Here are 60 American inventions that have either made the world a better place or are in the process of making the world a better place.
| # | Invention/ Discovery | Year | Inventor(s) |
| 1 | Lightning rod | 1752 | Benjamin Franklin |
| 2 | Bifocals | 1784 | Benjamin Franklin |
| 3 | Cotton gin | 1793 | Eli Whitney |
| 4 | Steamboat (practical) | 1807 | Robert Fulton |
| 5 | Vulcanized rubber | 1844 | Charles Goodyear |
| 6 | Anesthesia (ether) | 1846 | William Morton |
| 7 | Sewing machine (practical) | 1846 | Elias Howe |
| 8 | Transatlantic telegraph cable | 1858 | Cyrus Field |
| 9 | National parks (concept) | 1872 | U.S. Congress / John Muir (advocate) |
| 10 | Telephone | 1876 | Alexander Graham Bell |
| 11 | Phonograph | 1877 | Thomas Edison |
| 12 | Incandescent light bulb (practical) | 1879 | Thomas Edison |
| 13 | Skyscraper (steel-frame) | 1885 | William Le Baron Jenney |
| 14 | Coca-Cola | 1886 | John Pemberton |
| 15 | Alternating current system | 1888 | Nikola Tesla |
| 16 | Motion picture camera | 1891 | Thomas Edison & William Dickson |
| 17 | Diesel-electric locomotive | 1895 | General Electric engineers |
| 18 | Air conditioning | 1902 | Willis Carrier |
| 19 | Airplane | 1903 | Orville & Wilbur Wright |
| 20 | Stainless steel razor blade | 1904 | King Gillette |
| 21 | Electric washing machine | 1908 | Alva Fisher |
| 22 | Assembly line (moving) | 1913 | Henry Ford |
| 23 | Frozen food (commercial) | 1924 | Clarence Birdseye |
| 24 | Electronic television | 1927 | Philo Farnsworth |
| 25 | FM radio | 1933 | Edwin Howard Armstrong |
| 26 | Nylon | 1935 | Wallace Carothers |
| 27 | Blood bank | 1937 | Charles Drew |
| 28 | Nuclear reactor (first sustained reaction) | 1942 | Enrico Fermi & Manhattan Project team |
| 29 | Streptomycin | 1943 | Selman Waksman |
| 30 | Transistor | 1947 | Bardeen, Brattain & Shockley |
| 31 | Microwave oven | 1947 | Percy Spencer |
| 32 | Defibrillator | 1947 | Claude Beck |
| 33 | Hydraulic fracturing (practical) | 1947 | Stanolind Oil team |
| 34 | Modern franchise system | 1948 | Richard & Maurice McDonald |
| 35 | Semi-dwarf wheat (Green Revolution) | 1950 | Norman Borlaug |
| 36 | Credit card | 1950 | Frank McNamara |
| 37 | Polio vaccine | 1952 | Jonas Salk |
| 38 | Cardiac bypass surgery | 1953 | John Gibbon |
| 39 | Oral contraceptive pill | 1955 | Gregory Pincus & John Rock |
| 40 | Hard disk drive | 1956 | IBM team led by Reynold Johnson |
| 41 | Intermodal shipping container | 1956 | Malcom McLean |
| 42 | Laser | 1960 | Theodore Maiman |
| 43 | Buffalo wings | 1964 | Teressa Bellissimo, Anchor Bar |
| 44 | Gatorade | 1965 | Robert Cade & Univ. of Florida team |
| 45 | ARPANET (internet precursor) | 1969 | DARPA team |
| 46 | Lunar landing | 1969 | NASA |
| 47 | MRI scanner | 1971 | Raymond Damadian |
| 48 | 1971 | Ray Tomlinson | |
| 49 | Recombinant DNA technology | 1973 | Herbert Boyer & Stanley Cohen |
| 50 | Personal computer (Apple I) | 1976 | Steve Wozniak |
| 51 | Index fund (retail) | 1976 | John Bogle / Vanguard |
| 52 | GPS | 1978 | U.S. Department of Defense team |
| 53 | Reusable spacecraft (Space Shuttle) | 1981 | NASA |
| 54 | 3D printing | 1983 | Chuck Hull |
| 55 | Graphical user interface (commercial) | 1984 | Apple team |
| 56 | HIV antiretroviral therapy | 1987 | Samuel Broder & NCI team |
| 57 | World Wide Web browser (Mosaic) | 1993 | Marc Andreessen & Eric Bina |
| 58 | Smartphone (iPhone) | 2007 | Apple team |
| 59 | Reusable orbital rocket (Falcon 9) | 2015 | SpaceX |
| 60 | mRNA vaccine platform | 2020 | Moderna team, building on Karikó & Weissman |
Enjoy the celebration of America’s 250th birthday, my groovy freedomist.
But on Sunday, think a little about these 60 inventions. Why is America largely responsible for inventing the modern world? Why does America have a long history of punching above its weight—economically, scientifically, and culturally?
In a nutshell, America’s secret sauce is property rights. Our Founding Fathers bet that if you gave people the freedom to use their property for their own principled amusement (especially their corpus property), and you protected whatever property they produced from that principled amusement, they would do great things. And our Founding Fathers won that bet.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that their bet was perfectly executed. Property rights in this country have never fully escaped the tyrant’s jackboot. Nor does it mean that their bet, even if perfectly executed, would somehow manage to remove all folly and disappointment from the human condition. No one can blatantly mismanage his corpus property for long without becoming familiar with skid row, jail, or a welfare office. And no one, regardless of how earnestly he exploits his corpus property, is guaranteed to reach the heights obtained by Elon Musk, Lebron James, or Taylor Swift. All it means is that their bet, when reasonably executed, produces the wealth that makes unremarkable greatness doable for the ordinary. Take me, for instance. I’m as ordinary as they come. I have ordinary intelligence, ordinary drive, and my working career was witness to one ordinary job after another. And my accomplishments in life have been altogether ordinary too—in an American sense. In a worldwide sense, they are anything but ordinary. What percentage of the world’s highway workers (i.e., professional roadkill-scoopers), whether they patrol African, Asian, European, Middle-Eastern, or South American roads, can secure a 1,700 square-foot home with every modern convenience, retire with plenty of life left, build a decent inheritance for their heirs, and, for shits and giggles, weld a life-sized bison for a lawn-ornament and self-publish a book that maps out a genuine path to achieving financial independence? My unremarkable greatness is only possible because of the 60 inventions I highlighted at the beginning of this post. I stand tall, in a worldwide sense, because I stand on the shoulders of giants, not pigmies.
Mankind doesn’t do well without accountability. Without accountability, our innate laziness takes hold. We lounge rather than work. We video-game rather than exercise. We porn rather than date. We scheme rather than fix. We destroy rather than build. To have any chance of approximating our true potential, we need accountability tools—tools that incentivize us to fight through our innate laziness—tools that turn the joy of sloth into the searing pain of regret.
The best accountability tools ever devised by man are competition and meritocracy. It’s amazing how innovative, industrious, and noble we become when love and glory can only be secured by besting others honorably and material comfort can only be secured by serving others honorably. And this is why socialism, whether democratic or full-blown, never works. Socialism, because it exalts claims over property, kills competition and meritocracy. A “fair share” of the pie is secured, not by doing a fair share of the work, but by merely breathing. A “seat at the table” is won, not by demonstrating superior ability, but by being a member of a privileged group. Customers are obtained and kept, not by out-innovating and out-working the competition, but by lobbying for laws that eliminate or hobble the competition. Socialism promises what the systemic laziness and complacency it begets can’t possibly produce: widespread wealth and happiness. Instead of creating a country where everyone can rise to ordinary on his own volition—and ordinary is amazing—socialism creates a country where no one can rise above ordinary without permission from the state—and ordinary is dismal.
Take a look at the most stirring paragraph ever written on behalf of liberty:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of people to alter or to abolish it, and institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Now a question. Who are you going to hitch your wagon to? The men who took inspiration from the “self-evident” truths in that stirring paragraph and created the world’s first and only libocracy? Or the loser socialists who brought you trillion-dollar deficits, endless wars, five-hundred-thousand-dollar starter homes, fifty-thousand-dollar cars, Rube-Goldberg healthcare bills, dumbed-down college degrees, learing centers, “mostly peaceful protests,” and frankensteinian sex-changes for minors?
Don’t kill our secret sauce. Your birthright is liberty. You were put here to use your corpus property for your own principled amusement—without shame, and without fear of reprisals. You weren’t put here to be a slave to the wants of a tyrannical political majority or grovel at the feet of a worthless political class. Please, for the love of God, tell our Jeffery Epstein elites to drop dead. They have trodden on your liberty long enough. Start fighting back, “on the beaches, on the landing grounds, and in the fields and in the streets.” And don’t stop fighting until every single American’s liberty is secured and the guards of our libocracy are so secure our children’s children’s children will never come close to sniffing the foul stench of the totalitarianism.
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. Peace.
Be First to Comment