The following Bicentennial Essay is the tenth and last in a series that has been appearing periodically, surveying how America has changed in its 200 years.
"An athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous ounce of metal on it!" exclaimed William Dean Howells before the centerpiece of Philadelphia's International Exhibition celebrating our nation's 100th birthday. He was inspired to these words by the gigantic 700-ton Corliss steam engine that towered over Machinery Hall. When President Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil turned the levers on May 10, 1876, a festive crowd cheered as the engine set in motion a wonderful as sortment of machines— pumping water, combing wool, spinning cotton, tearing hemp, printing newspapers, lithographing wallpaper, sewing cloth, folding envelopes, sawing logs, shaping wood, making shoes — 8,000 machines spread over 13 acres.
Others, especially visitors from abroad, were troubled by this American spectacle. "I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed," announced the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, "by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things?"
The monster steam engine was an appropriate symbol of the American future, but not for the reason most of the spectators suspected. The special hopes, opportunities and achievements, the fears and frustrations that marked the nation's grandeur in its second century — and are destined to mark the century now to come — were to be even newer than visitors to the 1876 exposition could imagine. These came not from bigness but from a new kind of community. New ties would bind Americans together, would bind Americans to the larger world and would bind the world to America. I call this community the Republic of Technology.
This community of our future was not created by any assemblage of statesmen. It had no written charter, and was not to be governed by any council of ambassadors. Yet it would reach into the daily lives of citizens on all continents. In creating and shaping this community the U.S. would play the leading role.
The word Republic I use as Thomas Paine, propagandist of the American Revolution, used it in his Rights of Man, to mean "not any particular form of government" but "the matter or object for which government ought to be instituted . . . res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good; or, literally translated, the public thing." This word describes the shared public concerns of people in different nations, the community of those who share these concerns.