Technology and inventions are changing our lives, but we don’t always appreciate how they are literally changing us―the ways that we talk, see, and think. This S/DG will enjoy a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and what they’ve done to us humans.
Our text, The Alchemy of Us, examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they have shaped the human experience. We’ll read stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. Learn:
o how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep;
o how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas;
o how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and
o how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa.
Possible Presentations:
o Other materials or inventions that also greatly shaped human behavior
o The impressive background, TED Talk, books & articles of the author (or perhaps a Zoom interview)
o Expand on any of the inventors included in the book
o How inventions get patented
o What different countries do that encourages or discourages innovation
o How companies or governments use recent technologies to manipulate behavior
As we’ll see, as our often-forgotten inventors shaped materials, each invention had consequences, intended and sometimes unintended!
Common Reading: The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, by Ainissa Ramirez (April 2020)