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Before smart missiles and iPhones, electronic devices choked on the hefty tubes required to connect disparate transistors. Then, in 1959, an engineer from Kansas named John St. Clair Kilby figured out how to put all the parts of a circuit on a small slab of impure silicone. Enter the microchip. Everything was compressed, and the technological world exploded — like so much else, after 1959.
In his recently-published book, "1959: The Year Everything Changed," Fred Kaplan describes this moment in time as filled with possibility, teetering on the edge of a new decade, suffocated by the old one. The chronology of the year drives his narrative. He starts each chapter with a date, then draws contextual loops with facts and characters, ending where he started, but with fresh insight.
For example, the chip. He beings that chapter with the trade show on March, 1959 where Texas Instruments first introduced the integrated circuit. Then he backtracks, filling in details about Kilby’s career and the technological history of hulking computers. He describes the chips’ anticlimactic reception at first, then explains how revolutionary they became when mass produced. Finally, he wraps it up, foreshadows the internet, and moves to the next chapter, which is about jazz.
Kaplan runs the reader through a gauntlet of jazz bands, comedians, politicians and poets in his attempt to argue that the events of 1959 resulted from the pressure of a repressive decade and set the stage for the rest of American history. You might be able to make the same argument for any year, but Kaplan has strong evidence that it’s especially true for this one.
The book is packed with a blur of dates and names. You see Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce drink themselves indifferent, then dead. You see Planned Parenthood bubble out of the passionate campaign of a wealthy woman and righteous doctors. You understand the dark side of progress — at the time, the looming, metallic threat of nuclear war.
Kaplan rips through the calendar and relevant characters so fast that it feels like the dates and proper nouns are more for the music of the names than the chance that you’ll remember them. But maybe that’s the point — to highlight that there really was something frantic and powerful in the period of time represented by those four odd numbers squashed together. After all, the force of it guided people in a segregated, sham-puritanical country to creep from their bomb shelters, rub their eyes, and — for better or for worse — start to change the world.
