Italian glassmakers experimented and monasteries used chunks of glass as reading aids (called lenses from Latin lentes for lentils); no one realized need except scholars because of illiteracy

Gutenberg’s press—>cheap and portable books—>rise in literacy—>exposed farsightedness—>created market for glasses

Stacked lenses became microscopes from Hans and Zacharias Janssen in Netherlands in 1590; 1600s British scientist Hooke used it to discover cells; telescopes and Galileo followed

Strong glass fibers allowed for fiberglass and fiber optics, which fuel the Internet: the web is made of glass – “silicon dioxide all the way down the chain”

Murano glassmakers combined tin and Mercury to coat glass for a mirror

As glass lenses extended our vision to the stars or cells, glass mirrors allowed us to see ourselves for the first time

Chunks of glass found in Tut’s tomb needed furnace: turns out could have been from shards of comet strike

Bostonian Tudor wanted to ship ice to Caribbean but they had no use for it without storage; had never experienced anything cold

We take for granted our ability to toggle between temperatures easily

Tudor used sawdust and air to insulate ice blocks (ice, sawdust, and empty vessels sent to pick up cargo were free things he capitalized on)

Traveling ice enabled Chicago beef industry and spurred on invention of refrigeration, which exploded after Civil War

Birdseye experimented with flash-freezing in northern Canada to preserve flavor; idea came as “slow hunch” over decades

Refrigeration example of “multiple invention”: several people with same idea at same time due to ripe conditions and “network of ideas”

Carrier hired to prevent printers’ ink from smearing and accidentally invented air conditioning that expanded to theaters and other public spaces

Scott invented phonautograph that transcribed sound waves like shorthand, but didn’t have playback – meant to be another language

AT&T held monopoly on phone service but 1956 antitrust agreement said they could keep profit and monopoly but had to free licenses of stuff from Bell Labs

Turing and Bell Labs created SIGSALY machine that converted human speech into mathematical expressions: digital copies in binary; used to transmit secret transatlantic phone calls during WWII

De Forest’s gas-powered radio tubes turned into vacuum tubes by Bell Labs and into transmitter and receiver

Radio in 1920s helped jazz emerge from New Orleans and provincial limits: also better suited for radio’s tininess than the symphony (De Forest’s favorite)

Boston engineer Chesbrough employed to give sewage to Chicago’s flat terrain by raising the buildings up to install sewer lines

Prevailing wisdom up through 20th century was that water was bad for drinking and bathing

New Jersey doctor Leal experimented with chlorine and secretly added it to Jersey City reservoirs to test efficacy; experiment worked and was soon adopted elsewhere patent-free

New filtration systems drastically reduced mortality rates (infant and general) and make water safe: pools and fashion emerge thence

Dennison used standardized, interchangeable parts in his watchmaking to create cheap, unadorned “Wm Ellery” watch that Civil War popularized

Railroad agent Sears sold discarded watches to station agents and teamed with businessman Roebuck to launch mail-order watch catalogs

Faster transportation and communication (telegraph and railroad) exposed need for standardized time as books exposed need for glasses

Railroad engineer Allen proposed time-zone plan in 1883 – lines zigzagged to correspond to railroad junctions: November 18 EST was set and telegraphed across country to sync clocks

Radiometric dating (“deep time”) gave time meaning from raw data

Invention of lightbulb occurred over 50 years, but Edison had better PR

Riis read about Miethe & Gaedicke’s development of the photo flash in newspaper and immediately used it for his slum photos

“A laser is to ordinary light as a broadcast signal is to static.” John Pierce, Bell Labs

Barcodes emerged with lasers in 1970s and allowed for management of large inventories and thus big-box chains

Good to mix intellectual fields to provoke uncommon or unplanned insight: staying in same field can lead to tunnel vision — “time travelers” made cognitive leaps by stepping outside zone

Ada Lovelace’s “intuitive perception of hidden things”