My Turn: An Ode to American Innovation and Enterprise
No other era of history and no other region of the world can hold a candle to the volume and stupendousness of American innovation that has given the world just about everything that is of significance to contemporary life.
[Left] From automobiles to airplanes, just about all the paradigm-shifting technological developments of the recent century and beyond have Americans to thank for.
For this Fourth of July, I wanted to mull over something that is truly special about this nation that I have come to call home since over five decades.
Like legions of immigrants who arrived on these shores, whether during the era of Thomas Edison’s electric bulb or Henry Ford’s Model T, and down through the decades since then, I too was a gaping-mouth fan of American invention. After more than half a century of living here, that admiration for the sheer ingenuity of Americans and their ability to make it an enterprise of mass success—and more often than not, make a global impact with it—has only increased.
When talking about which country throughout history has had the greatest impact on the world in terms of paradigm-shifting contributions, it is not lost upon me that Anglophiles like to think that everything significant started in England: the English language, which supposedly “civilized” the world from Africa to India to the Americas, the parliamentary system of governance, the steam engine and the railways, and the judicial system (innocent until proven guilty!). They gave us cricket, and possibly soccer and tennis too. Of course, they also invented color prejudice.
The Wright brothers showed us that humans can indeed fly.
The Chinese gave us paper, gunpowder, and noodles. History can attest, we Indians too have given the world sublime gifts, not the least of which is an incomparable spiritual heritage in the form of the Puranas, Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The Ayurveda, Aryabhatta’s invention of the allimportant zero, the list goes on...
And if you are of the Hindutva bent of mind, you surely like to think Indians were into aviation and guided missiles several millennia before the Wright Brothers— our Puranas say so! And of course, Indians were pioneers in plastic surgery, as proudly proclaimed by our beloved PM Modi in none other than a session of the Indian Science Congress, citing the example of Lord Ganesha’s replaced elephant head (sic!).
But when it comes to contemporary material lives, no other nation even comes close to the massive roster of innovations, inventions, and contributions that Americans have made in just about every area of life— much of which we all take for granted. From Edison’s light bulb and gramophone to the Wright brothers’ airplane to telephone, television, computers, and IT.
I can’t imagine a gadget throughout human history that has been more consequential than the smartphone. From toddlers to octogenarians, and from peasants in remote Sahara to yuppies in New York City, everyone is hooked, many of them literally, to this genie-like device, which, by the way, has replaced dozens, if not hundreds of gadgets that came before it, in a single handheld piece.
The world has the late Steve Jobs—the quintessential mascot of American ingenuity and enterprise— to thank for it. The ubiquitous cell phone has not only become indispensable for life to function but has also become the go-to gadget for entertainment, news, sports, and so much more.
[Left] From toddlers to octogenarians, and from peasants in remote Sahara to yuppies in New York City, everyone is hooked on to the smartphone. The world has the late Steve Jobs—the quintessential mascot of American ingenuity and enterprise—to thank for it.
Big screen entertainment too, a la Hollywood, is America’s gift to the world. And who else would have dared to think of a 102-story building all the way back in 1934? Or a glitzy gambling mecca in Las Vegas?
Henry Ford and his Ford Motor Company gave the world the concept of assembly-line manufacturing, making it possible to fulfill the bold vision of a car for every family. This, then, revolutionized travel and transportation and ushered in the Automobile Age, which in turn provided the inspiration for the development of high-speed motor travel along a web of freeways of hundreds of miles, complete with its accompanying infrastructure of motels, gas stations, truck stops, and more.
The revolution in communications and information technology are another example of America’s prodigious ability to take technological breakthroughs to the masses—from the early days of Hollerith and card punching systems to the development of the microchip capable of storing tons of data in a thimble. Starting with the iconic IBM, American companies like Microsoft, and now Google, have become household names the world over.
Thanks to Google and other search engines, we have all the information we need with a click of a button, allowing us to dispense with big libraries and stacks of books and other documents. Letter writing has given way to e-mail, where American companies have led the way as well, starting from the days of AOL and Yahoo to Gmail and Outlook now.
Social media, the new frontier, has also been driven by Facebook and Twitter, American companies with a massive global influence.
The quest for how technology can enhance our material lives is relentless in this country. We can order groceries and other merchandise through the computers and get it delivered to our doorsteps. One dreads to think where we would have been if the Covid-19 pandemic had hit us twenty years earlier, when much of these developments were not yet in place.
American universities like Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and Columbia have over the years been fountainheads of innovative thinking and have been in the forefront of pathbreaking research and developments.
The nation surpasses all others by a huge margin when it comes to the number of Nobel Prize winners. Interestingly, it is a testament to the fertile environment of America that many of these Nobel laureates who were of Indian origin—Har Gobind Khorana (Medicine), Subramanyam Chandrasekhar (Physics), Venkataraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry) and Abhijit Banerjee (Economics)—did a major portion of their work after coming to this country and were U.S. citizens when they got the prize. Bangladeshi economist Mohammed Yunus, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, also did a major part of his work in the U.S.
[Right] America–the global trendsetter of popular culture!
Americans, I am sure, were the first to think of fast food and franchises—McDonald’s was such a seminal idea followed by other chains like Burger King and KFC. Starbucks not only got Americans used to paying $5 per cup of coffee, but also managed to establish a presence in Europe, the very place that popularized cappuccinos and expressos around the world in the first place!
And who else could have thought of exploiting a commercial angle to amour and bring about Valentine’s Day—or to parental relationships, giving us Father’s Day and Mother’s Day? Thank God (or thank American capitalists!) that at least twice a year, children are reminded of their parents. Makes one really wonder what today’s world would have been like without the last 150 years of American innovation!
A retired civil engineer based in Concord, California, Partha Sircar enjoys freelance writing. He can be reached by email at psircar@yahoo.com.
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