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Author Steven Johnson Talks 'How We Got to Now,' Starting With the Sewers

The prolific author talks about his new series, which premieres tonight. Futuristic toilets and indoor ski slopes are involved.
Image: How We Got to Now

Most educational TV shows kick off with a lyrical preview of the show's subject matter, or an outright appeal to the sublime.

PBS' new series How We Got to Now, however, opens with host and bestselling author Steven Johnson descending into one of the most nightmarish environments imaginable: the San Francisco sewer system.

"I am kind of like the anti-Bear Grylls," Johnson joked when I asked him about the experience. "So, we had a little fun in the show at my expense. That was a little bit of theme: how can we put Steven into these awkward things where he looks kind of embarrassed or terrified?"

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The sewer segment was just the first bizarre location in a series packed with fascinating, little-known corners of modern civilization. Over its six episodes, How We Got to Now takes viewers inside artificial ski slopes, computer chip clean rooms, the disorienting schedules of submarine operators, and the Arcy sur Cure caves, which arguably hold the first evidence of humanity's compulsion to record sound.

How We Got to Now trailer. Video: PBS/YouTube.

Each of the episodes tackles the unlikely history of an innovation that defines our world. "Clean" and "Time" air back-to-back tonight at 9 and 10pm EST, followed up by "Glass" on October 22, "Light" on October 29, "Cold" on November 5, and "Sound" on November 12 (the latter four episodes all air at 10pm EST, and will also air on BBC One). In addition, Johnson published a companion book last month.

The episodes track the inception, democratization, and unintended consequences of their titular innovation, spotlighting extraordinary stories along the way. Johnson's sojourn into the San Francisco sewers, for example, leads into a segment on America's first sewer system, installed in Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century.

But what made the story so mind-boggling was that the system's designer, Ellis S. Chesbrough, actually lifted Chicago's city blocks up to 14 feet off the ground using jack screws, in order to install the sewers underneath the elevated buildings.

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"I was showing my wife the Chesbrough sequence when he's lifting Chicago, and she at one point just said, 'no fucking way,'" Johnson said. "So I came in the next day, and said, 'guys, we need to have a 'NFW' moment every ten minutes.'"

Bro, do you even lift…Chicago? Video: PBS/YouTube.

Though Johnson delights in showcasing these brilliant insights from individual thinkers, he also repeatedly emphasizes the collaborative nature of innovation history. "A big part of the message is that the lone genius is kind of a myth and almost every innovation comes out of a kind of a collaborative network," he told me.

Thomas Edison, who is featured in the "Light" episode, is perhaps the ultimate example of that interplay. Though Edison cultivated the image of the lone genius, his real talent was anticipating how existing inventions could be combined and commercialized. "That is the way that we're starting to understand innovation now," Johnson said.

Tracing out the history of "how we got to now" naturally raises the question of where we are heading in the future, which Johnson has addressed by launching a new website called How We Get to Next.

"In the 'Clean' episode, we're really telling a story about this kind of nineteenth and early twentieth century solution to the problem of waste removal and clean drinking water," he said. But innovation there is ongoing. In 2012, a group of Caltech engineers won the Gates Foundation's "Reinventing the Toilet" challenge with a model equipped with a solar-powered reactor capable of breaking waste into fertilizer and hydrogen fuel.

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It's innovations like the Caltech design that inspire Johnson's general hopefulness about our ability to implement long-term solutions for our future on the planet.

"That's part of what the series is trying to say: 'look at all the things we have solved!'"

"That's part of what the series is trying to say: 'look at all the things we have solved!'" Johnson said. "Think about what your life would have been like just in terms of life expectancy 100 years ago, much less anything else."

In 1914, American men lived an average of 52 years and women lived for 56. That means about 25 years has been added the American lifetime over the last century.

Clean water is a huge part of that jump, as are microscopes, ultrasounds, refrigeration, lasers, and several other inventions that span out of the six central innovations covered in How We Got to Now.

As I watched the show, I couldn't help but speculate on other innovations that would merit full episodes if PBS opts for a second season. Steel, for example, has revolutionized cultures across the world, with applications that range from weaponry, to massive infrastructures, to the utensils in our kitchens. The invention and development of projectiles would also be an intriguing story to chart out, as would the history of domestication, or paper, or the wheel.

And that's all without getting into the innovations currently in development, which will shape the centuries to come—like carbon nanotubes, quantum computing, solar power, genetic engineering, or ion thrusters.

"We've been on this amazing run," Johnson concluded. "Let's keep going."