250 Years of Innovation

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
On Saturday. This great experiment is two hundred and fifty
years young, because that's what America is, an experiment, and
great experiments aren't mastered, but built upon. Over the last
few Wednesdays leading up to Independence Day, we've retold the
stories of our iconic neighbors, some of the men and
women who, like their fellow great Americans, built upon this

(00:22):
grand idea from right here. But if they, from Rose
Blumkin to Edward Flanagan, Bob Gibson to Peter Kewitt were
at this birthday party, imagine just how awe struck they'd be.
Think for a moment about the father of our country,
George Washington, dead at sixty seven of a sore throat

(00:42):
and infection. But if all you have to treat one
is vinegar and honey, it's fatal. Just three generations later,
his great great grandchildren shook off the same sore throat
with a single shot of American invented penicillin. Until the
late nineteen century, the average household burned seventy tons of

(01:03):
firewood a year just to keep warm and cook beans
for dinner. Until just one hundred thirty years ago, energy
was something you bought with your muscles. Today, one gallon
of gasoline pumped by tapping a credit card is the
energy equivalent of one man's ten hours of labor, six
days a week for an entire month. Energy was an

(01:26):
American leap. Today we lead an energy technology. Some twenty
US based startups are racing to perfect a microreactor, and
if their bets are sound, our grand children will heat
their homes with little more than the output of a
sealed kernel of uranium. America's second president, one of our founders,

(01:47):
John Adams, began his day with half a cup of cider,
ended it with three glasses of wine. He was intoxicated
all day. Had to be. The water wasn't safe. Their
water carried so many diseases and bacteria it killed thousands
of Americans every year. And then, in nineteen oh eight,
a New Jersey physician named John Leal had an idea.

(02:10):
He dropped a tiny dose of chlorine into the water
supply of Jersey City, New Jersey, became the first water
treatment plant in the world. To this day, it remains
the largest public health victory in human history. In seventeen
seventy six, the average person never traveled more than thirty
miles from where they were born. The fastest mode of

(02:33):
transport was a strong horse, but few challenged the tyranny
of geography, so we just stayed put. But it was
here where American inventors and engineers brought us canals and
railroads and tunnels. We birthed the Wright brothers and Henry Ford.
In seventeen seventy six, it took ten weeks to cross

(02:53):
the Atlantic Ocean. By nineteen fifty eight, an American made
Boeing seven oh seven carried travelers from New York to
Paris in seven hours. Before the end of this decade,
the brainiacs at American born Astromechanica should be ready to
test fly its supersonic jet carrying us from San Francisco

(03:16):
to Paris in ninety minutes. On our first birthday. Two
hundred and forty nine ago, forty percent of kids didn't
live to see their fifth birthday. The mortality rate was stubborn.
A mom and a dad could expect to bury at
least two of their children. Last year, a medical team
in Philadelphia diagnosed a one week old named kJ with

(03:39):
a one in a million metabolic disorder. Until now, that
was a death sentence. Kj's doctors found a typo in
his DNA. They designed a gene editing tool to delete
the typo and paste in the correct letter. Sixteen months later,
kJ is taking his first depths. What made it possible

(04:02):
for doctors to read Kj's genome, find a single broken letter,
make a drug targeted at that exact letter, and infuse
it into him American technology. It took thousands of scientists,
thirteen years and three billion dollars to sequence the first
human genome. Today, a California startup can read one for

(04:26):
one hundred dollars. Over the past two fifty we transformed
a country whose first president died of a sore throat
to where a one week old gets a drug made
for his specific genome achievement through a billion small acts
of invention by ordinary Americans in garages, basements, and rented space.

(04:46):
Pessimists will tell you America's in decline that her best
days are behind her. Don't believe them. Be the optimist
in the room today, because in America, optimists always win.