The Alchemy of Us summary

Steel is the result of a fascinating metamorphosis. When carbon is combined with iron, two new substances are produced, stacked one atop the other like a layer cake. One layer is hard, strong, and carbon-rich; the other layer is soft, malleable, and carbon-poor. The cake itself, so to speak, is steel.

These properties, which most metals do not possess simultaneously, make steel an excellent material for building durable objects. But forging this delicate balance was no easy feat. It was labor intensive and time consuming – that is, until a prolific English inventor named Henry Bessemer had a eureka moment.

In the winter of 1825, Samuel F.B. Morse was in Washington, DC. While there, he learned that his wife, Lucretia, had died of a heart attack some days prior. Grief-stricken, Morse lamented the snail-like pace with which information traveled. And he became fixated on finding a way to make news move faster.

This fixation seemed futile until, years later, he heard a Boston physician discussing how electricity could travel without any loss of time. This sparked an idea: an instrument that sent information via electricity.

Frederick Douglass, a famous orator and abolitionist, was a big fan of early daguerreotype photography. Because of its large format, controlled conditions, and increased resolution, it rendered a person’s likeness with great accuracy. Douglass, who was black, believed it could combat the stereotypical ways that African Americans were portrayed. To this end, Douglass had his photograph taken often. By the middle of the nineteenth century, he was the most photographed person in the world.

Unfortunately, Douglass’s hopes that photography would help dismantle prejudice weren’t quickly fulfilled. By the time color film was widely used, Kodak had optimized their chemical formula for white skin. In pictures, darker skin tones appeared sickly or like black ink blots in photos – underlining the idea that white skin was the standard of beauty.

Many inventors tried to create artificial illumination in the nineteenth century. But nothing stuck until William Wallace invited Thomas Edison to his home in Connecticut in 1878. With the prolific and famed inventor as witness, Wallace exhibited his arc light: a bright light achieved by harnessing electricity to flash between two blocks of carbon.

But Wallace wouldn’t be glorified by history for his innovation. Instead, he’d merely inspire Edison to improve upon his idea.

The day that Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American with his favorite invention, the phonograph, they stopped the presses and alerted the world: “Speech has become immortal.”

Edison’s rudimentary phonograph, invented in 1877, had a mouthpiece that collected sound waves and pushed a diaphragm. Then it moved a sharp tip up and down along tin foil, which was wrapped around a cylinder. Edison’s voice played on it, saying, “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” The sound was faint, and the phonograph could hold less than a minute of sound and only be played a few times before the metal deformed. But his idea, to combine the telephone and the telegraph, would mark the first time sound was recorded onto a physical device.

Glass is an ancient material with myriad uses. But before 1876, a scientific eye was not applied to glassmaking. Making glass was a trade, with glass recipes passed down from generation to generation – which resulted in glass whose properties were not uniform or predictable.

Scientists wondered whether anything could be done to improve the glass they used in the lab. Professor Ernst Abbe of the University of Jena, in Germany, wrote a paper bemoaning the poor quality of the glass lenses in his telescopes and microscopes, calling for the development of new formulations of optical glass. Upon reading the paper, chemist and glassmaker Otto Schott contacted Abbe, who invited him to Jena to collaborate on the creation of high-quality scientific glass.

Humans have always had a symbiotic relationship with the tools they use. After our Homo erectus ancestors discovered fire, they began cooking their food, and they spent less energy chewing and digesting raw food. This freed up their bodies’ resources, which allowed their brains to grow.

Similarly, in the last century, people who grew up listening to the radio developed heightened auditory sensitivity. And those who grew up with television are especially attuned to visual stimuli. Today, computers and the internet have boosted our IQs but shortened our attention spans.