Begging, Borrowing, Stealing, and Inventing The Greatest Country in the World
We Built That!? | A JMiF Original Series
16 minute read-time.
Buckle Up, Besties!
Quick housekeeping before we pull out of the station. Keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Unless you are stopping for a hot dog. Then, by all means.
We are about to spend 250 years talking about American invention, and I need to be upfront about something before we go anywhere.
America did not blink into existence on July 4, 1776, fully formed, with Benjamin Franklin holding a kite in one hand and a patent application in the other.
By the time thirteen colonies got around to declaring independence, this land already had farms. Shipyards. Mills. Roads. Mines. Printing presses. Ironworks. Trade routes running across oceans and across the continent. It had agricultural systems so effective that European settlers spent generations trying to reverse engineer them. It had a stack of technical knowledge that nobody in London knew existed.
So here is the question this post has to answer before we can talk about a single named inventor.
Where does American invention actually begin?
Short answer: not where you think.
Longer answer: keep reading. I made snacks.
First, Let’s Set the Chronometer
We are starting this adventure a couple of centuries before the Declaration of Independence, and I want to be clear about why.
It is not because innovation on this continent started then. Indigenous peoples had been inventing here for tens of thousands of years. Roughly 500 years before Columbus, the city of Cahokia sat across the river from what is now St. Louis with a population that rivaled London’s, complete with engineered mounds, planned neighborhoods, and a regional trade network. Then drought, flooding, and resource strain hit, and the Mississippians walked away from it. An American metropolis rose and fell before England had a functioning parliament, and most of us learned exactly nothing about it in school.
But this series is the story of America, not the Americas, so we are picking up where the documentation most Americans grow up with begins. Right around 1492.
Historians call the biological and technological free for all that followed the Columbian Exchange. Crops, livestock, tools, metals, techniques, and diseases moving in every direction at a genuinely reckless pace. It is the single most consequential shuffle of stuff in recorded history, and almost nobody involved understood what was happening while it happened.
Here is the part that matters: Columbus did not make landfall on an empty continent, and he did not make landfall on a primitive one.
Population estimates for the pre-contact Americas vary wildly and every single one is contested. Anthropologist Henry Dobyns put the number north of the Rio Grande around 18 million, which sits at the high end of the range and gets argued about constantly. Even the conservative estimates land in the millions. And in 1500, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities on earth, bigger than London, Rome, or Seville, with causeways, aqueducts, and floating agricultural plots that European visitors described in a tone best summarized as “wait, what?”
Millions of people had spent thousands of years building agriculture, architecture, transportation, medicine, and environmental knowledge on this continent before anyone sailed the ocean blue.
Europeans did not introduce technology to an empty place.
They introduced a collision.
Innovation Was Already Here: Indigenous Technology Before 1492
If you have read any of the Illinovation series, you already know innovation is baked into the geology of this continent. Before a single European colonist set foot here, people had spent roughly 12,000 years inventing their way through problems.
A very incomplete list:
- Agriculture. Maize cultivation and selective breeding across generations, which is genetic engineering with a longer render time. Three Sisters planting, pairing corn, beans, and squash so that one plot fixed its own nitrogen, controlled its own weeds, and tripled its own yield. Irrigation, soil management, and controlled burns to keep land healthy.
- Transportation. Canoes and kayaks engineered for specific water conditions. Snowshoes and toboggans built for an entirely different physics problem. Trail and trade networks connecting regions Europeans would not fully map for another 300 years.
- Architecture and infrastructure. Longhouses. Pueblo construction. Earthworks and settlement planning that reflect real engineering knowledge, not the “primitive dwelling” framing a lot of us got handed in fourth grade.
- Everyday technology. Maple sugar production. Food preservation. Plant based medicine. Textiles and fishing tech refined over centuries of iteration.
Now here is the thing I need you to carry with you for the rest of this series.
Notice that we instinctively call the European version of this stuff invention and the Indigenous version tradition.
Sit with that word choice, because it is doing a lot of quiet work. It is also the cleanest early example of a pattern that will follow us for 250 years: the definition of “invention” has always been controlled by whoever is holding the pen, not by whoever did the inventing.
The Columbian Exchange Was Not a Potluck
October 12, 1492 kicks off the exchange, and technology starts moving in both directions at a maddening pace. Crops, tools, materials, manufacturing methods, navigation knowledge, medicine. Some of it genuinely useful. Some of it catastrophic.
It would be a farce to frame this as a lovely multicultural collaboration and call it a day. It was not that.
Real voluntary exchange happened in some places. Forced assimilation, exploitation, and outright theft happened in others. Frequently at the same time, in the same region, involving the same people.
That is uncomfortable, and it is also exactly the environment where innovation tends to detonate. Pressure plus proximity plus desperation is a hell of an R&D budget. History has just never been especially fair about who got the credit, the ownership, or the check when the collision produced something valuable.
Which is why “borrowing” and “stealing” are sitting right next to each other in the title of this post. That was on purpose.
Invention vs Innovation: Lock This One In
European colonists brought European technology with them and discovered, fairly quickly, that copying Europe directly was a bad plan. Shipbuilding, watermills, sawmills, ironworking, printing, firearms, farm equipment. All of it had to be adapted to unfamiliar materials, unfamiliar geography, and labor conditions no engineer in London had ever imagined.
Good spot to pause and lock in a distinction that will come up in basically every post from here forward.
- Invention is a genuinely new thing that did not exist before.
- Innovation is taking something that already exists and adapting it, improving it, scaling it, combining it with something else, commercializing it, or finding a use nobody had thought of.
Most of what happened in colonial America was innovation, not invention. Colonists were not dreaming up new mills from scratch. They were taking a European mill design and rebuilding it to survive somewhere its designers had never been.
Hold onto that distinction. It becomes extremely load bearing in 1790, when the patent system shows up and someone has to decide which of those two things you are legally allowed to own.
The Knowledge America Took by Force
This next part is not a sidebar. It gets real space, because it earned it.
Popular history reduces enslaved Africans to a source of physical labor. That framing is not just morally lazy, it is factually wrong. Enslaved people arrived carrying cultural traditions, intellectual knowledge, and highly specialized technical skill developed across an entire continent’s worth of climates, crops, and craft traditions.
In multiple colonies, that knowledge was the difference between a settlement surviving and a settlement failing.
Rice cultivation. Irrigation and water management. Indigo production. Metalworking. Livestock husbandry. Foodways and preservation methods that are still shaping how Americans cook right now, today, in your kitchen.
Credited or not.
For generations, school curricula and public memory have minimized slavery’s technological legacy. Public memory has also compressed an enormous system into a handful of familiar villains, which conveniently obscures the sprawling network of governments, merchants, financiers, insurers, shipbuilders, and institutions that profited from it and kept it running.
Here is the grim irony. The transatlantic slave trade is one of the best documented forced migrations in human history, because the people running it were meticulous accountants.
Surviving shipping records let historians estimate that roughly 12.5 million Africans were forced onto slave ships between 1526 and 1866. Nearly two million died during the Middle Passage.
The overwhelming majority never arrived in what became the United States. About 4 percent disembarked in the British mainland colonies. The rest went to Brazil (roughly 45 percent), the Caribbean (roughly 37 percent), and Spanish America (roughly 11 percent).
And one question is going to hang over some of the most fascinating advances in American history, especially in the country’s first century.
When a person is legally considered property, and that person improves a process, builds a better tool, or introduces valuable technical knowledge, who gets called the inventor?
Under American slavery, enslaved people created real invention while being legally barred from owning a cent of its value. We are going to run directly into that problem again and again.
So if we are going to spend two years asking where American innovation came from, we have to be honest about the answer. It did not come from Europe alone. It did not spring fully formed out of a handful of famous Founding Fathers. A lot of the knowledge was already here. Some crossed the Atlantic willingly.
And some was dragged here in chains.
The Inventions With No Inventor
Popular history has done a phenomenal job of framing invention as the work of a lone genius. It has done a terrible job of keeping receipts.
Enormous amounts of important colonial innovation have no name attached to them at all. Farming techniques, cooking methods, shipbuilding tricks, tools, architectural solutions, household technology. All of it evolved collectively, in increments, over generations.
Documentation often does not exist. Sometimes because knowledge traveled orally. More often because the people doing the work were not considered important enough to write down.
We are going to firmly reject the idea that an invention is not worth exploring just because there is no tidy Mr. Inventor Guy attached to it.
And as you will find out, even when there is one, the story is almost never that simple.
Necessity, and Also the Neighborhood Blacksmith
By the mid 1600s, colonial life had a built in innovation problem. Everything useful was extremely far away.
Imported European goods were expensive, slow, and frequently useless for conditions nobody in London had ever encountered. That gap got bridged by local manufacturing, repair, improvisation, and substitution.
Necessity did not just become the mother of invention. It became the neighborhood mechanic, blacksmith, cooper, millwright, and farmer.
This is where the archetype starts taking shape. The farmer who is also a mechanic who is also a craftsman who is also, somewhat reluctantly, a tinkerer. Driven mostly by things breaking and nobody else being around to fix them.
By the early 1700s, that culture of necessity had matured into a culture of experimentation. Farmers tested new crops and cultivation methods. Ironworks, glassmaking, paper mills, and textile production expanded. Roads, bridges, and shipyards grew with the colonial economy. Printing presses and newspapers stitched together communities separated by hundreds of miles, and curiosity about electricity, astronomy, and medicine started drifting from hobby toward organized science.
People inside the colonies and across Europe were beginning to see North America as something other than a distant agricultural outpost. It was becoming a place where scientific curiosity, practical craftsmanship, and straight up entrepreneurial hustle overlapped.
Enter Benjamin Franklin, America’s First Influencer
Franklin was a content creator two centuries before the job existed.
Teenage runaway. Newspaper publisher. Satirist. Diplomat. Scientist. Entrepreneur. Fake persona enthusiast. He was arguably the eighteenth century’s closest thing to a celebrity, and he was very, very aware of it.
While charming the knee high socks off the French royal court, he strategically cosplayed as an unpretentious frontiersman in a fur cap, which was absolutely a branding decision. The rest of the time he was engineering solutions to whatever problem had most recently annoyed him. He looked at a violent thunderstorm and apparently concluded, “you know what this needs? A kite, a key, and a truly alarming lack of self preservation.”
The Franklin stove. Bifocals. A flexible urinary catheter he designed for his brother, who was suffering from kidney stones, which is a genuinely lovely thing to do for a sibling. And of course the electrical experiments that made him internationally famous.
Now, small note in the interest of not building statues.
Even the frontier hero gets a little mythification. The kite experiment as you picture it has no eyewitness account. Franklin described it briefly and did not publish a detailed version for years. The vivid retelling everyone knows came from Joseph Priestley in 1767, fifteen years after the fact. Historians have argued for decades about whether it happened as described, and several have pointed out that performing it the way the illustrations show it would likely have killed him.
He was also 46 at the time, not some plucky twenty something, which somewhat wrecks the vibe of every painting you have seen.
To his enormous credit, Franklin refused to patent most of his inventions. He believed useful things should belong to the public. Remember that, because in about thirty years the country is going to take a very different position.
But here is the real question. How do we know Franklin this intimately while being completely oblivious to the thousands of other people shaping colonial America at the exact same time?
That is not a rhetorical flourish. That is the actual mechanism of how history gets written, and we are going to watch it operate over and over across this entire series.
Sybilla Masters and the Problem With Owning an Idea
Here is a case study that belongs in every American history class and almost never makes it in.
Sybilla Masters was a Pennsylvania colonist who developed an improved method for processing corn. She wanted a patent for it, so she went to England to apply, because colonial patents ran through the Crown.
One enormous problem. Under British law, a married woman could not hold property in her own name. Including a patent.
The patent was granted in 1715. Not to Sybilla. To Thomas Masters, her husband.
Here is the part that should make your eye twitch. The patent text itself acknowledges the invention as hers. In writing. On the document.
Sit with that. The legal system was willing to state, on the record, that she was the inventor, while simultaneously refusing to let her own the thing she invented.
Which gives us the bridge for the rest of this series. What does it actually mean to invent something if the legal system will not recognize your right to own it?
That question does not go away when America becomes its own country. It changes shape, changes color, and in several cases doubles down.
Thomas Godfrey and the Invention America Almost Got Credit For
One more, and only because it is a personal favorite. It is the cleanest possible example of a problem that never stops recurring in invention history: simultaneous discovery.
Around 1730, Thomas Godfrey, a Philadelphia glazier, developed a reflecting quadrant. A navigational instrument that let sailors measure their position by the stars with far better accuracy.
At almost exactly the same moment, on the other side of the Atlantic, John Hadley built a strikingly similar instrument. It became known as the octant.
Then it got worse. Isaac Newton had sketched out a comparable design decades earlier and never published it, and the papers surfaced afterward, which meant three people had independently arrived at roughly the same solution across forty years.
The credit dispute was never cleanly settled. Hadley had the Royal Society, a London address, and the infrastructure to publish and promote. Godfrey had Benjamin Franklin as a friend and advocate, which is genuinely the only reason his claim survived in the record at all. It was not enough to move the credit that history books eventually assigned.
So. If two people independently invent essentially the same thing at essentially the same time, who invented it?
Pocket that one too. It comes back constantly over the next 250 years, and geography and connections are going to decide the answer far more often than merit does.
The Great Colonial Innovation Paradox
By 1775, the colonies had built a culture that looks, from a distance, like what we would eventually brand the American genius for invention. Tinkering. Adaptation. Practical problem solving. Entrepreneurship. Real scientific curiosity.
And none of it existed in a vacuum.
It ran on Indigenous knowledge. Imported European technology. African expertise carried across an ocean by force. Enslaved labor. Immigrant craftsmen. International trade. Remove any one of those inputs and the whole thing looks completely different.
So here is the thesis, and I need you to see it clearly before we go another inch:
The American genius for invention was never exclusively American to begin with.
American innovation is less a story about Americans spontaneously generating better ideas than everyone else on earth, and more a story about what happens when an enormous number of different people, technologies, cultures, and economic pressures all slam into one place at one time.
That is not a downgrade. Honestly it is a better story, and it is the one that carries the weight of everything coming next.
Next Question: What If You Could Own an Idea?
The Revolution happens. The colonies win their independence.
And almost immediately, a brand new country finds an extremely strange question sitting on its desk that nobody has fully answered yet.
If invention creates real wealth, should an inventor have a legal right to control the idea? In these United States, can a person own an idea at all, or do ideas belong to the people?
Before America could become the nation of inventors we think we know, it first had to decide whether an invention could legally belong to anyone.
In 1790, a Philadelphia inventor named Samuel Hopkins was about to find out.
Next stop: Samuel Hopkins and the American Patent System, Version 1.0
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