Steven Johnson is a maven of the history of ideas. Here, he focuses on just six technologies and explores their ramifications, both benign and malign. He makes the hummingbird emblematic of the kind of inventions he is interested in: insects and flowers co-evolved but the hummingbird is a gatecrasher from a different order of creation a very light bird adapted to hover and sip nectar. The book is full of hummingbird inventions that alight in totally unexpected places.
The six topics are: Glass, Cold, Sound, Clean, Time, Light. Like the material scientist Mark Miodownik in his book Stuff Matters and his TV series Everyday Miracles, Johnson plumps for glass as the material that most changed human existence. He traces a web of consequences via the invention of print which led to the widespread adoption of reading glasses, which led to the microscope and telescope, which led to knowing the patterns of the stars, and observing microorganisms. (He doesn't mention chemistry, which would be unthinkable without glass apparatus.)
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