Ceilidh

Michael Zey
futurist3000@aol.com

Charles Goodyear was the very opposite of the left's stereotype of the grasping American capitalist. A Dickensian hero going nobly into a world of cynics and thieves, he was typical of many innovators in America's advance. More of them were (and are) fired by an ambition to be remembered for achieving something worthwhile than for making money. The Google IPO with its overtones of moral superiority was seen as the latest oddity out of California, but the Google boys were in a long tradition. Amadeo P. Giannini, innovator of popular banking and progenitor of the Bank of America, went to great lengths to avoid leaving money. "No man owns a fortune," he said, "It owns him." The notebooks of Elisha Otis are an elevation in themselves for the moral epigrams he jotted down among sketches of machines and elevator platforms. "Machines," he wrote, "are the tools of liberty."

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Copyright (c) 2004, Dow Jones & Company Inc. Reproduced with permission of copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

The latest crop of headlines about insurance malfeasance brings yet more odium to the image of the American businessman, already spattered with mud from Enron and Tyco. Wrongdoers who prey on public credulity deserve a taste of the truncheon and the obloquy that goes with it, but in the process the stunning achievements of American business are being forgotten. There is actually so much more to celebrate than prosecute since the U.S. has been -- and remains -- the source of most of the innovations that created our modern world, and many of them have sprung from a desire to serve rather than steal.

I challenge anyone to get through a day without reliance on an innovation that was developed by an American. Rutgers University, which keeps the notebooks of Thomas Edison, has just published a volume of his papers on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of his invention (on Oct. 22, 1879) of the high-resistance incandescent light bulb (after 3,000 failed experiments).

The bulb was only the beginning. The innovator has to bring the brainwave to market, and that, more than invention, is the distinctive characteristic of America. In less than three years, Edison had, by September 1882, built a central power station in a dilapidated warehouse he found at 255-257 Pearl Street and illuminated 85 premises in lower Manhattan. That means he'd installed the labor and machinery to produce vacuum bulbs in quantity; designed and manufactured his own dynamos economically to convert steam power to electrical energy; ensured an even flow of current; connected a 14-mile network of underground wiring; insulated the wiring against moisture and electrical shocks; designed commercially efficient motors to use electricity in daylight hours for elevators, printing presses, lathes, fans and the like; designed and installed meters to measure individual consumption; and invented and manufactured switches, sockets, fuses, distributing boxes and lamp holders. For all this, he had to win the approval of Tammany Hall, whose aldermen were less turned on by illumination than the champagne banquet he threw for them. He put up most of the capital himself and marketed electricity against opposition from aggressive gas companies. What enterprise! What courage!

Edison lit the world, expensively at first. But it was his assistant, Samuel Insull, a naturalized American and business genius in his own right, who some years later in Chicago found the way to make electricity prices fall over six decades, an incalculable boon to life and work.

So much might be obvious, as obvious as the American innovations of the airplane and the PC, jeans and the cellphone, bio-tech and the sewing machine, TV (and 24-hour news) and the search engine, but we forget the invisible innovations. A day without rubber would be a day where nothing works. No shower, light, clean clothes; nothing unspoiled in the fridge; no shoes, cars, trains, planes; no TV, no radio, no computer, no phones; yet we owe this material not to a research lab, still less government, but to a Yankee tinkerer who hadn't the faintest idea of the organic chemistry he was meddling with to convert useless raw rubber to practical use.

Charles Goodyear was the very opposite of the left's stereotype of the grasping American capitalist. A Dickensian hero going nobly into a world of cynics and thieves, he was typical of many innovators in America's advance. More of them were (and are) fired by an ambition to be remembered for achieving something worthwhile than for making money. The Google IPO with its overtones of moral superiority was seen as the latest oddity out of California, but the Google boys were in a long tradition. Amadeo P. Giannini, innovator of popular banking and progenitor of the Bank of America, went to great lengths to avoid leaving money. "No man owns a fortune," he said, "It owns him." The notebooks of Elisha Otis are an elevation in themselves for the moral epigrams he jotted down among sketches of machines and elevator platforms. "Machines," he wrote, "are the tools of liberty."

It is a truth not universally acknowledged. Here is a curious fact of American culture, supposedly so obsessed with business. The Founding Fathers promised life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and there have been thousands of presidential biographies and histories tracing the political struggles to honor those ideals. But none of the promises could have been honored without the business innovators who have had nothing like the same attention. You cannot much pursue happiness if you are starving, or unable to move your family to a better place, or protect it along the way, or communicate.

Politicians could make promises, but while government could provide the framework of freedom it could not aspire to deliver these necessities. We owe them to men like Cyrus McCormick (the reaper), Robert Fulton (steamboat), Theodore Judah (transcontinental railway), Lewis Tappan (credit rating), Sam Colt (six-gun), and Samuel Morse (telegraph). McCormick's invention, and then his revolutionary buy-on- credit marketing, enabled thousands of farmers to harvest the Great Plains and feed the world. He also freed labor for the industrial revolution and the preservation of the Union. And so has our progress continued down to this day with the founding of the biotech industry by Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and the software industry made possible by the operating system for PCs from the unsung Gary Kildall.

Innovation will continue in America. It is in the nation's DNA. But if the scope of it is not to ebb in the face of global competition -- in large part the consequence of Malcom Maclean's innovation of container shipping -- we must honor more the risk-takers who really get things done.

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Sir Harold is the author of "They Made America," just published by Little Brown.

(See related letter: "Letters to the Editor: Beneficial Creations Of Our Government" -- WSJ Nov. 4, 2004)