Who Made America Rich?

By Daniel Kadlec

THREE YEARS BEFORE John Fitch began contemplating the absurd--a boat powered by steam, not wind or men with oars--a warring band of Delaware Indians seized his raft, which was heading up the Ohio River with flour for settlers. The Indians scalped two of his companions; Fitch narrowly escaped a tomahawk blow to the head. This was his second brush with death at the hands of the Delaware tribe, whose swift canoes in 1782 often rendered the settlers' plodding rafts easy prey.

Flash forward: at the helm of his yacht Tenacious, Ted Turner battled 40-ft. waves for four hours in a storm that claimed 19 lives and disabled 210 of 302 vessels in a four-day ocean race in 1979. Turner not only lived to successfully launch an unlikely venture--a 24-hour cable news network called CNN, in 1980--but also won the sea race and later said that even during the worst of the storm his mind was on finishing first.

From Fitch, spurred to invent the steamboat by a mortal need for speed, to Turner, driven by the thrill of risk and winning, American inventors and innovators during the U.S.'s march to economic dominance in the past two centuries have thrived in difficult--even deadly--conditions. In They Made America (Little, Brown; 496 pages), author, journalist and immigrant Harold Evans celebrates the near mythic lives of 70 unique thinkers who beat long odds to realize a dream and, in their day, to improve life for the masses.

"It is not simply invention; it is inventiveness put to use" that allowed America to achieve "preeminence while other well-endowed land masses lagged or failed," Evans writes. Five years in the works, this coffee-table anchor is the basis for a PBS series that starts Nov. 8. America is superbly written and thoroughly researched. Yet its power draws from the commonalities it finds between, say, Isaac Merritt Singer, whose sewing-machine firm was the first U.S. multinational in the 1860s, and Russell Simmons, the rap producer who took hip-hop global in the 1990s.

Among names stitched into Evans' work are Robert Fulton, often miscredited with inventing the steamboat but whose actual brilliance was in developing a market for river travel; Sam Colt, whose repeating revolver defeated foes of vastly superior numbers, was favored by Frank and Jesse James and set the standard for efficient mass production with interchangeable parts; and A.P. Giannini, whose Bank of America popularized mortgages and other loans for common folks.

Evans' challenge is saying something different. Barrels of ink have been spent on his subjects; many are the central figure in one or several books. Even the comparatively little-known Giannini gets four pages in the Dictionary of American Biography. And it's hardly revealing that creative minds universally must put up with institutional doubts that would crush lesser individuals.

What can Evans add? By neatly placing his subjects in their day and exploring what drove them, the author distills a template for innovation that, he candidly writes, he hopes will "spark the ambitions of the next generation to make a new America." That's shooting high, just as his subjects did. --By Daniel Kadlec