The author of nine books, Steven Johnson has
covered topics as varied as the connection between ant hives and
cities, pop culture's effect on intelligence, and the spread of
cholera in 1800s London.
His latest book, How We Got to Now, looks at the
surprising history of everyday inventions and concepts, and how
they're taken for granted despite their impact on human life in the
present day. It's also the basis for a five-part BBC documentary
series that launches tomorrow.
Johnson speaks with WIRED.co.uk on exploring beneath London, the
production of both the book and the series, and the challenge of
how to make lightbulbs interesting.
WIRED.co.uk: The series looks at some items most viewers
will consider pretty mundane -- lightbulbs or refridgerators, for
instance. How do you go about making that material
interesting?
Steven Johnson: The first thing is choosing what
the objects are. I was showing some footage before from the "Time"
episode, about the invention of time zones and you have no idea how
hard it is to make entertaining television about standardised time
zones! We didn't want things that were recognisably high tech --
there's no smartphone episode. We wanted things that were so common
you didn't even think of them as innovative, like drinking water or
accurate clocks.
Then we were trying to figure out which of fifty things like
that would give us the most interesting stories and the key
ingredients for interesting stories were surprising changes, cause
and effect -- where someone tries to change something in one field
that ends up causing things to be totally different somewhere else
-- and interesting people. The stories had to be fresh, about
figures that most people haven't heard of. We sat there in a team
of about four or five of us -- I was living in California and most
of them were living in London, so this was over Skype -- doing
research and digging in to the topic.
How did the show and book come about?
The show evolved out of another of my books from
four of five years ago, and then we started having conversations
with Jane [Root, founder and CEO of How We Got to Now's
production company Nutpoia], who used to work at the BBC but now
has her own production company that is mostly based around
London.
Jane came to me and said she thought there was a show that could
be done about the history of innovation and these themes for PBS and the BBC.
We hit upon the structure of each episode being one facet of the
modern world, how it came about and all these crazy consequences.
When we had that, I knew it would be a great book too, so we
developed it together. We did some scripts first and then I wrote
the chapter, or sometimes I did a chapter that turned into a
script. I was writing it as we were shooting it, so we'd do a
12-hour day of filming somewhere and then I'd go back to the hotel
and work on the book. It was a lot of work.
You've written extensively about history, but the show
was your first time presenting. How was it making that
transition?
It was incredible fun. I spent all my career
talking about the power of collaboration and working across diverse
networks, but writing is by definition a pretty solitary pursuit.
Most of the time I'm working on a book it's me and my computer. You
meet other people and take in their ideas through their research,
but this was intensely collaborative. The team was mostly British
so it was internationally collaborative as well. There's a lot of
the British and BBC sensibility mixed with my own personality,
which is pretty American. It was the hardest work I've ever done
because we'd go off and shoot for twelve hours on a frozen fjord in
Canada, then go back to work on the book. It was really draining
but also super-rewarding because it finally felt like I was finally
living up to the value system of encouraging diverse collaboration
and living up to my own work.
You spent a fair bit of time shooting in the UK. What
were you focussing on?
We shot quite a bit in London. We went into these
caves as part of John
Snow improving water quality. [For the "Time"
episode] there was this crazy thing at Heathrow where they let me
try the simulator for air traffic control -- fortunately it was
just the simulator because it's really hard! Time is really
important there, so something as simple as a clock is a really
important tool.
With the first episode, "Clean", you're returning to
themes of epidemiology covered in your book The Ghost
Map -- is that where the focus on Snow comes
in?
Yeah, that's crucial to the whole episode. We talk
about how the outbreak in Soho in 1854 was really what helped John
Snow come up with the theory that cholera was in water and not in
the air. It probably saved as many lives as any innovation in that
period, when people understood they had to clean the water,
separate water from waste. That set in motion a whole set of public
health revolutions.
Snow is one of those figures who we're trying to champion in
this show. He didn't become wealthy. He wasn't an entrepreneur.
Cholera was more like his hobby than a day job. He had a
fascination and an eclectic set of skills that made him uniquely
suited to solve the problem. Those are the sort of people we have
to remind people of, not just the titans and billionaires who made
their fortunes on these objects but the people who are behind these
innovations and never made a penny out of it. Those are the people
we really want people to think about.
Episode three, "Light", looks at the lightbulb, but also
Thomas Edison, who's increasingly known for his co-opting of other
people's work. Was his previous good reputation because people
prefer simple narratives from history?
Yeah, that's a really good point. Edison is
probably the most recognizable name we spend time with, apart from
Galileo. But the approach we had, we can't talk about the invention
of the lightbulb and not talk about Edison. At the same time what
we say is that Edison didn't invent the lightbulb.
The most interesting thing about the lightbulb is the fact
that there were fifteen people simultaneously inventing the
lightbulb, using the same core ingredients Edison did. That's
increasingly the way innovation works now -- you don't have a
single genius inventor. You have what we call multiple inventions,
where an idea becomes imaginable at a certain point in history
because of advances in science, business and technology. No-one was
trying to invent the lightbulb at the end of the 18th century, but
everyone was trying to invent it in the 19th century. It's like
saying Steve Jobs didn't invent the MP3 player -- which is true, he
didn't. But the iPod was the first one that made all the difference
and got to a mass audience because it was more than just the
technology of putting MP3 files in a player, it was a whole
package.
What present day innovations do you think people will be
looking back at 100 years from now, as you're doing in How We
Got to Now?
Electric vehicles, for one. People are giving up
cars for the first time in the US. Millennials aren't buying cars
and the whole thing is being reinvented after a really long and
stable period where there was no important innovation. We will look
back in a hundred years and say that was transformative. Think
about what the old model of automobiles changed in terms of the
layout of our cities and settlement patterns. Arguably it's the
most transformative innovation of the 20th century in terms of how
people lived.
How We Got to Now premieres on BBC Two tomorrow evening, at
7:35pm.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-02/13/steven-johnson-how-we-got-to-now http://d283tlc9jx3ws7.cloudfront.net/transpng/3/2
BBC's 'How We Got to Now' explores hidden history of things
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