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  • A History of Play-As-Innovator
  • Jeremy K. Saucier (bio)
Steven Johnson, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016. 322 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

In 1801, a precocious eight-year-old Charles Babbage and his mother visited a whimsical establishment in London's Hanover Square known as Merlin's Mechanical Museum. The museum, Steven Johnson tells us in Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, was a kind of "hybrid between a science museum, a gaming arcade, and a maker lab" that ignited the imagination of the young Babbage (p. 6). Babbage's encounter with two miniature female automata—one that walked four feet and bowed and another that danced while holding an animated bird—fascinated the future mathematician and inventor. These playthings kindled an obsession in Babbage to emulate the subtleties of human behavior and inspired him decades later to sketch out plans for his ultimately incomplete, but nevertheless pioneering, "Difference Engine" mechanical calculator and "Analytical Engine" mechanical computer. The latter stands as the first design for a programmable computer. This chance encounter in Merlin's Mechanical Museum, Johnson argues, foreshadows mechanized labor and revolutions in computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence. With Wonderland, Johnson argues convincingly that playful encounters like this one lead to innovations that have changed the world.

In six thematic, wide-ranging chapters focusing on fashion and shopping, music, taste (spices, not culture), illusion, games, and public space, Johnson insists that the history of "delight"—a word he says is rarely invoked as "a driver of historical change"—matters because so many "seemingly trivial discoveries," stemming from delight, "ended up triggering changes in the realm of Serious History" (pp. 10, 12). Johnson chronicles this "hummingbird effect," or the "process in which an innovation in one field sets in motion transformations in seemingly unrelated fields" through engaging stories of seemingly unrelated causes and effects: such as how the player piano (or pianola) led to the development of computer software; how the taste for pepper and other spices drove the creation of global trade networks and the spread of Islam; [End Page 163] and how dice games laid the groundwork for the probability theory that gave rise to the modern insurance industry (p. 12).

Those familiar with the iconoclastic bestselling author and cultural critic's previous works, will have seen this "hummingbird" approach to history before. In How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World, Johnson introduced readers to the hummingbird effect by grounding it in evolutionary history and pollination. He explains how flowers evolved colors and scents that initially attracted insects to pollen. Simultaneously, the flowers evolved in ways to lure insects to pollinate, while insects evolved the sensory tools necessary to draw them to the flowers. At the same time, the hummingbird evolved a special way to float in midair in order to extract nectar from a flower. From this, Johnson concludes, "The sexual reproduction strategies of plants end up shaping the design of the hummingbird's wings."1 Using this foundation, Johnson charts the "chains of influence" that led innovations such as glass, man-made cold, sound, cleanliness, time, and light to change the modern world in unexpected ways. Thus, Gutenberg's printing press not only triggered revolutions in information, art, science, and theology, but it also created a surge in demand for spectacles (or eye glasses), which led to the microscope, and which in turn expanded our vision down to a cellular level.2

This kind of history is fascinating, but fraught because the stories of unlikely connections often play out as a continuous tale of this-caused-that, and that-caused-this, and so on. In his chapter on fashion and shopping, Johnson claims that shopping is a cause, not a secondary effect of the industrial revolution. That the pleasure that seventeenth-century-elite British women took from shopping for calico in elaborate drapers' stores triggered the demand for cotton, which led to the expansion of slavery in the American south (a reminder that pleasure seeking can also lead to atrocity), and the creation of machinery to make fabrics "helped create the industrial revolution" (p. 26). Johnson's point that...

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