THREAD: The Invention of Glass and its Hummingbird Effect.
Hummingbird effect: An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
Hummingbird effect: An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
<Begin> The story of glass started in the desert around a few million years ago. The grains of sand—made up of silicon dioxide—melted under the heat, when cooled, could not get itself back to its original shape, it left behind what we now recognize as glass.
When Constantinople fell in 1204, a tiny group of glassmakers moved from Turkey and practiced their trade-in Venice, but once the heat required to make glass almost burned down the city. These glassmakers were banished to the island of Murano, but soon they spread across.
Information Revolution by a German goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg. One of his many business activities was selling wine that put him in proximity to the screw press used for squeezing wine grapes. His learning from his other failed business created the Printing Press.
Gutenberg’s great breakthrough had another, less celebrated effect: the condition of “hyperopia”—farsightedness—was there, but most people didn’t notice that they suffered from it, because they didn’t read. So, for the first time, people got to know that they were farsighted.
And that revelation created a surge in demand for spectacles. From the spectacle's inception, people began to read. This upped the need for more glasses for all types of eyes, so people experimented with lenses and glasses.
In 1590 at Middleburg in the Netherlands, father and son spectacle makers Hans and Zacharias Janssen experimented with lining up two lenses, not side by side like spectacles, but in line with each other, magnifying the objects they observed, thereby inventing the microscope.
Robert Hooke, a British scientist used this microscope to identify the cell as the basic unit of life.
Microscopes would later reveal the invisible colonies of bacteria and viruses that both sustain and threaten human life, which led to modern vaccines and antibiotics.
Microscopes would later reveal the invisible colonies of bacteria and viruses that both sustain and threaten human life, which led to modern vaccines and antibiotics.
A Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey in 1608, invented a device that can magnify objects 3x. Galileo modified it to reach 10x. And, in Jan of 1610, just two years after Lippershey had filed for his patent, Galileo used the telescope to observe that moons were orbiting Jupiter.
Charles Vernon Boys, a British physicist, developed a slender glass fiber in 1887. This strong type of glass, now known as fiberglass, was to be used as a balance arm, but is now today applied in computer circuitry, planes, and insulation.
We used transparent glass fibers and lasers to produce fiber optics, which led to the availability of the internet. Now, selfie photos are taken using Glass lenses, stored in fiberglass circuitry, sent via ultrathin Glass cables, and viewed on Glass screens. <END>
For the much more detailed reading. Grab Steven Johnson’s HOW WE GOT TO NOW <Six Innovations That Made the Modern World>
