The Mainspring of Human Progress

Chapter 18

INVENTIVE PROGRESS*

WHEN the American revolution had its beginning, living conditions had scarcely changed since the reign of Nebuchadnezzar. The colonial woman gathered her own firewood and cooked over an open fire, just as women had cooked since the dawn of history, and just as more than two-thirds of the women on earth are cooking today. She spun thread and wove coarse cloth, with a spindle and loom handed down from the early Egyptians. Every housewife made her own soap and candles and carried water from a spring or well. A crude millstone, dating back to ancient Babylon, ground the grain that the American farmer cut and threshed with knives and flails that were older than history.

These were the conditions existing when our forefathers threw off the shackles of Old World tyranny in order that human beings might be in control of their own lives and make full use of their individual initiative.

The outburst of human energy was terrific, and in no way is it better illustrated than by the inventive progress that immediately took place.

In 1793, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which could do the work of four dozen men. But that’s only part of the story. Whitney’s invention made it commercially profitable to cultivate the short-fiber “green-seed” cotton that grew wild in the foothills of Virginia and the southeastern states. In contrast to the long-staple or sea-island variety, the lint stuck so tenaciously to the short-fiber seed that only a few ounces a day could be separated by hand.

The lower processing costs increased the market for all varieties of cotton. Acreage was greatly expanded, and the southern states entered an era of high prosperity. In less than ten years, the annual production of cotton in America had increased from less than 5,000,000 pounds to over 50,000,000 pounds.

New England shared in this prosperity; the availability of cotton in such large quantities and at such low prices stimulated the development of carding and weaving machinery. A few years later in Waltham, Massachusetts, for the first time in history, raw cotton was turned into finished cloth under the roof of one factory.

Clothing could now be obtained at prices within the reach of all. It was no longer necessary for the housewife to work overtime at her spinning wheel and hand loom. Thanks to Eli Whitney, she could have an occasional evening for rest and recreation.*

Mass Production

In 1799, the same Eli Whitney, through the influence of Thomas Jefferson, was given a contract to build muskets for the War Department. His work on that project was one of the most important milestones in the development of modern mass-production technique.

Whitney is frequently spoken of as the inventor of mass production, but that is hardly accurate. In England in the early 1680’s, a man named Sir Dudley North had outlined a program of mass production, with particular reference to the building of ships. Sir Dudley’s analysis and proposal were presented in a paper entitled Considerations Upon the East-India Trade, which stands today as a remarkable document on the fundamentals of mass production.

Sir Dudley was much concerned about the confusion and perplexity to which the workingman was being subjected as a result of his having to switch back and forth from one type of job to another. He wanted to “abate” such unnecessary confusion by advance planning and by assigning jobs of different variety to different artisans of different skills and talents.

No Decrease in Wages

Sir Dudley also foresaw the possibilities of reducing costs “tho’ Wages shou’d not be abated.”15 But he was ahead of his time. The idea of increasing production through systematic planning was too revolutionary to be given serious consideration. And the idea of making things easier for the workers was downright anti-social.

Little Progress

A hundred years later, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, expanded on the principles laid down by Sir Dudley North. But mass production had made little headway. Ships were still being built in the old way – with no abatement in the confusion. Production-minded Americans, who probably had never heard of Sir Dudley, were the first to produce ships on a mass-production basis – and they didn’t get around to it until World War I.

About all that Adam Smith could find to report along lines of practical progress was that the principle of specialized operation was being applied to the manufacture of dressmakers’ pins. That was in the year 1776.

On this side of the Atlantic, in that same historic year, a rumor came out of Rhode Island that a tack maker named Jeremiah Wilkinson had perfected a new invention which would boost his production to several thousand tacks a day per man. Jeremiah’s “new invention” turned out to be nothing more than a scheme for fastening a dozen bits of metal in a vise, so that, with a broad-faced hammer, the heads could all be pounded at the same time.

Today such a procedure seems perfectly obvious, but in those days, it was startling news and represented an important step toward modern manufacturing efficiency.

Interchangeability

But mass production, if applied to anything beyond the simplest kind of article, depends not only on division of labor and multiple operations, but also on uniformly accurate, interchangeable parts. Whitney pioneered the idea of interchangeability as a fundamental principle of production, and he successfully applied the principle to a product that must be made with the greatest precision.

Guns had always been built by hand. Each part had to be laboriously filed, lapped, and fitted together by highly skilled gunsmiths. There was no division of labor. No one had ever worried about “abating the confusion.” Each worker made everything from the stock to the trigger spring. Each gun was slightly different from every other gun, and each part in each gun was different from the corresponding part in any other gun.

Whitney proposed to substitute highly specialized machine operations for the less uniform hand operations. Thus, each piece would be made exactly as it ought to be in its final form.

Simplified Repairs

This would not only reduce the assembly operation to a routine procedure, but would greatly simplify the problem of repairs. It would no longer be necessary to do a lot of expert filing and fitting to replace a worn or broken part. The principle of interchangeability would make it possible to repair a gun right on the battlefield, without the aid of a professional gunsmith.

Whitney’s contract called for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets over a two-year period; and government officials, thinking in terms of piecemeal or handicraft production, naturally assumed that deliveries would be made at an even rate of about 100 per week. But it is a characteristic of mass production that, while it’s a quicker way and a better way to build things once you get started, it takes a long time to get started.*

Around a hundred different machines are required to produce uniform guns on a mass-production basis – not to mention the special tools, jigs, fixtures, etc., that have to be made to order. Even with the highly perfected techniques, facilities, and know-how of today, it would take about six months to buy and install the machinery and equipment needed to produce quality guns on a quantity basis.

But back in 1799, it was not just a matter of going out and buying the machinery. That was before the age of the specialized tool industry. Most of the equipment that Whitney had to have just didn’t exist. It had to be designed and built from scratch.

The brilliant, ambitious, and audacious Whitney, unwittingly perhaps, had taken on the job of laying the groundwork for the modern machine-tool industry, without which few, if any, of our manufactured products of today would be available at prices within the reach of the average person.

It would have been much easier to go ahead and make the guns by hand, and presumably the first of them were made partly by hand; but at the end of a year, only 500 muskets had been delivered. The War Department was getting impatient and demanded a showdown.

Whitney was summoned to Washington to appear before a committee of experts. He knew he was in for trouble unless he could get them interested in his broad undertaking. He appeared before the committee with a box containing the loose parts for ten guns. Without ceremony, he dumped them on the conference table and, like a jubilant child with a new toy, put on a demonstration of what could be accomplished through the use of special machinery, tools, jigs, and fixtures. With parts chosen at random, and without any filing or fitting, he assembled two guns before their very eyes and passed them around for inspection.

Impressive Demonstration

It was an impressive demonstration, but the committee had to consider the practical aspects. The government had ordered, not ten guns nor 510, but 10,000 guns. The time was half up, and Whitney himself had to admit that he wouldn’t be able to meet the schedule. But he fared better than did Sir Dudley North; and with the support of his friend, President Jefferson, the contract was extended.

As time went on, Whitney had to get additional extensions; but the order was finally filled, and the United States entered the War of 1812 with 10,000 of the most perfect muskets that had ever been made. For the first time in history, precision firearms could be produced in almost unlimited quantities.

The War of 1812 was won; and in the years that followed, the conquest and settlement of the West were greatly expedited by Samuel Colt’s application of Whitney’s techniques.

But of far greater importance, Whitney had laid the foundation for quantity production of complex civilian products – bicycles, typewriters, linotypes, motion picture machines, electric refrigerators, motor cars.

It has been estimated that even the simplest, cheapest, skimpiest kind of automobile could not be built for less than $20,000 without machine tools and the interchangeability of parts which they make possible – and the cost of keeping it in repair would be even further out of line.

Luxurious Gadget

Inspired by what he had learned of Whitney’s undertaking, Eli Terry, a clocksmith of Plymouth, Connecticut, announced that he was building 500 clocks – all of the same, identical design – which he would sell for around $10.00 each, as against the customary price of $25.00.

This was even more startling than Wilkinson’s new method of making tacks. A tack was a very simple thing; but a clock was a mysterious, delicate, and highly complicated mechanism. Clocks had been built back in the days of the pharaohs, but up to the time of Eli Terry they had always been the ornamental luxuries of kings and princes. The common man had depended on the sun and the stars.

From the Old World viewpoint, time was unimportant, and the conservation of human energy also seemed unimportant. It is only when men are free that they begin to place a value on their time; and when men begin to place a value on human time, they begin to realize the importance of preserving human life.

Down through the ages, the principal business had always been war. When a people won a war, they made slaves of the defeated people; if they lost, they became slaves of their conquerors. In either case, there was always a surplus of burden-bearers. Long hours of drudgery helped to keep the slaves submissive, so there was no incentive to develop labor-saving techniques – no point in worrying about time.

Under such conditions, there was no place for the Eli Whitneys or the Eli Terrys. If any had cropped up, they would have been frowned upon as “enemies of the social order.” That is why Sir Dudley’s forward-looking ideas were thrown into the discard. Certain of his more daring writings were suppressed until years after his death, when they were published anonymously by a group of cautious admirers.

Terry was no newcomer to the clock business. For some years past, he’d been canvassing the New England countryside, selling high-priced clocks on the installment plan. But the idea of producing clocks of uniform quality at prices low enough to make them available to every family was something new and radical.

Eli Terry, as far as I can find out, was the first to put into practice the American idea of low cost and big volume through mass production and wide distribution. By the end of three years, he and his partner, Seth Thomas, had built and sold over 5,000 clocks.

Others were attracted to the field. Competition increased. Quality improved. Wages went up. Prices went down. The unique American formula was in the making!

One manufacturer, a man named Peck, saw possibilities in the export trade. His first shipment of low-priced clocks to England was held up at the Liverpool Customs House on grounds of suspicion. The Customs officials knew the value of clocks, and they knew that clocks just couldn’t be produced at the low prices shown on the Peck invoice – fraudulent payments must have been made on the side in order to avoid the full effect of the tariff.

British law provided that under such conditions the goods in question would be confiscated by paying the amount of the invoice plus 10 per cent. The clocks never reached the consignee. They were taken over by the government. What the government did with them, I don’t know.

But Peck, being a practical man, didn’t put up any argument. He was a hardheaded manufacturer, not a salesman. The 10 per cent extra profit was “pure velvet,” and he rather relished the idea of disposing of his output without any sales expense or credit risk. He added more workers and continued shipping his clocks to Britain and collecting from the Customs Office until they finally got wise to him.

Although the records are incomplete, I like to think that the British, at about that time, began to think that perhaps Sir Dudley had something. However, it took another hundred years to develop and extend mass-production techniques to a point where the worker could switch from one job to another without confusion and perplexity.

Sir Dudley’s dream was fulfilled – not in England, but here in the United States. It was brought to its fruition through the ingenuity of American production engineers. But scarcely had it reached full perfection when other forms of confusion were injected into the situation. Although of an artificial, man-made nature, they are so befuddling that even a Sir Dudley North might have difficulty in pointing a way to the solution.

6000 versus 160

For thousands of years under the Old World concept of a static economy, operating under bureaucratic control, human beings lived in hunger, filth, and disease. They worked ceaselessly at back-breaking drudgery to keep life in wretched bodies. They died young. For thousands of years, when not fighting wars, they managed to build pigsty shelters, to sow grain, cook meat, yoke oxen, and chain slaves to mills and oars.

Then in this New World, in a brief period of 160 years, Americans created an entirely different mode of life, with improvements and advances in the scale of living beyond the utmost imaginings of all preceding ages. Americans have disproved the pagan superstition of a static universe and have given a new meaning to the word progress.

If our progress is to continue, it is important that we do not forget the things which have brought us thus far.

Economists and statisticians are inclined to take the end of the Civil War as the milepost marking the beginning of America’s first great era of accelerated progress. In terms of the increased output and higher standard of living, that is true; but the seeds of that progress had been sown by the preceding generations.

Most of the things we have today are traceable, directly or indirectly, to what was going on in the minds of those who were blazing trails 100 and 150 years ago. That’s when the basic foundations were being laid, and it is doubtful that there has ever been a time when human energy and original, independent, creative thinking were so intense and so well-directed as in the years immediately following the Revolutionary War.

Elusive Lag

In the progress of a nation, just as in the decline of a nation, there is always a lag between cause and effect. This is an extremely important point, and failure to recognize it seems to account for most of the mistakes and misery of mankind down through the ages. Progress, or lack of progress, at any given time depends on what was happening in the minds of men and women at some previous time. The histories of Greece, Rome, and Spain afford abundant evidence.

Looking to the future instead of to the past, America’s progress in the years ahead depends on the American thinking of today. The long range prospects depend, not on us older folks, but on the thinking of the younger people who will be at the helm 10 years, 20 years, 30, 40, 50 years hence.

As individuals, what is their outlook on life? Are they fatalistic or self-reliant? What is the influence of the home, and how does it compare with that of 50 and 100 years ago? What’s going on in the schoolroom? What is the philosophy of our educators and of men in public office?

One of the best ways to insure future progress is to keep clearly in mind the things which have been responsible for our past progress, as well as the things which may have kept America from being as great as it might have been.

This chapter is supposed to deal with inventive progress as affecting our economic growth and our high scale of living. And yet I’m not sure that I should apologize for this digression because it all comes back to the effective use of human energy, and the effective use of human energy depends on the mental and moral outlook of the individual persons who make up a society.

Parallel Efforts

As already indicated, it is difficult to trace the “genealogy” of any invention or discovery, and any attempt to do so is accompanied by the danger of omissions and inaccuracies.

Economic needs have a way of permeating society. It is a commonplace in the history of invention to find minds far distant from one another in time and space wrestling with the same problems – working independently but producing results that are roughly identical.

Rarely does anything spring full-blown. Progress advances by degrees, each improvement paving the way for the next; and since the advent of the printing press and the growth of scientific societies, the benefits of the independent efforts have pyramided on one another to an increasing degree and at an accelerated rate.

The more complicated the product, the harder it is to trace the genesis of its development. To tell the story of the steam engine, for example, would take a sizeable volume, with a “begat” chapter as long as the Book of Chronicles.

James Watt is usually thought of as its inventor, and it is true that Watt, more than any other individual, was responsible for the type of engine which ushered in the modern age of power. He introduced the condenser principle and translated reciprocating motion into rotary motion. But steam engines of a crude variety had been used to pump water out of English coal mines before James Watt was born.

As a matter of fact, the principle of the steam engine had been understood back in the days of ancient Greece; and we know that in Alexandria, Egypt, a man named Hero built a steam turbine in the year 130 B.C. But an invention, like a natural resource, doesn’t amount to much unless and until something is done about it.

It always takes time to bring an embryonic idea to its full fruition – and the unavoidable lag is often prolonged by well-meaning people who still cling to the pagan concept of a static universe.

The Steamboat

A boat propelled by steam was launched on European waters in the year 1707. It was built by the French scientist, Denis Papin, who was living in Germany at the time. He made a successful voyage down the Fulda River. But at the town of Munden, he was attacked by an organized gang of boatmen. His new contraption was destroyed, and Papin barely escaped with his life. Thus, the pressure groups, through the use of violence, retarded the development of steam propulsion for almost a century. It was in 1807, just an even 100 years after Denis Papin had run afoul of the river gangsters, that Fulton’s Clermont made its maiden trip from New York to Albany.

Robert Fulton is usually thought of as the inventor of the first American steamboat, but he was more of a promoter than an inventor. No less than 16 steamboats had been built and operated in this country before the launching of the Clermont.

Before Fulton

The half-forgotten genius, John Fitch of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, built a steamboat in 1786; and during the following ten years, with the aid of Harry Voight and others, he built five additional steamboats – all of them successful, and each one better than its predecessor.

Fifteen years ahead of Fulton’s Clermont, Fitch’s fourth boat, the Perseverance, was operating on a daily schedule up and down the Delaware, carrying passengers between Philadelphia and Trenton, New Jersey. But unlike Fulton, John Fitch was a poor promoter, and he was too engrossed in his work to bother about the political angles.

Then there was the able engineer, Col. John Stevens, who launched his first boat in 1802. His third boat, the Phoenix – completed simultaneously with the Clermont – was equipped with an improved engine, designed and built by Colonel Stevens himself, whereas the Clermont’s engine was imported from England.

But Stevens was at a disadvantage because Fulton’s backer, Chancellor Livingston, through political pull, had obtained a 20-year monopoly on the operations of steamboats in and around New York State. Also, it seems that Nicholas Roosevelt, a former associate of Stevens, had thrown his support to Fulton’s group.

At any rate, the monopolistic setup was too much for Stevens to buck. So while the Clermont was chugging its way up the peaceful Hudson, the Colonel braved the waters of the Atlantic and took his new boat from Hoboken to Philadelphia – the first ocean voyage ever made under steam power.

Livingston and Roosevelt tried to extend their monopoly over the entire United States; but the newly-freed Americans didn’t like the idea of governmental restraint – in less than a generation, independent operators had covered the western waters with steamboats of their own contrivance. In the meantime, the dynamic New World had challenged the static Old World by making the first ocean crossing in a boat powered by steam. It was the good ship Savannah, which crossed to Cork, Ireland in the year 1818.

Little Things

The demand for houses following the Revolutionary War was as great or greater than it was following World War II.

Lumber was plentiful; the bottleneck was nails. Iron nails had been in use in the Roman Empire at the time of Christ, but they had always been laboriously made by hand; the forging of nails for the building of a house took about as much time as the construction of the house itself. Legend has it that in colonial days old houses were deliberately burned to the ground and the ashes sifted in order to salvage the hand-wrought nails.

Nails sold by the dozen, at prices not much lower than they now bring in antique shops. Thomas Jefferson kept a dozen slaves busy forging nails just to keep up with the building activities on his Monticello estate. But this was all changed when, in 1795, Jacob Perkins of New-buryport, Massachusetts developed a machine that would turn out 60,000 nails a week.

The history of nails is paralleled by that of many other ordinary household items which today are bought at the nearest dime store without a second thought.

The thrifty colonial housewife could have told you without a moment’s hesitation just how many pins, needles, and buttons she had in her sewing basket; the head of the house carried a mental inventory covering his meager stock of nails, tacks, screws, and scraps of metal.

Brass buttons sold for ten cents each until Paul Revere, in 1801, worked out a machine that would roll brass of uniform thickness. Then the button manufacturers of Waterbury, Connecticut began stamping out buttons on presses operated by a water wheel.

Pins and needles were especially treasured. They were larger than those in common use today and far more expensive – especially pins, as the heads were made separately and welded or brazed in place. Selling pins “by the paper” didn’t come into practice until 1844, when a small manufacturer in Derby, Connecticut worked out a way to produce them entirely by machine at the rate of 2,000,000 a week. Up to that time, ordinary pins sold for as much as 20 cents each and were looked upon as appropriate gifts for weddings and at Christmas time. They also took the place of small change to supplement barter between neighboring families – which, incidentally, is the origin of the phrase pin money.

Far-reaching Effects

As in the case of the cotton gin, it is almost impossible to measure the value of any useful invention. The dollar volume of the increased industrial production is only a part of the story and may be greatly exceeded by the gains in human efficiency. Consider the effect of steamships, railroads, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, etc., in releasing time and energy for other purposes. Or, to take a less spectacular example, imagine the time wasted by the colonial housewife in searching for one of her 20-cent pins.

Consider the saving in time and human energy and the thousand-and-one improvements in living that we owe to electricity. Its story is so involved and so far-reaching that it would take a whole book to develop it – even if I had the necessary knowledge and talent for calculations of such astronomical proportions.

But here’s just one example, a rather simple example – certainly less spectacular than either electricity or steam power. It has to do with plows.

Plows had been in use since the dawn of history, but they had remained practically unchanged down through thousands of years. At the time of the American Revolution, they were still being made from the prongs of trees, sometimes with a bit of metal fastened to the tip.

It was not the type of problem that appealed to the high-brow scientist. Tilling the soil had always been left to peasants and slaves, so why worry? But in the New World where men were free, a vast agricultural empire was opened up as a result of American ingenuity applied to the improvement of this ancient tool.

In colonial days, the vast midwestern prairie lands and a good part of the Mississippi Valley were looked upon as worthless. Early visitors spoke of the sweeping plains as a “land ocean” that would forever remain wild and uncultivated.

Several Reasons

This conclusion was not without a reason. In fact, it was based on several reasons.

The prairie country, in contrast to the eastern area, was not covered with forests; and although cutting down trees and clearing land had been the bane of their existence, the pioneer settlers looked with suspicion on any land that didn’t have to be cleared. They reasoned that if it wouldn’t grow trees, it just couldn’t be of any value for growing crops.

The prairies were covered by a tough, primeval sod. When this sod was dry, the ordinary plow wouldn’t cut through; and when it was softened by rain, the rich loam underneath was so sticky that it clung to the plow blade. The fertile soil of the river valleys was described as “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.”

Cast-iron plows had been tried, but without much success. They wouldn’t “scour.” They were too heavy to handle. And there was an age-old superstition that a plow made of metal would poison the crops.

But John Deere, a Yankee blacksmith who migrated from Vermont to the Mississippi Valley, was not so skeptical. Instead of using iron, he made a plow out of the very finest steel then available. From an old buzz-saw disc, he trimmed out the required parts; and on patterns carved from a log, he carefully pounded the sheets into the proper shapes and bolted them to a well-constructed hardwood frame.

When you come right down to it, John Deere’s plow could hardly be called an invention. About all he did was to find a new use for an old material and to carry out his ideas in a thoroughly workmanlike manner.*

But John Deere’s plow cut through the sod like a razor, and the sticky loam slid off the plowshare like butter sliding off a hot knife. True, it was heavier than its wooden predecessor; but John Deere was a giant of a man, and he trudged across the prairie lands with his new-fangled plow thrown over his shoulder, just to overcome the weight argument.

And after John Deere had a few seasons of increasingly good crops, the realistic, free-minded settlers cast aside the superstition that metal would poison the soil, and the prairie country was on the boom.

Just Reward

A big industry grew out of John Deere’s simple invention, and a number of other industries followed in its wake because binders, reapers, tractors, and other advanced types of farm machinery were developed as a natural result of his having found a way to plow the prairie sod.

Millions of acres of the most productive soil in the world were brought into use. Prosperous towns and cities sprang up in the vast prairie “wastelands”; and John Deere’s plow, along with the more intricate inventions of Cyrus McCormick and others, opened up similar opportunities for increased agricultural production in all parts of the world – including the Russian Ukraine.

It staggers the imagination to think how John Deere’s simple contribution increased the wealth of mankind. Perhaps it would have come without freedom to invent and freedom to share in the rewards of inventive efforts; but there’s no escaping the fact that plows had remained practically unchanged down through the ages, while the peoples of the world were going hungry.

I don’t know how much money John Deere made as a result of finding a way to plow the rich prairie lands; I doubt if he got any more than he deserved – although I wouldn’t attempt to say how much he was entitled to get, nor would I know how to go about estimating it.

I guess one way to do it would be on the basis of how many hours it took him to think up the idea and to develop the experimental model. The trouble is that inventive genius doesn’t operate on an hourly basis. More often than not, worthwhile ideas come in leisure moments, as a result of an interest in the job that extends beyond working hours.

From all I can gather, John Deere had been turning the problem over in his mind for about a year before he hit on the solution. But a year’s pay would hardly be enough – even if you figure it on a portal-to-portal basis, at maximum ceiling rates, and triple time for overtime.

Then too, it’s quite possible that John Deere may have followed some false leads and spent time on other ideas that didn’t “pay off.” It might be that some of these futile efforts were the steppingstones which led him to a solution of the plowing problem. But no matter how liberally we might deal with him on an hourly basis, there would be the danger of shortchanging John Deere – and I want no part of it!

Ability to Pay

So let’s take another approach and go at it from the standpoint of “ability to pay.” Since Deere’s sodbuster turned worthless land into highly valuable land, one might argue that he was entitled to a rather liberal percentage of the increased wealth. This might be arrived at by calculating the before and after value of the vast Mississippi Valley – including the fertile farmlands of Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, to say nothing of the Russian Ukraine.

Roughly speaking, this represents the area that Jefferson bought from Napoleon for $15,000,000; but when this land was brought under cultivation, the value increased to about $20,000,000,000, which would mean an added wealth of $19,885,000,000.

But that doesn’t throw any light on what John Deere’s share should have been because it took the co-operative efforts of millions of free men during several generations to provide the follow-through and to get the job done.

True, John Deere played an important part in getting things started; but I’m using his name more as a symbol, and much of the credit belongs to Cyrus McCormick, James Oliver, and other inventors – none of whom could have gotten vary far without the help of still others who supported their efforts. These included those who put up the money to build the factories and equip them with tools; those who used the tools; those who helped to develop new and better tools; those who worked out new and better methods for using the new and better tools; those who contributed to management, distribution, and service; and last but not least, the up-and-coming farmers who were willing to take a chance – to leave their comfortable homes in the East and risk their money, and their lives, to open up a vast new country. I don’t know of anyone who would be smart enough to figure their various shares of the increased wealth.

A Tough Problem

It’s a tough problem any way you look at it. I guess the only way to solve it is the way it actually was done – through a free and unhampered balancing-out of the incentives and the rewards among the various individuals who played a part. Perhaps it’s fortunate that in the days of John Deere, the major emphasis was on increasing wealth, rather than on how it should be divided.

Too much stress on how it should be divided might easily have reduced the amount to be divided because it would have taken more people to do the figuring than to do the job. But that’s really getting off the subject; I’m merely trying to emphasize the wealth-producing possibilities of new ideas.

No matter how much money John Deere may have made, it would be insignificant in comparison with the tremendous over-all benefits shared by millions of people. And it’s just possible that good old John Deere wouldn’t have bothered his head about the plowing problem if he hadn’t been living in a free country, where an ambitious blacksmith had a chance to become a prosperous manufacturer. Free minds are inventive minds. That is why America has always been a land of inventors.

Other Inventors

Benjamin Franklin invented a new type of stove which pointed the way to our modern base-burner. He invented the rocking chair and the first pair of bifocal spectacles, and his scientific experiments played an important part in laying the foundation for the great electrical development which took place long after his time. And it was the sly, tolerant, and benign Franklin who invented the American sense of humor, based on the idea: Don’t take yourself or anyone else too seriously.

Thomas Paine also had an inventive mind. Not only was he highly creative as a writer and welder of words, but with geometry as his hobby, he also drew up the plans and supervised the construction of the first single-span iron bridge with crisscross struts.

Jefferson’s home at Monticello demonstrates his ability as a master of structural design, and the fittings and furnishings disclose many evidences of his mechanical ingenuity. It was Jefferson who designed the first scientifically curved moldboard for a plow. Also, he played an important part in laying the foundation for the more effective administration of patent law, which, as Abe Lincoln later observed, added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius. Since the time of Jefferson, the United States has led the world in the number of patents registered – twice as many as in Great Britain or France and four times as many as in Germany.

In addition to the cotton gin, the modern steamboat, the prairie sodbuster, the reaper, and the binder, Americans invented the sewing machine, the typewriter, the linotype, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the motion picture, the airplane, the washing machine, the electric refrigerator, and dozens of other electrical appliances.

And Americans developed the techniques of quantity production. In a broad, over-all sense, one might argue that mass production, as we know it in this country, is the most important of all inventions because it is only through mass production that the practical benefits of other inventions can be extended to the millions.

But mass production rests on the foundation of another, and an even greater invention. It is our new and original concept of a political structure based on a principle that is just as true, just as real, just as inexorable as any law of physics – the principle of individual liberty and freedom, the principle that each person controls his own life-energy and is responsible for his own acts and for his relationships with others.

This, the first and foremost of all our inventive contributions, is not ordinarily thought of as an invention. But the fact remains that it is the greatest of them all because it serves as the foundation for all the others and provides the opportunity for their full fruition.