The nations of Europe, Asia and Africa mostly owe their existences to accidents of geography or language, the fortunes of war or interference from imperial powers. But the U.S., to a very great extent, is the product of its citizens' own ingenuity. Faced with an untamed wilderness and distances their European forebears could barely comprehend, the settlers who came to colonize the new land responded by becoming a nation of tinkerers, backyard inventors and, ultimately, technologists. Now, lacking a wilderness but confronted with challenges as great as those faced by their ancestors, mid-20th century Americans are responding similarly. In university and corporate laboratories, in basement and attic workshops, they are busy trying to invent their way out of an energy crisis, the worst recession in a generation and, toughest of all, what appears to be a global shortage of raw materials and finished products of many kinds.
From the time it was first founded, the U.S. has been the world's foremost innovator. Eli Whitney's cotton gin turned the South into a profitable agricultural kingdom that could rival the industrial North. Cyrus H. McCormick's reaper enabled farmers to transform the Great Plains into vast seas of grain and feed a growing nation. Canals and railroads made long-distance travel possible, while the telegraph and, later, the telephone made it unnecessary. Mass production—another 19th century American invention—turned out a plethora of consumer goods, from automobiles and radios to fiberglass boats, all of which helped make the U.S. standard of living the highest in the world. Plenty gave the nation the opportunity to look beyond its own rapidly closing frontiers and explore the poles, the moon and now the surface of Mars (see SCIENCE).
Lately, however, there have been fears that the U.S. may be giving up—or letting go of—its lead in technology.
The National Science Foundation reports that foreign inventions now account for nearly a third of the 1,300-plus patents issued each week by the U.S. Patent Office. Foreign countries lead the U.S. in the development of supersonic passenger jets and the introduction of new drugs and are catching and surpassing the country in the areas of electronics and textiles. From corporate boardrooms to garret laboratories, there is a widespread concern that the U.S. genius for invention is going the way of the passenger pigeon.
This is not a baseless worry. Foreign companies have expanded enormously in recent years, partly by importing, and in some cases improving upon American technology. Meanwhile, recession and the inflation of the past decade have taken their toll in the U.S. research and development community. Many American companies have cut back on investment into potentially risky new products. Federal funding for research has also been in increasingly short supply. The U.S. investment in R. and D. actually decreased during the early 1970s, and still remains too sparse for the scientific community's satisfaction. For example, funds for space projects, which stood at $6 billion a year in 1966, now total a mere $3 billion.