How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

This is a slightly different take on the "key" inventions of the modern world. It tries to pick out the small things that ended up leading unintentionally to large scale change. One story starts with ice shippers realizing that money could be made by shipping ice from the cold climates to the tropics. However, to make a big profit, this required creating additional demand for ice where there never was much demand before. Eventually, this led to innovations in artificial refrigeration. And from this, building air conditioning resulted. And with air conditioning, a large scale population occurred as many people sought out hot climates that they would have not considered earlier.

Other topics are glass (microscopes, telescopes, spectacles), sound (jazz music, ultrasound, and fewer girls in China), clean (chlorination, soap operas, mega cities, semiconductors), time (gps, time zones), and light.