How We Got To Now

How We Got To Now explores the history of innovation, how innovations connect to one another, create an environment for change and where innovations come from.

The Renaissance was one of the most innovative periods in history. Lasting from roughly the 14th to the 17th century, the density of innovations and technologies that allowed society to progress hasn’t been as big again until 300 years later. Gunpowder, glasses, the printing press, the flush toilet, the microscope, the telescope, the submarine, matches, that’s just a tiny selection of its accomplishments.

One thing you probably wouldn’t think of as a crucial innovation in this era, or a crucial innovation at all for that matter, is the mirror. Yet, without the mirror, we probably wouldn’t have had a Renaissance in the first place.

In the 1400s, glassblowing first came about, which made it easier to create glass mirrors at scale (though they were still very expensive). Before the mirror, people couldn’t look at themselves. Imagine the feeling you’d get if you first looked at a mirror when you’re 21.

The Renaissance was a period of introspection and self-awareness. People started to think and look inward. Self-portraits first came up, as did novels written in the first person. None of this would have been possible without people being able to look at themselves and start reflecting.

In this way, the mirror didn’t exactly cause the renaissance, but it’s impossible to imagine without it – because it created the right environment for this change.

Sometimes, however, an innovation is of course directly responsible for a huge change. Like the light bulb, for example. Before artificial light, there were only candles. But they were expensive to make. Guess what they were made of. The stuff that’s in a sperm whale’s head. It’s called spermaceti and the only way to get it is, you guessed it, to hunt and kill whales, which is both a terrible and expensive endeavor. Luckily, Thomas Edison broke through before they went extinct, and gave people sustainable light whenever they wanted it. The light bulb acted as a springboard for huge further innovations, that built upon it. Flash photography, for example. First tested by Charles Smyth in the late 1800s by creating a mini-explosion to illuminate the King’s Chamber inside the Pyramids of Giza and take a picture, it was later used by Jacob Riis to document the horrible living conditions in a New York neighborhood called Five Points. Being visualized for the first time, the images garnered huge support for a new law to be passed, which effectively eliminated those conditions and greatly improved the situation. And that’s how one innovation can lead to another, and another, and another, and eventually…