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.


2. In 1900, Carnegie and Robert Fulton (who died in 1815) were the two most mentioned American innovators.  Fulton peaked in 1910 (his steamboat probably overtaken by the auto and airplane) but Carnegie--famous for both his innovations in steel and in philanthropy--continues to resonate in literature right up to the present.  At one point I tried searching on both Cyrus McCormick and Samuel Colt who, along with Eli Whitney and Fulton, represented the Four Horsemen of American innovation in the first half of the 19th century.  Neither had a remarkable presence at any point in the graph.

3. From 1970 until about 2000, Thomas Edison had a steady rise in mentions, mirroring America's growing interest in innovation.  He remains #3, but at only about half the mentions of Ford.

4. Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, continues to be a visible presence in literature. Note, however, that except for Jobs (and a tiny uptick for Zuckerberg), all of our innovators are in some decline.  This slump in long-term heavyweights could represent a fragmentation in business reporting, with America's press now focused on the up-and-coming technology innovators in Silicon Valley.  It might also represent a more global reporting of business, with the old American innovators competing for press-time with an entire world of new talent.

Just for fun, I ran the Ngram again to compare Henry Ford with other American luminaries to measure the broader category of entrepreneurship against politics and entertainment.  Ford beats Elvis but falls far below the Founding Fathers.

I then pulled the lens back one last time to get a true sense of proportion.  For this chart, I leave the interpretation up to you.