God Looks After Fools, Drunks and the United States: John Steele Gordon on How Information Technology United America

“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon

To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time:

1. Internet

2. Light bulb

3. Integrated circuit

4. Personal computer

5. Airplane

The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business historian John Steele Gordon validates the list. Gordon’s piece for the WSJ series is titled “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation.” His argument is that the United States was always in danger of falling apart and the telegraph saved the republic. Then radio, television, and even the now vilified internet knitted it even closer together.

Otto von Bismarck quipped that God looks after three things: fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Gordon agrees with the Prussian unifier of Germany. Nobody, he notes, has ever made money selling America short. As for the now venerable republic, he thinks it’s still in pretty good hands. The ever expanding national debt, however, is another matter. That certainly wouldn’t get onto Gordon’s top 250 most impactful American inventions.

Five Takeaways

•       Hanging by a Thread: The Communication Crisis at the Founding: George Washington’s fear was not philosophical: it was geographic. The original United States, stretching to the Mississippi, was larger than all of Western Europe. The trans-Appalachian West couldn’t get its commerce over the mountains — it had to go down the Mississippi, which was controlled by Spain. Washington said the West was hanging by a thread. Every subsequent expansion — to California in 1850, to Oregon and Washington — only deepened the crisis. The republic could not exist without communication. That is why the post office was almost constitutionally important in Washington’s time, and why the telegraph and the transatlantic cable were understood as national security technology, not merely as business.

•       The Atlantic Cable: Ten Days to Ten Seconds: In 1800, a transatlantic crossing took two months westbound and six weeks eastbound. By the 1850s, with steam, it was ten days either way. Cyrus Field — a paper merchant who knew nothing about cable technology — read about undersea cables and decided to lay one across the Atlantic Ocean. Gordon compares this to reading about Sputnik and deciding to go to Mars. It took six tries and ten years. William Thomson — Lord Kelvin — did the physics. The result: ten days to ten seconds. Basically simultaneous. The nineteenth century was right to call itself an age of miracles.

•       The Robber Barons Were Misunderstood: As early as the 1850s, the New York Times was calling Commodore Vanderbilt a “robber baron” — after the medieval German toll barons on the Rhine who wouldn’t let your boat pass without paying. Gordon’s verdict: the dead can’t sue, but they should. Vanderbilt built a faster, safer, cheaper transportation network than had existed before. He died the richest man in America in 1877, worth $105 million. Henry Ford did the same thing with the automobile: took a rich man’s toy invented in Germany and built one the average man could afford. Gordon sees Elon Musk’s reusable rocket in the same tradition. Nobody complained about their products. They complained about their wealth.

•       The Internet Is the Greatest American Invention: The Wall Street Journal’s ranking puts the Inte