Johnson outlines are more than clever - they're important. The histories Johnson sketches are lively and intriguing, and much of the book's narrative thrill comes from discovering how exactly history's slowest and greatest hunches played out. Though the approach has been an organizing principle of some of his other works, in How We Got to Now, it's on full display. ![]() If you can’t find the resource you need here, visit our contact page to get in touch.Įstablished in 1962, the MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.Steven Johnson, a popular science writer with several bestsellers under his belt, has become well-known for his historical method of connection-making, which he calls the long-zoom approach to history. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition.Ĭollaborating with authors, instructors, booksellers, librarians, and the media is at the heart of what we do as a scholarly publisher. ![]()
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