By Steven Johnson
'The ebook is a home of wonders' the recent York Times
'Steven Johnson is the Darwin of expertise' Walter Issacson, writer of *Steve Jobs*
What connects Paleolithic bone flutes to the discovery of software program? Or the Murex sea snail to the dying of the good American urban? How does the bag of crisps you carry on your hand support inform the tale of humanity itself?
In his wonderful new paintings at the historical past of innovation, foreign bestseller Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and beauty has continually been a strong driving force of world-shaping technological swap. He reveals that that all through background, the leading edge of innovation lies at any place individuals are operating the toughest to maintain themselves and others amused.
Johnson's storytelling is simply as pleasant because the innovations he describes, choked with spectacular stops alongside the adventure from uncomplicated ideas to advanced sleek platforms. He introduces us to the vibrant innovators of rest: the explorers, vendors, showmen, and artists who replaced the trajectory of historical past with their sumptuous wares, unique nutrition, taverns, playing tables, and magic shows.
Johnson compellingly argues that observers of technological and social traits can be searching for clues in novel amusements. you can find the long run anyplace individuals are having the main fun.
**
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Additional resources for Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
Example text
They ventured down the coast of North Africa, where they eventually discovered a bounty of sea snails that would keep the aristocracy cloaked in purple well into the Dark Ages. The legacy of these voyages extends far beyond simple fashion. The passage out of the Mediterranean into the vast mystery of the Atlantic marked a true threshold moment in the history of human exploration. “The Phoenicians’ now-proven aptitude for sailing the North African coast was to be the key that unlocked the Atlantic for all time,” Simon Winchester writes.
But if the production techniques remain a mystery, the historical record is clear about one thing: Tyrian purple endured as a symbol of status and affluence for at least a thousand years. ” Over the millennium that passed from the age of the Phoenicians to the fall of Rome, an ounce of Tyrian purple dye was worth significantly more than an ounce of gold, a valuation that compelled sailors to explore the entire coastline of the Mediterranean for colonies of murex snails. Eventually, though, the supply of Hexaplex trunculus in the Mediterranean could not keep up with the demand for Tyrian purple, and a few intrepid Phoenician sailors began to contemplate more ambitious voyages in search of the mollusk, beyond the placid waters of the inland sea, out onto the gray, turbulent waves of the Atlantic itself.
The most visible, and painful, of these was slavery in the American South. Slaves had been a part of American society from the first decades of the colonial era, but it was cotton that turned the forced labor of African-Americans into the cornerstone of the South’s economy. In 1790, only a handful of counties along the seaboard of the American southeast had a slave population higher than 50 percent, mostly working tobacco plantations. By 1860, slaves made up roughly half of the entire population of the Southern states, numbering more than five million in total.
