American History Revised (14 page)

It is a day easy to remember: 1857, September 11.

1895
The Commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office proposed to Congress that the Patent Office be closed down. His reasoning? All the great inventions had already been made. Preposterous? Actually he had a point:

• The period from the end of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century was the “Golden Age of Invention,” captured very well by the greatest world’s fair of all time, the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition. During this thirty-five-year period the U.S. Patent Office issued more than half a million patents. This was the era of the telephone, the camera, the sewing machine, the typewriter, the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the motor-propelled people mover. Steam and electricity replaced human labor, wood, and iron. Crude oil and petroleum came into being. Railroads connected North to South and East to West, heralding an unprecedented age of expansionism and self-confidence.
  

• When new inventions came along, people couldn’t possibly imagine what to do with them. A century ago, many thought a major use of the telephone would be listening to opera in their homes.
  

What the patent commissioner overlooked was the importance of “innovation”—from which almost all “inventions” come. The American experience is replete with examples of ingenuity and creative inventiveness. In the American Revolution, for example, the basic weapon was the simple musket. Only it wasn’t so simple. The musket was a handmade weapon, requiring “months for skilled artisans to fashion into a working weapon.” Whenever a part broke or malfunctioned—a common occurrence—the musket had to be sent back to the shop and completely rebuilt (every part had to be individually forged and fitted until it worked). To equip an army of ten thousand men, it took years to accumulate enough firearms, plus thousands of armorers to perform the necessary maintenance and repairs once the fighting started. The British Army had a much larger force than did the colonists during the American Revolution, but it also had a major problem: a ten-year backlog of repairs for muskets. Imagine taking your gun into a shop for repairs and hearing the proprietor say to come back in a decade, it should be ready then. No wonder the British packed up their bags and went back home.

In 1798 the U.S. War Department issued a request for ten thousand muskets. Eli Whitney, mired in litigation over his cotton gin, saw a way out of his financial troubles and put in the low bid. He had never made guns before. Lacking craftsmen like the traditional gun manufacturers, he had no choice but to try to find ways to simplify the manufacturing process for nonskilled
workers. He never came up with a perfect method, and finally delivered the muskets only in 1809, but he set in process what has become the Holy Grail of manufacturing.

America’s greatest commercial innovation is interchangeable parts. It is the key to the production of clocks, cutlery, tools, hardware, sewing machines, printing equipment, agricultural implements, bicycles, electrical equipment, conveyors, elevators, automobiles, and computers. No one brilliant scientist invented it, no one exclaimed “Eureka!” It is the result of thousands of American tinkerers trying to simplify and make things better. The process continues. Nowadays the modern parallel to gun manufacture is the software industry, where handcrafted software is giving way to software created and assembled from components.

1899
One evening after dinner, Elbert Hubbard sat down at his typewriter and in an hour banged out a 1,500-word book that became the number-one bestseller in American history.

The day after the book was published, Hubbard got a telegram from the president of the New York Central Railroad, asking for 100,000 copies. The buyer subsequently increased his order to 500,000. The book then spread by word of mouth, was reprinted in more than two hundred magazines and newspapers, and got translated into thirty-seven languages. A copy of the book was distributed to every railroad employee in Russia. During the 1904 war between Russia and Japan, copies fell into the hands of the Japanese, who concluded “it must be a good thing,” and so, by command of the emperor himself, it was given to every person in the Japanese government and military. Over the next ten years
A Message to Garcia
became the book to sell the most copies ever during the lifetime of the author. Over the next several decades, according to the Grolier Electronic Encyclopedia, it became the fifth most widely distributed book of all time (after the Bible, Mao’s
Quotations
, Noah Webster’s
American Spelling Book
, and Jehovah’s Witnesses’
The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life).

A Message to Garcia
sold more than 40 million copies and countless reprints, and influenced the attitudes of a generation of Americans. The book’s message: the importance of character. The hero, asked to perform a dangerous mission and deliver a message to a general hiding in the woods of Cuba, did his duty: he did not ask where Garcia was, who he was, what the message was, or “why me?” He simply delivered the message.

Today the book is totally forgotten because it picked the wrong war: the Spanish-American War. Other great wartime books that swept the country and galvanized public opinion—Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
, Edward Everett Hale’s
The Man Without a
Country
, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
—picked more significant wars.

But more important, the book is forgotten because times are different: character is not popular nowadays; personality is. Observes one historian, “At the same time that the number of books emphasizing character has declined, the number emphasizing personality has soared.” In the early 1900s, people placed great emphasis on proper attitude. “My heart goes out,”
A Message to Garcia
concludes, “to the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it….Civilization is one long, anxious search for such individuals.”

It still is. (Because the book is so short—a four-page pamphlet, really—curious readers can find it on the Internet.) In the words of one
Amazon.com
reviewer, the book “is a quick read and reminder that the world is in desperate need of people who spend less time complaining, pondering, posturing, posing, back-stabbing, you name it … but actually get things done.”

1900
Today, as we recoil from the incredible greed of Enron, we should remember the three wizards of electricity
who gave us a great gift, sacrificed quick riches for their dream, and treated their employees well. They set a standard for modern-day corporate behavior.

Mission accomplished: the messenger, with General Garcia

Electricity is one of those modern-day conveniences we take for granted. (Electricity as the primary source of lighting for U.S. households skyrocketed from 3 percent in 1900 to 35 percent in 1920 to 79 percent in 1940 to 99 percent in 1960.) But imagine yourself during a perpetual blackout, wandering from room to room holding a candle or a flashlight, lacking the juice that makes possible the computer, the TV, the refrigerator, the air conditioner, the elevator … And to whom do we owe this great gift? Not to the well-known Thomas Edison—he developed a technology that never caught on. Our debt is to three men, the first a dreamer who invented the winning technology, the second an industrial entrepreneur who backed the dreamer and won “the war of the currents,” and the third a business tycoon who developed the means to distribute electricity cheaply. All of them plowed all their wealth back into their businesses to keep growing. In so doing, they overextended themselves and lost their companies to their creditors; two of them died penniless.

“Now, my friends, I will make you some daylight.” And with that, he would press a switch and the room would be flooded with electronic rays penetrating his body and lighting up the entire room, leaving onlookers spellbound. To this day, nobody dares replicate this feat.

During the 1890s and early 1900s, when the most exciting technology of the day was electricity, the foremost physicist was Nikola Tesla, father of alternating current, the basis of today’s electricity distribution system. He was one of the most famous men in the world, a celebrity as well as a scientist. Living in high style in New York, eating lunch every day at his personal table at the Waldorf-Astoria, entertaining such luminaries as Mark Twain, J. P. Morgan, and William K. Vanderbilt, Nikola Tesla made front-page newspaper copy. As far away as London, people were talking about the New Wizard of the West—and they weren’t talking about Thomas Edison.

At a critical moment in his career, Tesla threw it all away in pursuit of his dream. “Mr. Westinghouse,” he said, “you will save your company so that you can develop my inventions.” And with that, he tore up his contract for royalties for alternating current that would have made him a multimillionaire many times over. He paid the price. Always running around trying to finance his myriad inventions, he never fulfilled his potential and died, lonely and penniless, in a hotel room forty years later.

“Tesla is a man who is always going to do something,” grumbled Edison. Certainly there was no greater innovator than Edison, a man who developed a huge research laboratory
turning out hundreds of products. But science depends on theory as well as innovation, and there was no better theoretician than Tesla. As every patent lawyer knows, there is very little new under the sun; almost every patent is the practical implementation of dreams publicized by earlier, unsuccessful inventors. Hence the common saying among patent-seekers: “Our ancestors were very dishonest. They stole all our best inventions.” Nikola Tesla was such an ancestor, the ultimate dreamer whose prodigious scientific experiments form the basis of modern-day radar, tube lighting, X-rays, MRI, robotics, rocket engines, solar energy, and Star Wars. He had 111 U.S. patents and more than seven hundred worldwide.