
How We Got to Now
Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
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Narrated by:
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George Newbern
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By:
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Steven Johnson
About this listen
From the New York Times best-selling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas.
In this volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes - from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth - How We Got to Now investigates the secret history behind the everyday objects of contemporary life.
In his trademark style, Johnson examines unexpected connections between seemingly unrelated fields: how the invention of air-conditioning enabled the largest migration of human beings in the history of the species - to cities such as Dubai or Phoenix, which would otherwise be virtually uninhabitable; how pendulum clocks helped trigger the industrial revolution; and how clean water made it possible to manufacture computer chips. Accompanied by a major six-part television series on PBS, How We Got to Now is the story of collaborative networks building the modern world, written in the provocative, informative, and engaging style that has earned Johnson fans around the globe.
©2014 Steven Johnson (P)2014 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress, through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford.
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No more accents, please!
- By Ned Gulley on 08-30-18
By: Richard Rhodes
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Life's Edge
- The Search for What It Means to Be Alive
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 9 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Carl Zimmer investigates one of the biggest questions of all: What is life? The answer seems obvious until you try to seriously answer it. Is the apple sitting on your kitchen counter alive, or is only the apple tree it came from deserving of the word? If we can’t answer that question here on Earth, how will we know when and if we discover alien life on other worlds? The question hangs over some of society’s most charged conflicts - whether a fertilized egg is a living person, for example, and when we ought to declare a person legally dead.
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What is Life?
- By Shane S Shull on 04-29-21
By: Carl Zimmer
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The Science of Storytelling
- By: Will Storr
- Narrated by: James Clamp
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
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A great portal into human psychology
- By Stephanie Romer on 02-13-21
By: Will Storr
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The Innovators
- How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?
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A History of the Ancient Geeks
- By Mark on 10-21-14
By: Walter Isaacson
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The Beginning of Infinity
- Explanations That Transform the World
- By: David Deutsch
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
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A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.
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Worthwhile if you have the patience
- By Scott Feuless on 08-12-19
By: David Deutsch
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A Brief History of Intelligence
- Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains
- By: Max S. Bennett
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 12 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Equal parts Sapiens, Behave, and Superintelligence, but wholly original in scope, A Brief History of Intelligence offers a paradigm shift for how we understand neuroscience and AI. Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five “breakthroughs” in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can tell us about the AI of tomorrow.
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Flawed fundamental assumptions, good function rvw
- By Duane Leet on 06-01-24
By: Max S. Bennett
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How Emotions Are Made
- The Secret Life of the Brain
- By: Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.
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Emotions are not things!!!!!!
- By Gary on 03-14-17
New insight into famous innovations
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Johnson’s first example is a translucent substance in the Egyptian desert. Its discovery takes the form of art-buried in ancient tombs. Tiny scarab models lead to questions of how a translucent glass beetle is formed. His second example is the brittle transparent natural production of ice that leads to cooled drinks, to refrigeration, air conditioning, and frozen dinners. In the early days of civilization, sunlight determined the length of the work day. Eventually ways of extending the work day are created with artificial light. With Guttenberg, innovations in print spread education around the world at an affordable cost. Personal human knowledge expands geometrically. Innovations in sound have expanded from echoes in caves to wired communication to cell phone conversations to sea floor mapping to the discovery of remnants of the sound of earth’s Big Bang. As the world matures, time is measured; i.e. first by the position of the sun; later by the segmentation of a created twenty-four hour day and finally with accuracy determined by the molecular action of atoms. Accurate and synchronized measurement of time becomes critical to many aspects of life.
Johnson argues that these six areas of innovation coalesce to explain humanity’s past, present, and future. Johnson’s glass, ice, light, print, sound, and time reminds one of Aristotle’s forms; i.e. the idea that forms are what human’ senses determine objects to be. Johnson adds the principle of innovation to Aristotelian forms to make the world modern.
CIVILIZATION'S ADVANCE
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I come back to this over and over!
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Amazing, but 25% shorter than I'd like
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interesting
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Loved it
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Good Naration of Science History
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A must read!
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Inventions Rock!
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The Proper Telling of Human Evolution
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