Their Yankee ingenuity helped change the world

In “They Made America,” Harold Evans, a journalist, historian and former editor of the London Sunday Times, draws an important distinction between his adopted country, the United States, and his country of origin, Britain. This distinction hinges on the difference between invention and innovation. Britain is a country of inventors, including Frank Whittle, who in 1930 designed and patented a jet engine; Robert Watson Watt, who in 1935 invented a radar system; and Alexander Fleming, who in 1928 discovered penicillin. But these discoveries had little effect until they fell into the hands of “innovators” -- that is to say, Americans -- who transformed laboratory breakthroughs into marketable phenomena.

“Practical innovation more than anything else is the reason America achieved preeminence while other well-endowed landmasses lagged or failed,” Evans writes. What is more, he argues, the impulse to commercially exploit ideas has often been rooted in the anti-elitist notions on which the United States was founded. For example, in response to other early cars that were playthings for the rich, Henry Ford designed his Model T for Everyman. He imbued it with “his contempt for wealth and show and servants, his rustic-bred pride in independence, his unarticulated belief in equality of opportunity.” And he was rewarded with a huge success.

“They Made America” is a lavishly produced, energetically written tribute to the men and women who meet Evans’ criteria as innovators -- or, more accurately, who meet criteria established by his board of experts: Daniel Kevles, Stanley Woodward professor of history at Yale University; Victor McElheny, a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Merritt Roe Smith, the Leverett and William Cutten professor of the history of technology at MIT. This book is the opposite of quirky.

Because the subjects have had to pass muster with a high-toned jury, inclusion confers validation. Certain choices -- aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright, for instance -- are far from surprising. But others, such as blue-jean mogul Levi Strauss, are less predictable. In 1873, Strauss secured a patent for work pants whose seams were secured with rivets. The trousers swiftly made him wealthy, but their appeal was limited to cowboy types in the West. Their real influence didn’t come until almost a century later, when they became an emblem of an international counterculture.

Evans divides the book into three chronological sections, beginning with innovators from the Revolution to the Civil War, whose gadgets, ranging from the reaper to the steamboat, “got America going.” Advances during this period did not involve just engineering: The Supreme Court ruling “liberating” interstate commerce, the establishment of federal patent law and the invention of the corporation, which limited liability and made it easier for entrepreneurs to raise money, also contributed. The second section recognizes innovators from the end of the Civil War to the late 20th century, a period in which devices that had been “mechanical” became “electromechanical.” And the third part covers the Digital Age.

I was most fascinated by the second section and surprised by things I learned. Some innovators whom I had assumed to be scientists were, in fact, merely passionate hobbyists. Photography pioneer George Eastman, for example, was a bank clerk with no formal training in chemistry. This did not stop him from inventing an emulsion that enabled photographic exposures to be made with a dry plate, as well as a machine that would coat plates in quantity. All this to make his hobby convenient: When taking pictures, “One ought to be able to carry less than a pack-horse load” of equipment, he observed. And instead of, say, looking to literature to name his camera, he made up the word “Kodak,” because “[h]e liked the strength of the letter K and reckoned it was a word that would be pronounced the same in every language.”

Evans has made an effort to include women and people of color in his pantheon of innovation. These include Garrett Augustus Morgan, who invented both the traffic signal and the gas mask, and Sarah Breedlove Walker, known as “Madame C.J. Walker,” who made a fortune in hair-care products. I was especially moved by the way Bank of America founder Amadeo P. Giannini (who might have been an inspiration for George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”) defied the Anglo-Saxon banking establishment and built a business lending money to working people for houses and cars.

Told together, these profiles add up to more than they would on their own. Yet the survey approach is not without shortcomings, including, on at least one occasion, oversight of a crucial detail. In his eagerness to applaud Ruth Handler, inventor of the Barbie doll, for helping to build the Mattel toy empire, Evans never notices what made her product revolutionary. He characterizes Barbie as a 1950s “mom and homemaker,” but at no point has the doll ever been presented as a mother. Barbie has been issued with friends and siblings, but never parents or children. Baby dolls teach little girls to nurture. But Barbie was never about nurturing or playing helpmate to dad in a 1950s nuclear family. She was about independence: Coded to be sexual, she had no husband and from the get-go came with paraphernalia for a career.

In his introduction, Evans writes, “These innovators are heroes and benefactors, but they are not saints.” Nevertheless, he doesn’t dwell on their faults. A short, vague sentence is devoted to Ford’s extensive promotion of “anti-Semitic theories.” And at no point does he mention that in 1938, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, Nazi Germany’s highest award given to foreigners, which had been presented earlier to Benito Mussolini.

Such delicate phrasing of difficult material, however, is in harmony with what Evans admires in the subjects of his book. Innovation, as Evans defines it, is as much about marketing products as it is about devising them. In “They Made America,” Evans establishes himself as an innovator. Not only has he come up with an interesting idea, he has told and packaged it in a selling way, a way reminiscent of the marketers he admires. *