The Alchemy of Us

Her book has had some impressive recognition, too. "The Alchemy of Us" was named one of Amazon's Best Science Books of 2022, one of Smithsonian Magazine's Top 10 Science Books of 2020, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prizes finalist.

So keep listening to find out how deeply eight inventions have impacted our lives, why it's important to share inclusive stories about innovators and innovation, and why we need to think critically about the things we create.

Each chapter of the book explores a different technology or set of related technologies. Each explains how that technology changed culture and history in a particular way – for example, how we connect with each other, or how we interact. So the chapters have one-word titles like "Interact" or "Connect."

Ramirez focuses especially on inventors that aren't very well known or who are overlooked. She wants people to see themselves reflected in the innovators she writes about. This is important for her, as a Black woman in science. She was inspired to follow this career path as a kid when she saw a young African American girl solving problems on the TV show "3-2-1 Contact." Without that representation, she might not have had this dream or known it was a possibility for her.

So how does technology change the world? Let's look at clocks as the first example.

Imagine you're in London between the 1870s and the 1900s. Businesses depended on knowing the precise time. Bars, for example, needed to know exactly when to close because if they were open after hours, they would get fined. But the enterprises that needed to know the time lacked the equipment for it.

The sundial, water clock and hourglass were the tools most people had to tell time, and they depended on imprecise methods like the movements of shadows, liquid or sand. Some people had watches, but they weren't widely used and weren't always accurate.

To know the precise hour and minute, you needed astronomy. The Royal Observatory in Greenwich and others like it could tell exactly what time it was, but of course the businesses weren't able to send someone several miles to the observatory every day.

One family saw a business opportunity here. Ruth Belville was the third member of her family to sell time. She carried her late father's pocket watch, named Arnold, to the Royal Observatory every day and compared the time on her watch to the observatory's clock. Then she traveled throughout London, from one business to another. She told each the official time based on its difference from the time on her watch.

This would have been a pleasant interaction for Belville and her customers. They would have a cup of tea and catch up on one another's news. But as telegraph clocks, wireless technologies and radios appeared, her services became a relic of the past.

Ramirez gives a wealth of context for the impact of clocks and precise time-telling. What was life like before them? It's hard to imagine now, but if you look back to your childhood, or if you have a child in your life, you can get an idea. Babies have their own internal schedules. They get hungry, alert and sleepy on their own time. But as they grow older, they start to follow the regimented schedules that adults now do.

Adults used to be more like that, too. We followed the cycles of the sun and used them to keep appointments. If you were supposed to meet someone at noon in the village square, your idea of noon might be different from theirs, so you might find yourself waiting for a while. Now that we have clocks, we synchronize our time. We get things done more quickly, but we've arguably lost something in our haste.

And our sleep is affected, too. How many of us have sleep disorders? Did you ever think that they might be related to our natural sleep patterns before clocks and electric lights? Before the Industrial Revolution, our ancestors went to bed around 9 or 10 p.m. and woke up after midnight. They'd stay up for about an hour and do gentle tasks like sewing, writing, or gossiping with neighbors who were also awake. Then when they were tired again, they'd fall back to sleep for another three and a half hours. People from these times wrote about "first" and "second sleep," although not a lot of us are aware of this past sleep pattern now.

Timekeeping marched on. The book's chapter on clocks goes on to tell stories of the invention of better watch springs by the clockmaker Benjamin Huntsman, and Warren Marrison's vibrating quartz clock, the first public clock to tell time accurately.

Readers learn about how subjective time can be, thanks to the famous physicist Albert Einstein's "Theory of Relativity," which says that time isn't a fixed thing. A clock that stands still is faster than one that moves. Then there are jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong's experiments, where he changed the length of the notes he played, and that changed listeners' sense of time.

So much for time, clock technologies, and how they changed the ways we interact. They're one of the eight technologies Ramirez explores, and the others go into a similar level of depth.

Along with learning about technologies and their impacts, we learn about their inventors on a human level. Take steel, which we find in the railroad tracks that connect the United States.

Ramirez delves deeply into the story of Henry Bessemer, who found a way to make this material quickly. We get to see what a complex person he was. To use some of the author's language, Ramirez describes how he could be engaging or explosive, generous or overbearing, how he talked a lot but preferred to be alone with his gadgets, and how he looked sad but spent his time seeking new opportunities.

We see how Bessemer's context shaped him as a person and shaped the invention he made. His father was a prolific inventor working in France, who moved back to England after the French Revolution. Young Henry had access to his father's workshop and tools.

When he grew up, he faced a world at war: the Crimean War, to be exact, which began in 1853, when England and its allies fought the Russians over Catholics' access to the Holy Land. To win this war, England needed better weapons, so the inventors of the time sought a faster way to make the steel that created cannons. Not only would it be helpful to the military; this invention would also make the inventor rich.

All of these factors got Bessemer interested in developing a quicker steel-making process. Because of the context that Bessemer lived in and who he was, we got the invention we did. And it shaped the world we have. As steel rails connected the United States, cities grew, new forms of commerce were created, and Christmas became the major holiday that it is today.

Here's another example of how human factors influenced a technology, and not in a positive way. One of the chapters, called "Capture," focuses on photography. We learn about the creation of a camera that could capture motion. But more than anything else, we learn about different ways that photography reflected and supported the racism of its time and context.

In the 1960s, after American schools were desegregated, school group photographs failed to reproduce African American children's features clearly. The culprit was the film, which had been optimized to capture light skin tones.

When color film was developed, it had to balance both the contrast between black and white and the different pigments. Color scientists created a balance card with standards of colors to use when printing pictures. This would allow photographs to look the same no matter where they were shown, whether it was on TV, for example, or in a magazine. The most popular color chart showed a picture of a white model. Because the film was optimized to match her skin, people with other skin tones looked wrong in photographs.

This is striking given the history of early daguerreotype portraits in the 1800s, which had more controlled lighting and resolution, as well as different chemicals. Regular people could and did take these photographs, so they were accessible and democratic. They also rendered people with different skin tones accurately.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass and African American history scholar W.E.B. Du Bois advocated for the use of daguerreotype portraits to fight stereotypes of Black Americans. Douglass became the most photographed person in the world. Both men wanted to counter the degrading caricatures in magazines and newspapers with real and positive pictures. But Du Bois came a few decades after Douglass, and in his time it had already become more common to use film processing than the old-fashioned homemade pictures. So, images of black subjects taken by white photographers were often, in Du Bois' words, "a horrible botch."

What solved this problem? It wasn't an awareness of racial bias! No, it was business. Kodak was the main producer of photographic film at the time. Black parents complained about the school pictures to them, but their concerns were dismissed. But then two industries complained: chocolate and furniture companies. Both of these needed to be able to take pictures that showed dark browns accurately and made their products look appealing. By the 1970s, Kodak developed more-inclusive color films.

Here's another instance of racism meeting photography. In 1970, Caroline Hunter was working as a chemist for Polaroid. Her boyfriend, Ken Williams, worked in Polaroid's art department. The two of them saw a mock-up identification card on a company bulletin board. A South African identification card.

As a young black kid, Caroline had learned about apartheid, with its segregation of Black people in South Africa, and seen parallels with her own life in New Orleans. Now she wondered why Polaroid was involved in such an oppressive place.

Hunter and Williams researched South Africa and discovered that it was a police state with passbooks that controlled and tracked the movement of Black South Africans. If someone didn't have their passbook, they would be fined or jailed. And Polaroid contributed the pictures.

Hunter and Williams began a seven-year campaign to end Polaroid's involvement in South Africa, which was ultimately successful. Polaroid's departure was part of a chain reaction that led to the end of apartheid.

Along with clocks, steel and photography, readers learn about the telegraph, which had a lasting impact on language and future forms of communication such as texting. They also discover how the invention of electric lights impacts the lives of animals through light pollution, an example of how inventions have unforeseen effects that aren't always good.

The section on inventions that impacted data sharing is intriguing, touching on technologies like the phonograph and storage disks. These innovations changed the shape that information took, as it could be stored in smaller and smaller spaces and is now usually digital. There are chapters on scientific glassware and the technologies that allow computers to "think."

A section in the middle of the book features several black-and-white photographs and images related to the technologies and inventors discussed by Ramirez. This is a thoughtful inclusion that gives readers context, and helps them to understand the information in more depth.

In her epilogue, Ramirez notes that many authors glorify genius, but she wanted to humanize it. The book is inclusive in terms of gender and background, and aims to show that innovation is accessible to all kinds of people. "The Alchemy of Us" succeeds on that count. Its portraits of inventors and their processes help readers understand the people behind the technology, along with the mixture of effort and the right context that go into creating it.

And the book is equally successful in showing both sides of technology. All of the inventions discussed have had deep impacts on human life, and benefit from critical thinking about their consequences. Their stories also bring the sense of wonder and connection to the world that the author wanted to invoke.

Ramirez chose to reach a broad audience by focusing on the stories of technology rather than spelling out every technical detail of how they work. "The Alchemy of Us" is both smart and accessible. Ramirez is a gifted communicator who connects a wide range of ideas and shares information through compelling narratives.

So if this sounds like an interesting read, give it a go! It's fun, it makes you think, and you're almost certain to learn something new.

"The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another," by Ainissa Ramirez, is published by MIT Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.