What we think of as the modern world was born not in the twentieth century but in the technological innovations of the nineteenth century. Almost everything that is quintessentially modern—rapid transportation and communication, entrepreneurship and the market economy, crowded urban centers, the primacy of the individual, the mastery of nature—began in the nineteenth century. Even that icon of modernity, the computer, grew out of two nineteenth-century devices, the punch card system of Joseph Jacquard (1752-1834) and the analytical engine of Charles Babbage (1791-1871).

Copernicus (1473-1543) can be considered the ancestor of nineteenth-century technology because, with his contention that Earth revolves around the Sun, he founded the scientific revolution. His theory was revolutionary because it engendered a new way of thinking: the belief that humans could master nature through careful observation, systematic experimentation, and determined problem solving. The relationship...