Michael: The computer you're using to listen to this podcast owes its existence not to a military project or a corporate lab, but to a wind-up doll from the 1800s. The path to artificial intelligence started with a toy. Kevin: Hold on, a toy? You’re telling me that the foundation of all modern computing, the thing that runs our entire world, started as a plaything? That sounds completely backward. Michael: It does, but that's the kind of mind-bending connection that fills every page of Steven Johnson's book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World. Kevin: Right, and Johnson is a master at this. He's built a career on what he calls the 'hummingbird effect'—how an invention in one field, like a better way to make glass, can lead to a revolution in a totally different field, like microbiology, because someone could finally build a decent microscope. Michael: Exactly. And this book is the ultimate exploration of that idea, arguing that the most powerful hummingbird effects often start with something we dismiss as trivial: play. Johnson’s whole point is that we have this story of progress that’s all about necessity, about serious people solving serious problems. He argues that’s only half the story. The other half is driven by delight, wonder, and the pursuit of amusement. Kevin: I love that. It’s a much more optimistic view of human nature. So today, we’re diving into how fun, literally, built the world we live in. Where do we even start with that?

Michael: Let's start with that doll I mentioned. It's a story about a young boy who would one day be called the father of the computer. In 1801, an eight-year-old Charles Babbage was taken by his mother to a place in London called Merlin's Mechanical Museum. Kevin: A Mechanical Museum? What was that, like an 18th-century Dave & Buster's? Full of clockwork arcade games? Michael: That’s not a bad analogy, actually. It was this bizarre hybrid of a science museum, a gaming arcade, and a kind of early maker lab. The owner, John-Joseph Merlin, was this brilliant inventor and showman. He showed young Babbage his collection, but one thing captivated the boy: a small, silver automaton of a female dancer. Kevin: An automaton, so like a robot? Michael: A very sophisticated one for the time. Babbage later wrote about it in his autobiography. He said, "The motions of her limbs were singularly graceful... Her eyes were full of imagination, and irresistible." He was completely enchanted. This wasn't just a machine to him; it was magical. And that encounter lit a fire in his mind that never went out. Kevin: Wow. So he saw this doll and didn't just see a toy, he saw... code? He saw the potential for a machine to do more than just one repetitive task? Michael: Precisely. He saw a system. Years later, Babbage bought that very same silver dancer at an auction and kept it in his study, right next to the blueprints for his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine—the machines that are now considered the first true computers. That little spark of delight from a toy directly fueled his life's work. Kevin: That's incredible. But was that a one-off, or was this a common thing? Were people just building these elaborate, useless toys all over the place? Michael: It was a huge craze among the wealthy. And some were even more complex. There was a Swiss inventor named Pierre Jaquet-Droz who built an automaton called "The Writer." It was a mechanical boy, made of over six thousand parts, sitting at a little desk. Kevin: Okay, what did "The Writer" do? Michael: You could program it. It used a large wheel with a set of cams that you could arrange in any order. The automaton would then dip its quill into an inkwell, shake off the excess, and write out whatever message you had programmed—up to forty characters. And the detail was astonishing. Its eyes would follow the pen as it wrote across the page. Kevin: That is genuinely unsettling and amazing at the same time. But I have to push back a little. That's still just a fancy music box, right? It's not thinking. It's just executing a pre-set command. Michael: You're absolutely right, it wasn't thinking. But you've hit on the key distinction. The machine itself, the hardware, was separate from the instructions, the software. That idea—of a programmable machine—was the conceptual leap. And it was born not for calculating crop yields or artillery trajectories, but for the sheer, jaw-dropping wonder of it. Kevin: So the innovation wasn't the machine itself, but the idea that a machine could be told what to do. Michael: Exactly. There's a great quote from the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, who saw these things and wrote, "It may sometimes happen that the greatest efforts of ingenuity have been exerted in trifles; yet the same principles and expedients may be applied to more valuable purposes." He saw that the engineering used to make a doll dance could one day be used to "drain fens, or manufacture metals." The plaything was the prototype for the world-changing tool.

Kevin: That's fascinating. The idea that a desire for beauty or amusement, not just utility, drives progress. It feels like that connects to another huge part of the book: fashion and taste. Michael: It's the exact same pattern, but on a global scale. Johnson starts with a modern example: a Doritos chip. If you look at the ingredients, you see corn from Iowa, cheese powder from Wisconsin, and a whole list of spices and flavorings that come from all over the planet. That global supply chain, he argues, didn't start with a need for calories. It started with a desire for new and interesting tastes. Kevin: You mean the spice trade. Michael: The spice trade, but also the color trade. For thousands of years, one of the most valuable commodities in the world was a specific shade of purple. Tyrian purple. To make it, you had to harvest thousands of a particular Mediterranean sea snail, the murex, and extract a tiny drop of mucus from each one. Kevin: All that for a color? That's insane. It's like the ultimate status symbol. People weren't just buying a purple toga; they were buying the sheer difficulty and expense of making it. Michael: Exactly. It had no practical value. It didn't keep you warmer or safer. It was pure aesthetic delight and status. And the demand for that color, and for spices like pepper and cloves, is what pushed Phoenician and Roman sailors out into the unknown. It funded exploration and created the first truly global trade networks. The desire for a pretty color literally redrew the map. Kevin: That’s a powerful idea. And it didn’t stop in the ancient world, right? Michael: Not at all. Johnson tells the story of the "Calico Madams" in 17th-century London. At the time, English clothing was mostly made of heavy, scratchy, plain-colored wool. Then, the East India Company started importing these amazing fabrics from India called calico and chintz. They were cotton, so they were soft and light, but more importantly, they were printed with these incredibly vibrant, colorful patterns. Kevin: And people went nuts for them. Michael: Completely. It was a sensation. Women, in particular, abandoned wool for these beautiful, comfortable cottons. It got so extreme that it created a national economic crisis. The wool industry was the backbone of the English economy, and it was collapsing. There were riots. Wool manufacturers attacked women on the street for wearing calico. Kevin: So this is like the original fast fashion crisis! What did the government do? Michael: They tried to ban it! Parliament passed acts making it illegal to import or even wear printed cotton. But you can't legislate taste. People just smuggled it in or started importing raw cotton and developing their own printing and dyeing industries in Britain. Kevin: Let me guess. To compete with the Indian imports, they had to find a way to make cotton textiles faster and cheaper. Michael: And there you have it. That massive consumer demand, born from a simple desire for a prettier, more comfortable dress, is what directly fueled the invention of the flying shuttle, the spinning jenny, and eventually the entire factory system. It flips the script on the Industrial Revolution. We usually think that factories created consumer culture. Johnson shows that, in many ways, consumer desire created the factories.

Michael: And this pattern of play and aesthetics driving technology shows up in one of the most unexpected places: music. We think of music as pure art, the opposite of technology. But Johnson argues it has been a secret engine of innovation for millennia. Kevin: How so? I can see how a flute is a piece of technology, but it seems like a dead end. You invent a flute, and... you have a flute. Michael: But what if you want to automate the flute? That leads you to Vaucanson's Flute Player, one of the most famous automata of the 18th century. And Vaucanson used the principles he developed for that musical toy to design an automated loom, which directly inspired the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards—the same punch cards Babbage adopted for his Analytical Engine. There’s a direct line from a musical toy to the computer. Kevin: Okay, that's another one of those hummingbird effect chains. It's wild. But the book has an even better story, right? The one that connects Hollywood, a crazy composer, and World War II. Michael: It’s one of the best stories of invention I’ve ever heard. It’s the 1940s. Hedy Lamarr, one of the most glamorous movie stars in the world, is at a dinner party in Hollywood. She’s also a brilliant, self-taught inventor who had been tinkering with ideas since she was a child in Austria. Kevin: I’ve heard this! She was a genius, but nobody took her seriously because of her looks. Michael: Exactly. During the war, she was horrified by the reports of German U-boats sinking ships carrying civilians. The US Navy had radio-controlled torpedoes, but the Germans could easily jam the signal by broadcasting on the same frequency. Lamarr had a breakthrough idea: what if you could make the radio signal jump from frequency to frequency, faster than the enemy could track it? Kevin: That’s frequency-hopping. The core principle of secure communication. But how do you get the transmitter in the torpedo and the receiver on the ship to jump frequencies in perfect sync? Michael: That was the problem she couldn't solve. But at that same dinner party was a composer named George Antheil. He was a notorious avant-garde figure, a bad boy of classical music. And he had once composed a piece called Ballet Mécanique that was supposed to be performed by, among other things, sixteen synchronized player pianos. Kevin: Sixteen player pianos all playing at once? That sounds like a nightmare. Michael: It was. The project was a famous failure because he could never get the piano rolls to synchronize perfectly. But in trying, he had spent years working on the problem of how to get two separate machines to execute a complex, pre-programmed sequence in perfect time. When Hedy Lamarr described her problem, a lightbulb went off in Antheil's head. Kevin: No way. Don't tell me. Michael: He told her: "We can synchronize the frequency changes using a mechanism like a player piano roll." They drew up the plans, got a patent in 1942, and offered it to the Navy. Kevin: And the Navy, of course, laughed them out of the room. "Thanks, movie star and weirdo composer, we'll take it from here." Michael: Pretty much. They filed it away, and the idea wasn't implemented until decades later. But that patent, born from a conversation between a movie star and a composer about a failed musical experiment, contained the seeds of spread-spectrum technology. It’s the technology that now powers your Wi-Fi, your Bluetooth, your GPS, and your cell phone. Kevin: That is the perfect story for this book. The desire to create a bizarre, unlistenable piece of music accidentally provides the solution for a world-changing military and civilian technology. That's the hummingbird effect in a nutshell.

Michael: And that's the central argument of Wonderland. We have this official history of progress that's a story of necessity—of war, politics, and survival. It’s a serious, sober story. But Steven Johnson shows us there's this shadow history running alongside it, a history of delight. The path to the computer, the Industrial Revolution, and modern wireless communication was paved with toys, pretty fabrics, and weird music. Kevin: It completely reframes what we should value as a society. We're so focused on utility, on return on investment, on practical applications. But maybe the most practical thing we can do is allow for impractical, joyful exploration. Because you never know where it might lead. Michael: The things we do just for the fun of it, just because they delight and surprise us, might be the most important things we do. Johnson quotes the designer Charles Eames, who said, "Toys and games are the prelude to serious ideas." Kevin: It makes you wonder what 'frivolous' things we're playing with today—video games, social media filters, AI art generators—might be the accidental seeds of the next century's biggest revolutions. We dismiss them as distractions, but maybe they're the workshops where the future is being prototyped. Michael: It’s a great question. And it’s a powerful lens to look at the world through. What if the most important innovations aren't happening in the boardroom, but in the playroom? Kevin: A much more hopeful way to think about the future. It suggests that our capacity for joy and wonder is our greatest resource. Michael: We'd love to hear what you think. What's a modern 'toy' or a 'frivolous' pursuit today that you think might have a serious, world-changing future? Let us know on our social channels. We're always curious to hear your ideas. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.