Series a cool idea

In the innovation game, it pays to be cool.

In fact, you need to be cool before people accept that you're hot.

And you gotta be hot to be cool.

It's circular, but obvious.

Innovation is one of those nebulous terms, of which most people have just a vague understanding.

And that is despite Dunedin hosting a whole Centre of Innovation that sports plenty of mirror windows and various of floors.

Considering all that, and considering innovation is something of a jazzy idea with the in-crowd at the moment, it is timely a pleasant young science author and media theorist has put together a series that gives the viewer some idea of the whole shebang.

Steven Johnson's six-part series How We Got To Now looks at how ideas were born and raised, dashed, remembered, then developed by not just one person, but whole networks of people.

Johnson has written nine books, mostly on the intersection of science, technology, and personal experience.

You can tell he has something, as he is not one to argue popular culture and television have dulled the minds of the young and developed a society of stupids.

In fact, in his 2005 book Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, he argued the opposite.

So I like him immediately.

The first episode of How We Got To Now, which airs on BBC Knowledge from 8.30pm tomorrow, looks at the development of cool things - in this case, refrigeration.

''Imagine what life was like before we could make anything cold,'' Johnson demands.

''Just a few generations ago we had no idea how to keep things fresh.''

The development of cooling began with an American fellow, Frederic Tudor, who shipped ice around the world in the 1800s.

Despite some melting, and years in debtors' prison when things went awry, Tudor stuck at it, and made ice export work.

That was all very well, until little matters like hurricanes and American Civil Wars got in the way of deliveries.

Dr John Gorrie, a medical type in the American South, had been cooling wards using an ingenious method of blowing air over ice, but found he could no longer do so.

Since the 1600s scientists had been aware air could be heated when compressed, and cooled when ''stretched'', so Gorrie used those ideas to invent an ice machine.

He couldn't get backing for the idea, and died alone and penniless.

Happily, that was not the end of it.

Long story short - refrigerators.

''Ideas are fundamentally networks of other ideas,'' Johnson says.

''Ideas remixed into something new.''

Watch and learn, clever television watchers.

- Charles Loughrey

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