They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators
by By Evans, Harold, Buckland, Gail, and Lefer, David
Category: Technology & Engineering , History

The flourishing of America is the story of an inventive people with a mystic faith in technology, from the early settlers who used windmills as a way of getting water on the Great Plains to the electronic whiz kids of the Internet. Innovation, practical inventiveness, is the main force behind America's preeminence. But there is more to this extraordinary history. Harold Evans traces how the innovators have time and again proved to be democratizers, driven not by greed but by an ambition to be remembered. They translated the nation's political ideals into economic reality.