January 2011

1. Colossus

Henry Luce, a founder of Time Magazine, coined the term “American century” to describe the twentieth century in which he lived and in which the United States became the world’s foremost power. But not even Luce could have foreseen America’s global position at the dawn of the twenty-first century, only 33 years after his death. Today, the United States is pre-eminent in the world militarily, technologically, scientifically, and culturally as no state has been since the apogee of the Roman Empire 1,800 years ago.

1837: The Telegraph Samuel Morse’s telegraph separated communication and transportation. Information became electrical, with the Morse Code the first form of software. During the Civil War, the telegraph and the railroad came into their own as the twin, dominant modes of modern commerce, requiring new forms of office organization.

1873: The Typewriter Glidden&Sholes’s first practical model was manufactured by Remington, the gun maker. It went on the market in 1873, at a price of $125, but not until more than a decade later did a manufacturer offer a typewriter whose typed line was visible to the user, or one with lowercase as well as capital letters. Touch-typing came on the scene in the 1880s—and with it the standardized QWERTY keyboard.

In 1915, before commercial broadcasting existed, David Sarnoff, an assistant traffic manager at the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company of America, proposed to build and sell a “radio music box,” and wrote, “I have in mind a plan of development that would make radio a household utility.…”

When a new outfit called Radio Corporation of America took over Marconi, just after World War I, it acquired Sarnoff as an asset. He pursued his idea—and saw it yield more than $80 million in sales by the mid-1920s. In 1926 he led RCA into the new field of radio networks, forming the National Broadcasting Company. He was named president of RCA in 1930.

He soon turned his attention to television, and RCA’s NBC network became hugely popular. Sarnoff could rightly boast that he had introduced both radio and television as mass media.

—T.A.H.

The other great engine of change that made the twentieth-century American economy so different from that of the nineteenth was electricity. Electricity began being scientifically investigated in the eighteenth century and had its first major practical application in the telegraph, which started to spread in the 184Os. Edison’s electric light, far superior in both illumination and safety to gaslight, spurred the demand for electricity, which quickly spread to the major cities. But it would be the middle of the twentieth century before the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration made it available nearly everywhere. The astonishing increase in our electricity consumption in the past hundred years is, in very important ways, a measure of the American economy over that time. In 1902 the country produced 6.0 million kilowatt hours of electricity. By 1929, 116.7 million; in 1970, 1.4 billion; and in 1997 we produced 3.1 billion kWh.

“I will build a motor car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford declared. “It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”

His path to this goal began in his own home, where he assembled a succession of vehicles that won the financial backing with which he founded Ford Motor Company, in 1903. He built several different types of car, and then in 1908, he offered the Model T. After that, he never looked back.

It was simple, rugged, and durable. In an era when every motorist had to be his own mechanic, it was easy to maintain. Ford tried various production methods and then in 1913 introduced the moving assembly line, an innovation that would define the nature of much industrial production for decades to come.

By 1920, the whole appearance of American city streets along with their noise and even their smell had changed from what they had been 20 years earlier. The horse, which had been the chief means of land transportation for 3,500 years, had given way to the automobile, and the country’s largest industry had been born.

The dream of a self-propelled vehicle had been around at least since the middle of the eighteenth century, but it was only toward the end of the nineteenth, when the internal combustion engine approached practicability, that the dream started to be a reality. Europe, especially France and Germany, made many of the first technical breakthroughs (such as the carburetor), and France was the largest automobile producer until 1904, when it was overtaken by the United States, which has led the world ever since.

In 1894 he was 1 of 10 kids from a scottish family just managing to squeak by in a small, gray town in the Scottish Highlands. A mere decade later he sat in the Waldorf-Astoria, in a cutaway suit, hobnobbing with some of the most powerful men of his time. My grandfather had come a long way—though not quite so far as it appeared.

He had left home at 14, armed with an eighth-grade education and a burning ambition to be somebody. He worked as a clerk, as a printer’s devil, learned shorthand, and eventually landed himself a job as a reporter. Then it was off to the wider world, first to South Africa and then on to America. He had lived frugally up to then. But not long after he arrived here, he abandoned his good Scotsman’s ways and set himself up in style. Suddenly his hard-earned savings were being squandered on lavish rooms, evening clothes, and card games. By all rights he belonged in a cold-water flat in Brooklyn, but his extravagance had a purpose. He was a business reporter, and he intended to succeed. And what better way to get to know his subjects than to live among them?

In 1900 Andrew Carnegie was getting old and wanted to sell his Carnegie Steel Company. He turned to the financier J. P. Morgan, a man accustomed to transactions on the largest scale. Paying Carnegie $480 million, Morgan merged his company with steel holdings of his own. In 1901 he announced the result: U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.

Inevitably, it faced a challenge under the Sherman Antitrust Act, and the government’s suit against the company reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1917. In 1920 the justices ruled in favor of the corporation. They determined that it had not engaged in unfair business practices, and was not to be punished merely because of its size.

Morgan had died in 1913, but with this posthumous victory, he completed the work that John D. Rockefeller had begun. Unlike Standard Oil, U.S. Steel showed that it could be both large and legal. Other industries took note, and an era of trustbusting came to an end.

—T.A.H.