FOREWORD
This book will probably be read by the light of an electric lamp, perhaps by a reader who does not remember ever using any other kind of artificial illumination. Americans would not live as we do today without the electric lamp, the telephone, the automobile, and a multitude of other things which were new-fangled in the times of our grandparents. Most of us think of the majority of them as American inventions, and feel satisfied that we are so much cleverer than other people, without wondering why. Some of us do wonder, though; and others should wonder, for it is the person who knows where he has been who is most likely to know where he is going.
The reader will learn that our heroes — Edison, Bell, Henry Ford — did not always just pick up their tools and make an invention. Edison was one of the few who occasionally did just that. But many of them instead thought of a way to make an invention available to everyone, rather than just to the chosen few who could afford an expensive toy. It was in devising ways to make inventions useful to everyone — in mass production — that Americans have excelled.
So it is better for Americans to know something about science and invention than simply to have faith in our inventiveness. For behind most inventions, and behind nearly all of them in the 20th century, lies science. In this background Americans were less prominent in the days of Edison, Bell, and Ford. Science did not seem to make something which was useful to everyone; at least, our grandfathers did not think so. But the Europeans, who often regarded inventions as toys, thought science was more interesting. They spent the 19th century filling books with observations of nature and the way it works. These books spread throughout the world, and answered the questions which puzzled our inventors. And so the story of the electric lamp does not begin with Edison, nor that of the telephone with Bell.
But some Americans also thought science was more interesting. Joseph Henry was one, and Willard Gibbs another. They paid some of the debt American invention owed to European science. In the present century more and more Americans have recognized that science is both interesting and important. And as the exploration of our geographical frontiers has drawn to a close we have found no less excitement in the exploration of the endless frontier of science.

Robert Multhauf