The American genius is a unique one. As befits a nation of immigrants, America has excelled at taking ideas from anywhere and transforming them into the practical, startling, often unexpectedly beautiful creations that have shaped our world.
We are a nation of tinkerers, never content to leave a thing alone. Born inventors, researchers, adventurers, we keep seeking what’s next, what’s better, what’s more fun, what will make more money. As the first country to exist wholly in the modern age, we have also had to invent and constantly reinvent ourselves—our institutions, our customs, even our definition of who is an American, and what that means.
These are the stories of some of the best things that we’ve taken up—who did them, how they were done, what they meant. The list is an eclectic one, and highly subjective, moving freely from the skyscraper to the subway, the safety elevator to the space elevator, the Pennsylvania rifle to the video game. They include many of our most important and famous innovations, such as the telephone, the transistor, and the farm combine, as well as more pedestrian inventions that nonetheless transformed daily life for millions: the sewing machine, air-conditioning, the electric guitar—all the way down to the humble safety pin.
Here you will find many things that aren’t generally included in books about inventions: blues and jazz, our greatest cities, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Why not? They were invented by people just as much as anything else in this book, and they are constantly cited by others as some of our greatest creations.
Here, as well, are inventions whose utility ended years ago, but that changed the world in their day, such as the telegraph, or the Yankee clipper. Inventions that have declined in importance, such as dried blood plasma, but may yet again play a crucial role in the near future. Innovations that were simply, stunningly beautiful, such as the streamlined automobiles, planes, and trains of the 1930s—and which also represented a gigantic step forward in technological research and application.
And here, too, you will find a glimpse of an equally dazzling future that is already beginning to emerge. Will we zip around in flying cars—or driverless ones? Build prosthetics that work better than our arms and legs? Climb into space on a single cable the thickness of a thread? The answers are likely to be as amazing as all the earlier creations here first seemed when they came into being.
The inventions in this book are inextricably linked to the American experiment. They were inspired, shaped, and made possible by the character of our country.
This is not to say that Americans invented everything. Far from it. Throughout history, very little was invented solely in one nation or by one person working alone. The “American” inventions cited here were inspired by ideas, theories, and prototypes going all the way back to the toga-cleaning facilities of ancient Greece and Rome; the ninth-century printing presses of China, Korea, and Japan; even the iron-chain suspension bridges thrown across the chasms of the Himalayas by a Buddhist saint in 1430.
The Western world at the outset of the industrial age was a particular hotbed of invention. New discoveries and their applications poured out of Europe and, especially, Great Britain, and credit often remains disputed to this day. To peruse the Internet is to gain the idea that everything in the world was invented by the English, which is to say, a Scotsman.
The fact is that many of the inventions in this book were indeed first conceived of, or even first made a working reality, in other countries, and to the extent that space allows, they are freely credited here. Others were invented at virtually the same time in America as they were elsewhere, with the advances in each nation sometimes feeding off one another.
In every case, though, each one of these devices, structures, remedies, systems, styles, enterprises, and entertainments were fully realized in America. If they were not wholly invented in the United States, it was here that they were made commercially viable, widespread, affordable, beloved, indispensable.
More important than whether Americans came up with everything first is the fact that we were once, at least, able and willing to learn from others. To take what was dreamed up anywhere around the world and improve on it. (Or even, in the case of magnetic tape recording, cart the basic idea off as a spoil of war.)
What were some of the other keys to our inventiveness?
Freedom. Yes, you did build that. What comes across at every turn in studying the history of American innovation is that this is what free men (and women) can do when afforded the liberty to pursue whatever they wish. Whether it’s the genius of an Alexander Graham Bell, the dogged persistence of a Thomas Edison, the entrepreneurship of an Andrew Carnegie or a Henry Ford, the courage of a Walter Reed, or even the sheer, exasperating eccentricity of a Walter Hunt, the value of the individual shines through.
We all built that. Beyond the obvious heroes, I have tried here to demonstrate how much we owe to all the “ordinary” people who made our progress a reality. The generations of anonymous pioneers who gave us the Conestoga wagon, and then adapted it into the prairie schooner. The trail of craftsmen along the eighteenth-century frontier who perfected and built the Pennsylvania rifle. The nameless Irish navvies who dug out the Erie Canal by hand; the black and white sandhogs who looked death in the face every day as they carved out the tunnels beneath New York’s rivers.
Their contributions, and those of countless others, were as valuable as anyone’s in making us all that we are and giving us all that we have.
Government matters. Rugged individualism aside, the history of American invention shows again and again that government—which in a democracy, again, means all of us—is vital. It was government that set the rules, with patent law that settled what otherwise would have been interminable legal battles over inventions from the cotton gin to the automobile; that rescued countless small inventors, such as Philo Farnsworth, inventor of electronic television, and Elias Howe, of sewing machine fame, from predatory forces that would have stolen their creations; that set up antitrust regulations, and in so doing spurred the invention of everything from the modern oil rig to Silicon Valley; that so often put up the cash to sponsor projects from the Trancontinental Railroad to the space race, the telegraph to the Hoover Dam; that provided the money for a first-class public education system and countless research grants and laboratories; that has freely “picked winners,” right down to Abe Lincoln testing a repeating rifle himself on the Washington Mall during the Civil War.
Immigration is crucial. Over and over, in researching this book, I was struck by just how much of America was made by immigrants. Many of these, of course, were those anonymous men and women who did the hard work of hauling and digging, riveting and welding. But beyond arm and back, so many contributed their brains, as well. What would America have been without them? Not just the more famous ones such as Bell, Carnegie, or A. P. Giannini, but also Carl Breer, son of a German immigrant, who led a revolution in car design; or Richard Hoe, son of an English immigrant printer, who gave us the rotary press; or Jacob Youphes and Loeb Strauss, two young Jewish men who came to America, changed their names to Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss, and gave us blue jeans.
For many, many years, we have drawn the best and the brightest from nations all around the globe. America’s lifeblood is immigration, and to ever shut it off would be fatal.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Readers will find among our inventors a relatively small proportion of women and people of color. This is because both were prevented for many years from filing patents by law, and then by social custom and persecution.
How many enslaved African Americans were deprived of the fruits of their labor for things they actually invented? How many women saw their achievements purloined by husbands, fathers, bosses? We shall never know, but it is instructive to note that the number of patents won by women today is over seven times the number they earned a hundred
years ago.
Even denied so many outlets for so very many years for their advancement and education, African Americans invented everything from a blood plasma system to a revolutionary advance in removing cataracts—not to mention what much of the world considers to be the very greatest of American accomplishments, our music, blues and jazz.
It takes a village. Again and again, bringing brilliant and talented people together produces magic.
This is true not just in a purely academic setting, though American colleges and universities have made myriad contributions to the commonwealth. From Edison’s workshops and the Volta Laboratory down through Bell Labs, the NASA center at Huntsville, Alabama, and Silicon Valley, concentrations of all sorts of smart people have created vital nodes of creation and commerce. Proximity matters.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about American ingenuity is, well, how many different ways we’ve invented to invent things. Take the basic elements of individual initiative, collaboration, education, government funding, venture capitalism, immigration, innovation, hard work, obstinacy, obsession, persistence, irrational optimism, and the occasional earth-shaking epiphany, and mix them together in any number of different ways. It all works, providing us with a sort of built-in redundancy to our great experiment in democracy. And as we continue, I am sure that we will find still more ways to make it work.
In the meantime, here it is to explore, presented, I hope, in a clear and easily comprehensible manner. Presented, as well, on a human scale, and through the works, the hopes, and the dreams of the sort of regular human beings who together can do anything. This is their story. ★