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For example, the code of the Mesopotamian city of Eshnunna in the early second millennium B.C., developed a century before the more famous code of Hammurabi, left no doubt what would happen if you punched a man in the face: a fine of 10 shekels of silver (a bargain compared with the levy for biting off his nose, which would cost 60). As long as people could go about their business without fear of getting their noses bitten off, the social brain could productively throb.
As distant cities became linked through commerce (much of it orchestrated by written contract), culture acquired a kind of disaster insurance. Any valuable meme--the concept of the chariot or of coins--would spread so fast from city to city that it could survive any catastrophes that afflicted its birthplace. The world's data-processing system was getting better at making backup copies.
That's why so much Roman culture survived the disintegration of the Western Empire. The most prolific memes had long since spread to Byzantium if not beyond, and would keep replicating themselves even as Western Europe struggled to regroup. Thus the astrolabe would eventually be reintroduced to the area via Islamic culture, which thrived during the early Middle Ages. Meanwhile, in Asia, key memes would arise--the spinning wheel, even printing--and some would migrate all the way to Europe.
The movable-type printing press, up and running in Europe by the mid-15th century, was by far the most Internet-like technology in history. Eventually, it would convey detailed news of inventions, allowing people in distant lands who would never meet to collaborate, in effect, on new technologies. "James Watt's steam engine" was actually lots of people's steam engine, including the Frenchman who had first shown that steam could move a piston.
The economic historian Joel Mokyr, stressing this sort of international synergy, has attributed Europe's Industrial Revolution to "chains of inspiration" by which one idea sparked another. But, as we've seen, chains of inspiration had been vital to the whole history of technical advance, even the glacial process by which the stone flake inspired the inventor of the stone knife. What was new was how fast the chains were being forged, even across great distances.
In the early 19th century, the coming of the railroad train further sped things up. Paired with increasingly smooth local postal service, the train meant that people thousands of miles apart were separated by only days. With chains of inspiration sprouting wildly, the multinational technical community became an almost unified consciousness. Increasingly, good ideas were "in the air."
Witness how often the same basic innovation was made independently by different people in different places at roughly the same time. And witness--as testament to the impetus behind easing communication--how often those independent breakthroughs were in information technology itself: the telegraph (Charles Wheatstone and Samuel F.B. Morse, 1837); color photography (Charles Cros and Louis Ducos du Hauron, 1868); the phonograph (Charles Cros--again!--and Thomas Edison, 1877); the telephone (Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell, 1876)--and so on, all the way up to the microchip (Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce, 1958).