 |
| This is the 1837 prototype receiver for Samuel B. Morse's telegraph. By sending electric pulses, Morse was able to record a message as a wavy line on a strip of paper. Morse was an excellent artist, so it's no surprise the frame is an artist's canvas stretcher. |
 |
| Here is John Heinz's 1879 prototype for a vegetable sorter. Automated sorting was a sign that high-speed production had breached the food business. |
 |
| Wow. I remember this. The 1977 prototype for what would become the Jarvik-7 Total Artificial Heart. It was first implanted in a human being in 1982. (Yes, that's velcro holding the chambers together.) Barney Clark was patient #1 and he survived 112 days. |
 |
| This one has me a little little baffled. It's an 1868 prototype for a typewriter, modeled by three Milwaukee inventors. Six years later, Remington produced the first commercially successful model. This makes clear it's not about first-mover advantage. Instead, as Nathan Bedford Forest so famously said, it's about getting there firstest with the mostest. |
 |
| Here's the digital camera, patented in 1975. Who was the patentee? Eastman Kodak, of course. |
 |
| The following year, 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak patented this, the Apple I computer. |
 |
| Following the computer in Silicon Valley, of course, came the t-shirt. This from 1977. |
 |
| At the top, an Intel C8080 8-bit microprocessor from 1974. At the bottom, a transistor from Fairchild Semiconductor, 1961. Some real history here. |
 |
| This one speaks for itself. |
 |
| This is an 1851 revolver from the factory of Samuel Colt. It's the product that dazzled the world at the Crystal Palace world's fair in London. |
 |
| Here's the telephone that Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. |
 |
| This Technicolor motion picture camera was used on the set of The Wizard of Oz in 1937. Now you know how things went from B&W to color. |
 |
| Recognize this? It's a videocassette recorder--the beginning of "TV on Demand"--from 1977. |
 |
| And finally, what says "American innovation" better than a well-stocked Suzy Homemaker refrigerator from 1966? |
