How We Got to Now — The Problem With Steven Johnson’s Theory of Innovation

The Book Brief Project · Aug 9, 2026 · 11m

How We Got to Now begins with an unusual way of thinking about invention: the most important consequence of a technology may appear somewhere its creators never intended. Steven Johnson follows six innovations — glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light — through chains of unintended consequences that helped construct the modern world.Johnson calls this the “hummingbird effect”: a change in one field creating unexpected transformations somewhere seemingly unrelated. Improvements in glass eventually made microscopes possible. Refrigeration reshaped where people could live and how cities…