They Made America

"They Made America" has the dimensions, heft and plethora of illustrations and photographs to be a coffe table book. Should copies actually end up on coffee tables all the better, since more people will be exposed to this carefully researched and truly exciting history of the application of hard-won practical knowledge across two hundred years of the American landscape. Make no mistake, however -- this book is to be read and considered, not just glanced through. To the casual observer the countless technologies we use every day seem to be forgone conclusions to the specific equations of research and manufacturing. This is rarely the case. By the time a technology reaches a consumer level it is often decades old. Evans, with his reasearch assistants, skillfully traces the convoluted paths not only of single inventors, but how those paths are further twisted with the paths of other inventors. Political histories tend to focus on and mythologize the bewigged fops. Technical histories more often display the daily grime of how things actually happened. This is what Evans has accomplished. As with any listing of top people, Evans' is subjective, ultimately. As example, Howard Hughes made only a secondary list, receiving one paragraph. Evans' selections pay off, though. Not so much with the names we know, but in stories of people we've never heard of who nevertheless changed the course of events, directly affecting our lives today. I had never heard of Edwin Drake, to name but one. A disabled retired rail car conductor with no engineering experince, Drake figured out how to drill for oil. Neither had I known of Amadeo Peter Giannini, the son of young Italian immigrants. He brought banking to common men, rescuing them from loan sharks. He even established branches of his Bank of America in Japanese internment camps during WW II. As Evans points out initially, adding further twists to the history of American technology, and bringing into question the history we learn in high school, most of the people he chose were not inventors so much as innovators. Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat. Issac Singer did not invent the sewing machine. What these two men DID do was put together all the parts in a practical way. Just as important, this book is the story of people and families coming to America and becoming or raising Americans, leaving behind the suffocating ways of ancient cultures. In the opening pages Evans offers a visual riddle. From one of those grim photographs of the late 1800s, picturing two forlorn boys and several glum men, save for two, he asks the reader to pick out the innovative genius. One of the two seems to be staring into the distance, perhaps thinking about his dinner. The other, though, is so clearly staring into the future. Finally, a word to film and TV producers. These are great stories, many of them virtual outlines for scripts. Take a look.

They Made America contains biographies of nearly 50 innovators who changed the course of American history. Rather than cover inventors, Evan focuses on people who popularized existing inventions - innovators. After all if an invention never becomes popular then it has little effect on the course of history. John Fitch invented the steam engine, but Robert Fulton who you may remember from history class was the first to start a large shipping company using the technology. The people Evans discusses have a wide range of backgrounds. For example immigrant Ida Rosenthal worked out of her home as a seamstress. She began to sow reinforced dresses meant to be worn without corsets. Customers asked for separated reinforcement as an undergarment for other dresses. Eventually demand was so high that she hired more seamstresses and focused on producing only her most popular item - the bra. Ted Turner was of course a colorful character who inherited a regional billboard company and worked his way up to founding CNN, an around the clock news channel updated continuously. The biographies also come from all time periods of American History: Part 1 covers history up to the War Between the States, Part 2 covers around 1870 to the very recent past (as the search engines mentioned in the title suggest). I was amazed to find out that the author, Evans, is British. He was drawn to study innovation in America from seeing pragmatism and the effect the country has had on modern history. This is a neat book, and good to look through. (The actual dimensions of the book are huge, but only about 10 pages are devoted to each biography so it is easy to read in shorter sections.) History buffs, potential entrepreneurs and libraries from college to grade school would benefit from it.

Author Harold Evans has chronicled American history in a most personalized way, by spotlighting seventy innovators driven by the American spirit to be remembered for their particular contributions to our everyday lives. Divided into three parts and filled with hundreds of photographs and illustrations, this coffee table book is an ideal introduction to the people, both the famous and the forgotten, who have inspired the rest of us to think beyond our self-imposed boundaries and capitalize on ideas that would benefit the greater good. What Evans does very well in his incisive narrative is show how these ideas are not exclusive to any specific group or place and how they often came about by accident or through circumstances they could have never been foreseen. The common thread is a faith in technology in its earliest incarnation when the early settlers devised windmills as a way of getting water on the Great Plains to the latest trends with the electronic whiz kids of the Internet. Even more importantly, the author traces how most of these innovators have time and again proved to be "democratizers", driven not by greed but by an ambition to be remembered. In aggregate, these innovators translated the nation's political ideals into economic reality. Part One covers our history up to the Civil War, and the inventions one remembers from the social studies class of our youth are covered here - the cotton gin, the Colt revolver, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the bicycle - but also some surprising things like blue jeans and the credit rating. The emergence of electricity and its subsequent predominance in our lives are covered in Part Two, when Edison indeed invented the incandescent bulb, as well as the "kinetoscope", an early motion picture projector. Of course, the Wright brothers and Henry Ford are in this section for obvious reasons, but so are those responsible for plastic, gas masks, Weight Watchers, Walt Disney Enterprises and even Barbie dolls. Probably the most interesting portion is Part Three, which covers the Digital Age with the personal computer revolution fathered by DRI's Gary Kildall and the recognition of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for commoditizing PCs into "the software equivalent of fast food". The emergence of biotechnology is covered here, as is Ted Turner's introduction of "24-hour electronic news", Joan Cooney's Sesame Street, hip-hop, eBay, and Google. Evans makes some unsurprising conclusions - persistence is a definite requirement as is a "make it work" mentality, and many ended up in debt or destitute in the process. There is apparently no character requirement as several were not particularly moral characters and abrasive to those who hard to work with them. But they delivered...and Evans enthusiastically celebrates their creative spirits. This is a terrifically educational book for not only adults but also children as a way to inspire them to tap into their own ideas.

This book is large (9 x 11, 496 pages) and heavy. I can barely lift it with one hand. There are 500 illustrations, many in color, almost one on every page. The accomplishments of 70 innovators are included, such as Morse, Singer, Eastman, Ford, Noyce, Land, Watson, etc. Since I work with computers, I was interested that my former boss, Gary Kildall, is listed as the true founder of the personal computer revolution. His surprising story took 16 pages, IBM and Watson got 19 pages, Edison, 21 pages. This book would make a great Christmas gift. A PBS series follows in November.

They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine, by Harold Evans with Gail Buckland and David Lefer. The title of this innovative book describes the essence of the American character: that undaunted, entrepreneurial, practical, and above all productive spirit. Evans distinguishes between invention and innovation. Inventions are many, he argues, but they do not always result in innovations, which change the way we live. The book is replete with examples of original inventions which would have been destined for the wastebins of history had it not been for innovators who recognized, and developed, their potential. The chapter on Raymond Damadian and the development of the MRI is especially impressive. The book is remarkable for its breadth and depth of detail. Evans, former editor of The London Times and author, most recently, of The American Century, was aided in this enterprise by Gail Buckland, a distinguished photographic historian, and David Lefer, an investigative journalist.