Google Ngram Puzzler I: American Innovators (update February 2020)

I've been fiddling with the Google Ngram Viewer for the last few months, trying to understand what it means and how it might help with the research I'm doing.  The Ngram's database of 5.2 million digitized books (through 2008) is an endlessly fascinating tool--one of the web's more entertaining rabbit holes.

Shown below is a search I did on America's heavyweight innovators, picking a few from each of the last three centuries.  (In so doing, I reviewed the Atlantic's list of "The Top 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since the Wheel," making sure I didn't miss an important name.  Update February 2020: I ran the same Ngram search this morning that I did more than six years ago and the results are slightly updated but my conclusions below unchanged.)

Some observations:

1. Henry Ford, who died in 1947, remains the dominant presence among American innovators. Only Bill Gates was able to take a run at Ford around 2000, but since then has seen his interests shift from entrepreneurship to philanthropy.  Edison, Carnegie, and Rockefeller are also long-term heavyweights.  America remains a culture defined, at least in the written word, by the automobile and computer.

Sometimes Entrepreneurs Are Just Liberal Arts Majors Making Money

The room where it happened, my fate thus sealed

First, my credentials: I am the son of a mechanical engineer, spouse of an aeronautical engineer, and father of an environmental engineer. I not only support STEM, I adore STEM.

But I hail from a different tribe, that of the liberal arts majors.  I cast my lot long ago in a diner on the East Side of Providence, announcing to my college friends that I would major in history. “Oh, so you want to teach history,” one of my buddies asked, before adding, “could you pass the maple syrup?”

My fate thus sealed, I spent the rest of my undergraduate days having a particular set of skills drilled into my noggin: Sift through a mountain of information by reading quickly and critically, ask good questions, separate signal from noise, and use the results to craft a concise, compelling narrative. That is, take a feral world and tame it into a cracking good story.

After graduation, I took my history degree to Wall Street for a couple of years, returned home to earn my MBA (squeaking through Managerial Economics), and soon found myself working on the launch of a new company.

“We need a business plan,” my STEM boss said, looking at me. 

“What would you like me to do?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, dropping two binders and a box of material on my desk, “you need to quickly read through this mountain of information, ask good questions, and separate signal from noise. Then you need to draft a compelling narrative. After that,” he added, “we can go raise some money.”