The Light of Day

The country that invented itself
KeithHandy posted in Lists on July 3rd, 2007

As with many Americans, there were gaping holes in my education, and history was a particularly weak subject of mine… so take it with a grain of salt when I suggest that America is a super-sized “man who invented himself”, or, the country that invented itself. You could criticize me here for reffing a song written by one Brit about another Brit, when England is the very country we’re celebrating our independence from (an inconvenient detail to mention these days). Of course, as George Carlin observed, “When you get right down to it, we’re Europe Junior.” Besides that, though, I think the Barrett analogy fits: we came over wild-eyed, passionate, and full of original ideas, overdosed on the fruits of our own brilliance, and became fat, apathetic, and schizophrenic… and now our own president stares at the world blankly while strumming the same chord over and over.

Before you fire off the hate mail, I realize that’s not the whole picture. America is about the people, and I’ll flat out admit I’m no good at talking about people; in fact, I can probably tell our story much better by talking about our things. So let’s look at a much-abbreviated list of American inventions, care of a quick Wikipedia search. In general, I picked the ones that had some emotional ring, be it “thank god”, “what have we done?”, or as in most cases, a combination of both:

• 1806: Coffee pot
• 1833: Sewing machine
• 1836: Revolver (the gun, not the album)
• 1837: Power tools
• 1843: Mechanical refrigerator (I assume this means “refrigerator” in general?)
• 1860: Repeating rifle
• 1863: Roller skates
• 1867: Barbed wire
• 1876: Telephone
• 1879: Light bulb
• 1882: Electric fan (gimme that and the coffee pot, and I’m all set!)
• 1887: “Platter” record (as opposed to cylinders)
• 1891: Escalator
• 1891: Motion picture camera
• 1902: Air conditioner
• 1903: Powered airplane
• 1906: Assembly line
• 1929: Frozen food
• 1934: Television
• 1945: Microwave oven (don’t watch the food cook!)
• 1945: Atomic bomb
• 1959: Integrated circuit
• 1960: Laser
• 1964: Operating system
• 1965: Minicomputer
• 1974: Product barcode (I remember these being spoofed by MAD Magazine when they first became widespread)
• 1983: Internet (the first TCP/IP-wide area network)
• 1988: Graphical user interface

…among many others. It’s likely that your eyes scanned over the list fairly quickly — it has more impact if you take a few seconds to register each item visually and ponder its subtexts, implications, motives, and long term (and indirect) effects — or better yet, read the full Wikipedia entry. I left out the medical and space-travel innovations because, important as they are, they don’t greet us in our day to day routines. So I don’t know what my rationale is for leaving weapons in; maybe because they look satisfyingly sinister lumped in with the other stuff. (Gun… gun… BOMB.) Yes, I am all about the drama.

I wonder if America’s two-century-and-counting invention spurt (or at least the sort of things we’ve been inclined to invent, since by no means do we have a monopoly on this trend) has been partly fueled by the nearly complete severing of our own roots, leaving a void where our world and identity had to be created from the ground up, a void that we filled with technology in lieu of culture. What culture we do have is largely bracketed within that technology — the preservation of early jazz recordings and newsreels, for example — and now, art and entertainment are practically non-existent outside of reproducible media, to the point where cutting edge technology is the very canvas we work on. Not unique to America, but very American, if that makes any sense.

I love technology, I love the spirit of invention, and I love the things we’re capable of coming up with. And while there may be some inventions capable of more harm than good, ultimately A.) it’s always up to people to choose to use technology for good, and B.) there’s no sense suppressing ideas, because if we force ourselves not to invent something, somebody else will. It parallels my views on speech: if you don’t like what was said, rather than silencing the speaker, say something back; and likewise, if a machine or tool is causing a problem, invent something that will either improve/replace it or correct the problem (I, uh, don’t know what to tell you about the atomic bomb here, sorry). We can sit around blaming the existence of refrigerators, escalators, TVs, microwaves, cars, and frozen food for that extra thirty pounds of blubber we’re hauling to Chuck-E-Cheese every day in our minivans… or we can re-invent ourselves again, now that we know even more about the effects of our inventions on ourselves, each other, and the planet. If we settle for the former, then America has jumped the shark; but if we pursue the latter, then I would dare to suggest that maybe it hasn’t.

P.S. - I was going to end this post with a link to one of the hundreds of “America F*ck Yeah” videos out there, before I realized there were hundreds of different versions (there must have been a competition or something)… and as I was watching them all, they became less and less funny to me, partly because half the people leaving comments on YouTube interpreted the song literally. See what I mean about schizophrenic?