Once you get to the why, the story has to widen and tighten at the same time: to the long duree of urban development, or the microscopic tight focus of bacterial life cycles, These are causes, too. You can tell the story of the Broad Street outbreak on the scale of a few human human lives, people drinking water from the a pump, getting sick and dying over a few weeks, but in telling the story that way, you limit its perspective, limits its ability to convey a fair account of what really happened. The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience, both temporal and spatial. Steven Johnson is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Enemy of All Mankind, Farsighted, Wonderland, How We Got to Now, Where Good Ideas Come From, The Invention of Air, The Ghost Map, and Everything Bad Is Good for You. “2Do not mistake these multiple trends-the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior-for mere historical background.
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