The United States has spent its quarter millennium of existence creating tools that reshaped the modern world.
As the country celebrates its 250th birthday, here are five tools invented within its borders that completely transformed how humanity lives.
The Telephone — 1876
Working from his laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell changed human communication on March 7, 1876, when the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent No. 174,465 for transmitting speech by electrical current. Three days later, he spoke the first clear sentence sent by telephone, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!”
While the telegraph already carried coded pulses across long distances, Bell’s device carried the human voice. He co-founded the company that became AT&T, and the telephone soon linked homes, businesses and cities. Bell’s networks laid the groundwork for a century of American communication research. Mathematician Claude Shannon later used the same communication science to help launch another world-altering invention, artificial intelligence.
The Airplane — 1903
Orville and Wilbur Wright, who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, achieved what inventors had chased for more than a century: powered flight controlled by a pilot. On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted a powered flying machine he and his brother Wilbur had built off the sand at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The machine stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet during the first flight.
Three more flights followed, with the brothers trading turns at the controls. Wilbur flew the last and longest, staying aloft for 59 seconds and traveling 852. The brothers’ invention of three-axis control was a major breakthrough, which let the pilot steer and steady the flying machine.
The brothers also pioneered the use of the wind tunnel as a design tool. Within two years of their breakthrough, they built the first practical airplane, Wright Flyer III, which could sustain much longer flights.
In October 1903, The New York Times published an op-ed claiming that machine capable of powered flight may not be possible for “one million to ten million years.” Just 69 days later, the Wright brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk.
The Internet — 1969
The World Wide Web began as a U.S. defense project. On Oct. 29, 1969, researchers at UCLA sent the first message between two computers over ARPANET, a network funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. The message traveled from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed after transmitting the first two letters of “login” from one computer to the other. So, the first transmission on the internet read simply “lo.”
The network grew to four connected computers by the end of the year. Its core idea, packet switching, broke data into small pieces and routed them separately. ARPANET’s technology became the shared language of a worldwide network and grew into the global internet that now connects billions of people.
GPS — 1973-1993
The Global Positioning System (GPS) also traces its origins to the U.S military. The Defense Department launched the program in 1973, and it sent up its first satellite in 1978. The full network of 24 satellites came online in 1993.
President Ronald Reagan moved to open GPS to civilian use after a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air Lines jet that had strayed into Soviet airspace in 1983. The military kept the most precise signal to itself for years, but the government removed the restriction in 2000. GPS now guides cars, phones, farms, ships and aircraft worldwide, and the system is run by the Space Force.
Artificial Intelligence — 1956 and onward
The field of artificial intelligence was first launched at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. In the summer of 1956, a small group of scientists gathered for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Mathematician John McCarthy organized the meeting and coined the term “artificial intelligence.”
“The study is to proceed on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it,” argued McCarthy and three co-authors in their founding proposal. Historians call the Dartmouth meeting the “Constitutional Convention of AI.”
Among the authors was Claude Shannon of Bell Labs, who established the field of information theory in 1948. Shannon turned to chess in 1950, mapping out in a research paper the logic a computer would need to play the game.
Progress with AI accelerated in the 2010s as computing power and access to vast data made machine learning more practical. AI then surged in popularity after ChatGPT debuted to the public in 2022. Today, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are among the leaders in AI systems that write, “reason” and code.
Editor’s Note: Do you believe another invention should have been included in this list? If, so, say so in the comments below.
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