By Harold Evans
Now on hand in a text-only paperback version, "They Made the US" is a stirring and supremely readable paintings of history--a party of the entrepreneurial strength that has fueled this state seeing that its inception.
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Extra info for They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators
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They produced an effective carbon button transmitter for the rival Western Union so that when Western Union pooled the patents of Edison and Bell’s rival Elisha Gray it had a real working telephone. Then Theodore Vail presided over the amalgamation of Western Union and the Bell Company to create the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. It was Vail who foresaw the potential of a national long-distance system and worked to overcome myriad technical, political and bureaucratic obstacles with such effect that on January 25, 1915, he was able to sit in his convalescent retreat on Jekyll Island, Georgia, and listen to Bell in New York repeat his original request of 1876 to Thomas Watson in San Francisco (to which Watson replied that it would take him a week to get there now).
In his second draft, influenced by “Gentlemen of Learning and Ingenuity,” notably Benjamin Franklin, he unwisely abandoned paddle wheels. Fitch and Voight, testing their skiff without an engine, then tried various rowing contraptions on the river, one of them a chain carrying perpendicular boards round and round. They sweated away at the cranks, with minimum movement but maximum enjoyment among the watching professional boatmen. Fitch took to his bed with “West Indian produce,” fretting how he could explain away to the directors the expenditure of $60.
He realized that the bulky Newcomen engine would sink the kind of boat he could build, so he set out to design and build his own steam engine from scratch, one light enough not to sink a small boat. Fitch worked with manic intensity on research and fund-raising. He rode to the handful of state capitals in the East, petitioning the legislators for a monopoly license to steam the state’s waters on the grounds that he was the first to come up with the idea. He would have got nowhere without the happy circumstance that he had a drinking partner, a hearty German-born clockmaker by the name of Henry Voight, who, like Fitch, was a religious radical, a Christian Deist dismissive of the divinity of Jesus.