Welcome to The Founding Era of American Innovation
We Built That!? | A JMiF Original Series
Buckle Up Besties!
Today we are diving in to The Founding Era of American Innovation which for the absolutely official and universally recognized sake of this blog is the period from 1776 – 1799.
These were the years where the United States transitioned from a revolutionary idea into a full-fledged nation. Which, as it turns out, required inventing a whole lot more than just a government. This time was not simply a period of corn-planting, flour-milling, and blacksmiths, though there was that for sure… Americans were experimenting with submarines, repeating firearms, steamboats, automated manufacturing, mass production, agricultural machinery, cryptography, new financial instruments, even a better way to simply sit at a desk. Meanwhile, the new nation was building something arguably more important: the systems designed to encourage people to invent in the first place.
Not everything invented in this period made America better. Some innovations created rich prosperity while deepening exploitation. Some inventors became legends and others watched someone else become famous for essentially finishing what they started.
And some inventions?
Well, sometimes it’s as simple as being annoyed that one has to constantly switch their glasses.
So, let’s jump in and meet some of the inventors and innovators and discover their inventions that helped define the first quarter-century of the United States…
A Quick Detour: The overall pacing and flow of this series will go a little like this: I will introduce a new era, I will paint some broad strokes in that era’s introductory post of the people and places and ideas that shaped that era and I will follow that introduction with a dozen or so posts where we will peel back the onion so-to-speak in order to do a deeper dive on some folks and interesting contraptions and ideas.
Every year in American History will have at least one invention noted. Not every invention needs more than a paragraph or two. Some inventions, and their inventors, deserve an entire book (and many probably have them!) but for this publication, I am not necessarily doing any formulaic approach to the inventions that made the cut for a given year. I did try to put weight on the inventions that made the cut for a given year. I did try to put weight on inventions that either dramatically altered the timeline themselves or that would be the first iteration in something that would grow into a larger idea or movement later on.
All of this is to say: if you don’t see your favorite invention featured, drop a note and I’ll check it out! There have been tens of millions of patents issued and millions more inventions that were released without ever considering a patent… I’ve done my best, y’all!
The Timeline: 1776 – 1799
1776 | David Bushnell & The Turtle Submarine
While the United States was busy declaring independence from Great Britain, David Bushnell was working on an entirely different problem: how do you defeat the world’s most powerful navy when you don’t exactly have the world’s most powerful navy?
His answer was The Turtle, a tiny, one-person, hand-powered submersible designed to sneak beneath British warships and attach an explosive charge to their hulls.
In September 1776, Continental Army Sergeant Ezra Lee piloted the Turtle in an attempted attack against a British Vessel in New York Harbor. The mission failed, but the experiment represented one of history’s earliest documented attempts to use a submersible in naval warfare.
Bushnell also experimented extensively with underwater explosives, helping establish ideas that would eventually evolve into modern naval mines and submarine warfare.
The Turtle didn’t win the Revolution.
It did show exactly how Americans would repeatedly approach technological disadvantages: if you can’t overpower the competition, try out-inventing them.
1777 | Joseph Belton & The Belton Repeating Flintlock
Imagine pitching a repeating firearm to the Continental Congress, right in the middle of the American Revolution.
This is essentially what Philadelphia inventor Joseph Belton did.
Belton demonstrated a modified flintlock firearm that he claimed could fire multiple rounds in rapid succession without the lengthy manual reloading process required by conventional muskets. Congress showed enough interest to negotiate with him about producing weapons for the Continental Army.
Then, things fell apart.
Belton and Congress couldn’t lock in a price.
The weapon never became standard military equipment, and historians continue to debate exactly how practical or effective Belton’s system would have been at scale. Still, his experiments belong to a much longer American obsession with increasing the speed at which firearms could be loaded and fired.
In other words: even before America had finished becoming a country, someone was already trying to sell a faster gun.
1778 | The U.S. Dollar Sign & Oliver Pollock… Sort Of
Here’s an invention you probably used today without thinking about it: $.
The precise origin of the dollar sign remains debated, but one popular explanation connects it to Irish-born American merchant and Revolutionary War financier Oliver Pollock.
Pollock frequently dealt in Spanish pesos, often abbreviated in handwritten financial records with combinations of a “P” and “S.” Over time, overlapping the letters may have produced something resembling the now-familiar “$.”
Pollock’s correspondence is often cited as containing early examples of the symbol, although calling him the inventor of the dollar sign would be overselling what the historical records can prove.
What we do know is that the symbol emerged from the messy commercial world of Spanish currency, international trade, handwritten accounting, and a young United States still figuring out what its own money would even look like.
Sometimes innovation isn’t a machine.
Sometimes, it’s shorthand that sticks around for centuries.
1779 | The College of William & Mary and America’s First University Law Department
A new country needs laws.
It also needs people who actually understand those laws.
In 1779, the College of William & Mary established what is generally recognized as the first university-level law program in the United States when George Wythe became the institution’s first professor of law and police.
Wythe’s students included future political leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and James Monroe.
The innovation here wasn’t a mechanical invention. It was institutional.
Rather than relying entirely on apprenticeships and informal legal training, America was beginning to treat law as a formal academic discipline which would create a professional pipeline for the lawyers, judges, legislators, and public officials who would operate the country’s emerging legal system.
In this case, the United States wasn’t merely inventing new technology or schools of thought, but the actual guardrails and infrastructure required for the nation to continue to run itself.
1780 | The Commonwealth of Massachusetts & Inflation-Indexed Bonds
Who would have guessed: financing a revolution is expensive. Inflation makes promises about future payment worth considerably less by the time the bill comes due. This makes finding financiers a tough bit.
Fortunately, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was on top of that small problem. In 1780, Massachusetts issued bonds designed to protect soldiers and creditors against wartime inflation by tying repayment to the changing value of a basket of commonly purchased goods.
The idea was remarkably sophisticated: if prices rose dramatically, repayment should adjust accordingly rather than leaving the bondholder with money that had lost much of its purchasing power. This early inflation-indexed system of securities represented an innovative attempt to solve one of the Revolution’s nastiest financial problems as well as anticipated financial instruments that governments would still utilize centuries later.
Turns out, “your money isn’t worth what it used to be” is not a particularly new complaint.
1781 | Andrew Law & Early American Authorial Copyright
America’s modern copyright system did not appear fully formed overnight. Before federal copyright law existed, individual states began experimenting with ways to protect authors and creators.
Music educator and composer, Andrew Law, became an important figure in this emerging system when Connecticut granted him copyright protection for his musical work in 1781, among the earliest examples of an American government formally recognizing an author’s ownership interest in their creative output. The larger idea was transformative.
If the new nation wanted writers, musicians, scholars, and creators to produce original work, they reasoned that perhaps those creators should have some ability to control, and profit from their creations.
Within a decade, that principle would become embedded in the U.S. Constitution and federal law. America wasn’t just figuring out how to protect physical inventions. It was beginning to ask: who owns an idea?
1782 | Charles Thomson & William Barton and The Great Seal of the United States
Countries need symbols. The Flag. Cultural lore. Icons. And symbols of authority and official office. On June 20, 1782, after years of proposals and committee work, Congress approved the design that became The Great Seal of the United States. Secretary of Congress Charles Thomson assembled the final design, drawing significantly from ideas proposed by heraldry expert William Barton and earlier committees.
The result gave America some of its most enduring national imagery: the bald eagle, the shield, the olive branch, thirteen arrows, and the motto E Pluribus Unum: “Out of many, one.”
The reverse introduced another symbol that would become globally recognizable: an unfinished pyramid topped by the Eye of Providence. You have probably seen both sides countless times, as they both appear on the back of the one-dollar bill.
1782 | Jacob Yoder & The Mississippi Flatboat Trade
Early America faced a geography and logistics problem: its rivers could carry enormous quantities of goods, but navigating those waterways efficiently was another matter altogether.
Jacob Yoder is traditionally credited with making an early commercial flatboat voyage from the Ohio River down the Mississippi to New Orleans, helping demonstrate the economic potential of moving agricultural products and other goods from the western frontier toward southern markets.
Flatboats were gloriously uncomplicated: broad, boxy vessels designed primarily to float downstream with cargo. They also became essential infrastructure. As settlers pushed westward into Appalachia and the Ohio River valley, flatboat commerce connected inland farms and communities to distant markets, turning the Ohio and Mississippi rivers into enormous, natural commercial highways.
The boats weren’t particularly glamorous, but the economic network they helped create absolutely was.
1783 | Benjamin Hanks & The Pneumatic Self-Winding Clock
Benjamin Hanks was one of those early American inventors who refused to stay in a single lane. He was a clockmaker. Instrument maker. Bell founder. Mechanic.
Among his experiments was an ingenious clock mechanism designed to use changes in atmospheric pressure to help wind itself: an early attempt to capture energy from the surrounding environment to keep a mechanical device operating.
Hank would become better known for manufacturing bells and large bronze objects, contributing to an emerging American precision-manufacturing tradition. His pneumatic clock, however, captured something wonderfully familiar about American invention during this era… even winding the clock was apparently a problem someone thought could be automated.
1784 | Benjamin Franklin & The Double Spectacles (Bifocals)
Benjamin Franklin had a problem. He needed one pair of glasses to see things nearby and another to see things far away. Constantly switching them was annoying. So Franklin did what Franklin tended to do when something annoyed him: he tried to redesign it.
By cutting lenses of different strengths and combining them into a single pair of spectacles, Franklin created what he called “double spectacles,” an early form of what we now call bifocals. The precise history of bifocals is more complicated than the tidy “Franklin invented them” version most of us learned, and we’ll get to that in a few posts. But Franklin’s use and description of double spectacles perfectly captures his relentlessly practical approach to innovation.
He didn’t want to simply invent for the sake of invention. He observed friction in everyday life and thought: Well, surely we can fix that.
1785 | Oliver Evans & The Automated Flour Mill
Oliver Evans looked at flour milling and saw something deeply offensive to an inventor: Too many people were doing things machines could probably do instead.
His automated flour-milling system used interconnected mechanical devices—including bucket elevators, conveyors, and other equipment—to move grain and flour through multiple stages of production with dramatically less manual handling. It was an early example of continuous-flow manufacturing and industrial automation.
Evans wasn’t simply improving one machine. He was redesigning an entire process. That distinction would become enormously important as American industry evolved. Increasingly, innovation wouldn’t mean inventing a single better tool. It would mean connecting machines together so an entire production system became faster, cheaper, and more efficient.
The factory of the future was beginning to take shape.
1786 | Ezekiel Reed & The Nail-Cutting Machine
Nails seem boring. Making nails seems pretty straightforward. That is, until you need millions of them.
Before mechanized production, nails were labor-intensive products typically forged individually by blacksmiths or nailers. As American construction expanded, inventors began developing machines capable of cutting nails mechanically from sheets or bars of iron. Ezekiel Reed was among the early American innovators associated with mechanized nail production during the 1780s.
It sounds like a tiny improvement. It wasn’t. Cheap, abundant nails reduced construction costs and helped accelerate building across a rapidly growing country. This is one of innovation history’s recurring lessons: the inventions that transform an economy aren’t always the flashy ones. Sometime they’re the things that everyone suddenly needs by the bucket-full.
1787 | John Fitch & The Successful Steamboat Demonstration
Before Robert Fulton became synonymous with the American steamboat, there was John Fitch. In 1787, Fitch successfully demonstrate a steam-powered vessel on the Delaware River near Philadelphia, reportedly attracting attention from members of the Constitutional Convention.
Over the following years, he continued developing steamboats and eventually operated passenger service. And yet, ask most Americans who invented the steamboat and you’re unlikely to hear his name.
Fitch struggled with financing, technical challenges, patent disputes, and the brutally difficult task of turning experimental technology into a sustainable commercial enterprise. His story illustrates one of the most important truths about American innovation: being first does not guarantee you’ll be remembered.
Sometimes history remembers the inventor. Sometimes it remembers the person who figured out how to scale the invention. John Fitch’s remarkable—and remarkably frustrating—race to commercialize steam navigation is a story in its own right. We’ll be returning to him later in the series, too.
1788 | The First Federal Land Patent
The United States had acquired an enormous amount of territory. Now it needed a reliable way to determine who owned what. Early federal land patents became the legal mechanism through which the national government transferred public land into private ownership, creating documented chains of title as settlement expanded westward.
This wasn’t “invention” in the workshop sense. It was administrative innovation. Standardized land ownership records helped create confidence that property could be purchased, sold, inherited, developed, and used as collateral.
Of course, the story of American land ownership also carries a much darker reality: much of the territory being surveyed, divided, patented, and sold by the United States had been inhabited and governed by Indigenous peoples for generations, showing that innovation in government can create order and it can formalize dispossession.
1789 | The Constitutional Foundation for American Patents and Copyrights
When the Founders ratified the Constitution in 1787, they had no idea what technologies Americans would go on to invent. What they did believe was that invention itself deserved encouragement. Article I, Section 8 gave Congress the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” laying the constitutional foundation for America’s patent and copyright systems.
The mechanism was simple, and it still holds today: inventors and authors who disclosed their work to the public would receive exclusive rights to its commercial use, but only for a limited time. Create something new, share the knowledge, and society grants you temporary control in return.
The machines changed. The industries changed. The technologies became unimaginable to the people who wrote those words. But that basic bargain, disclosure in exchange for protection, would go on to shape 250 years of American invention, starting with the ones covered in this series.
1790 | Samuel Hopkins & America’s First Patent
On July 31, 1790, Samuel Hopkins received the first patent issued under the newly created federal patent system. His revolutionary invention? A better way to make potash and pearl ash. Not exactly the dramatic beginning you’d expect.
But potash mattered. Produced from wood ashes, it was an economically important material used in manufacturing goods like soap and glass.
Hopkins’s patent carries a second layer of historical weight. Under the Patent Act of 1790, applications were personally reviewed by senior members of the new federal government, and Hopkins’s surviving patent bears the signature of President George Washington himself.
The first American patent wasn’t really about potash. It marked something bigger: the moment the United States officially created a national system for rewarding invention. In case you missed the earlier post, you can dive into Samuel Hopkins’ invention on JMiF and learn why any of this matters.
1791 | Thomas Jefferson & The Swivel Writing Chair
Thomas Jefferson apparently looked at an ordinary chair and decided sitting still was unacceptable. His modified Windsor-style writing chair incorporated a revolving seat, letting him turn between his writing surface, books, papers, and visitors without constantly getting up.
Was it the first swivel chair ever created? Probably not in any absolute, global sense. But Jefferson’s chair became one of the best-known early American examples of the concept, and a reminder that innovation often starts with personal inconvenience.
Jefferson spent his life fascinated by gadgets, architecture, agriculture, and mechanical improvements of every kind. Apparently he also wanted the eighteenth-century equivalent of a really good office setup.
Relatable.
1792 | John Pearson & American Pilot Bread
Long before crackers became something you casually demolish while standing at the kitchen counter at midnight, they served a far more practical purpose.
In 1792, Massachusetts baker John Pearson is traditionally credited with developing a durable flour-and-water biscuit built to survive long journeys at sea. Known as pilot bread or ship’s biscuit, these bare-bones baked goods could be stored for extended periods without spoiling, making them essential provisions for sailors and travelers.
The modern cracker would evolve considerably from these brutally practical ancestors. Flavor, apparently, was a problem for future generations to solve.
The immediate challenge was simpler: how do you make bread survive a voyage?
1793 | Eli Whitney & The Cotton Gin
Few machines illustrate the complicated relationship between innovation and human progress more clearly than Eli Whitney’s cotton gin.
The device dramatically sped up the process of separating seeds from short-staple cotton, making cotton cultivation vastly more profitable across the American South. It was an extraordinary productivity breakthrough. It was also catastrophic. Rather than helping slavery fade economically, as some earlier observers had hoped, the cotton gin fueled a massive expansion of cotton production, and with it, an enormous increase in demand for enslaved labor.
Whitney’s story also raises difficult questions about how America assigns credit for invention. Catharine Littlefield Greene provided crucial support and connections, though later claims about additional technical contributions from her remain difficult to verify. Meanwhile, the broader agricultural and mechanical knowledge of enslaved Black workers existed within a system that denied them any legal claim to their own ideas.
The cotton gin created enormous wealth. The fire it helped fuel would burn for generations.
We’ll return to Whitney, Greene, contested credit, and the cotton gin’s role in American slavery in The Spark & The Fire, a future edition of We Built That!?
1794 | Zachariah Cox & The Circular Saw
As American sawmills expanded, inventors searched for ways to make lumber production faster and more continuous. Zachariah Cox is credited with an early American patent for a circular saw, awarded in 1794 for what he called a “round saw.”
The basic advantage is obvious once you see it: unlike a straight saw blade that has to repeatedly reverse direction, a circular blade can keep cutting for as long as it keeps spinning. That simple mechanical principle would eventually become foundational to sawmills, woodworking shops, construction sites, and industrial manufacturing.
Sometimes the biggest productivity improvement is simply figuring out how to stop going backward.
1795 | Thomas Jefferson & The Wheel Cipher
Apparently inventing a swivel chair wasn’t enough for Jefferson. He also needed encryption.
Jefferson designed a cylindrical cipher device made up of rotating wheels, each engraved with a scrambled alphabet. By arranging the wheels and aligning letters, users could encode a message into text that would look like gibberish to anyone without a matching device set to the same configuration.
The concept was remarkably ahead of its time. Wheel-based cipher technology would resurface in military cryptography more than a century later, developed independently by others who had no idea Jefferson got there first.
Jefferson’s device never became a widely adopted American cryptographic system during his lifetime. Still, the underlying idea held up.
Turns out protecting the group chat has been a national-security concern for a very long time.
1796 | Count Rumford & The Rumford Fireplace
The traditional fireplace was cozy. It was also spectacularly inefficient. Much of the heat escaped straight up the chimney, while poorly designed fireboxes often filled rooms with smoke instead of warmth.
American-born physicist and inventor Benjamin Thompson, better known as Count Rumford, approached the fireplace as an engineering problem rather than a fact of life. His redesigned fireplace featured a shallower firebox and angled sides that radiated more heat into the room, while a reworked chimney design improved airflow and cut down on smoke.
The Rumford fireplace went on to become enormously influential across Europe and America.
There is, however, a wonderfully awkward complication to claiming Thompson as an uncomplicated American innovation hero: during the American Revolution, he was a Loyalist. And not a quiet one, either, he actively spied for the British before fleeing the country entirely.
History is messy like that.
1797 | Charles Newbold & The Cast-Iron Plow
Plowing American soil was hard work. Charles Newbold believed iron could make it easier.
In 1797, Newbold received a U.S. patent for a cast-iron plow, built as a single integrated metal implement rather than relying on the wooden construction that was standard at the time.
There was just one problem: farmers weren’t convinced. Some reportedly feared iron plows would poison the soil or actually encourage weed growth.
Newbold’s invention struggled commercially, but the underlying idea survived. Later innovators, including Jethro Wood and eventually John Deere, would keep refining metal plows until they became essential tools of American agriculture.
Newbold’s experience fits a recurring pattern in this series: sometimes the technology works before the market is ready to believe it.
1798 | David Wilkinson & The Screw-Cutting Lathe
A screw seems like an incredibly simple object. Manufacturing thousands of identical ones is not.
In 1798, David Wilkinson patented a screw-cutting lathe that let American manufacturers produce standardized metal threads with far greater precision and consistency than hand-cutting allowed. That mattered well beyond screws.
Precision machine tools helped make interchangeable parts possible, moving manufacturing away from a world where every component had to be individually fitted by a skilled craftsperson. The result would eventually transform American industry. Machines could make parts. Those parts could build other machines. And increasingly, when something broke, the part could simply be replaced rather than refitted from scratch.
The age of precision manufacturing was coming.
1799 | Marc Isambard Brunel & The Multiple Writing Machine (Polygraph)
Before carbon paper, photocopiers, scanners, and the copy-paste command, duplicating a document was annoyingly straightforward: you wrote the whole thing again.
Inventors began experimenting with mechanical devices capable of producing multiple copies of handwriting at once. One such concept was the polygraph, a linked writing mechanism that let the movement of one pen be mirrored by a second.
Marc Isambard Brunel, a French-born engineer who spent several years in the United States before building the rest of his career in Britain, patented an early multiple-writing device of this kind in 1799. Thomas Jefferson would later become famously enthusiastic about a similar polygraph machine developed by John Isaac Hawkins and improved by Charles Willson Peale.
The goal was essentially the same one that would drive office technology for the next two centuries: I already wrote this once. Why should I have to write it again?
A New Country Built on New Ideas
Between 1776 and 1799, the United States did more than survive a revolution and stand up a government. It began building an innovation economy.
Inventors experimented with underwater warfare and steam navigation. Manufacturers automated production. Farmers adopted new machinery. Engineers refined tools. Writers and inventors gained legal protections that hadn’t existed before. Governments experimented with financial systems, land administration, and intellectual property, often for the first time anywhere in the world.
Some of these innovations made life easier. Some created entirely new industries. Some failed spectacularly before someone else picked up the idea and succeeded. And some, most notably the cotton gin, proved that technological progress and human progress are not the same thing at all.
That tension will follow us throughout this series.
Because the history of American innovation isn’t a neat parade of brilliant people having brilliant ideas. It’s a story about ambition, money, necessity, war, curiosity, competition, exploitation, opportunity, failure, and power. And occasionally, someone who was simply sick of switching between two pairs of glasses.
Next up: We dig into some of the more revolutionary ideas and inventions: Eli Whitney’s Cotten Gin (or was it?), the Steamboat, Benjamin Motherfu**in’ Franklin, Submarines, Contested Inventions, and more.
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