Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism (Chapter Fifteen Review)

This Chapter is focus on the light development of America and told several stories about who made fabulous contribution to the grounding of daily lighting. From a holistic viewpoint, I think this section more or less deviated a little from the aligned topic of this book. A brand new innovation, of course will take profits for the ones who invented some specific instruments, but no doubt under the protection of patent or copyright laws. There is a sentence I think it’s worthy noting, “The development of American capitalism relied to a large degree on government recognition of a unique form of property ; the patent transformed the product of an inventor’s imagination into a set of legal rights, creating new property out of nothing”. It conveyed a message that patent underlined what is American capitalism and only that happened a seamless continuation of scientific and social forwarding can be a unstopped thing.

Edison is someone who will never be missed when you are going to talk about electricity in human history. As uneducated and unschooled boy, he started his efforts on telegraph owing to his exposure to recipients of the messages, the mechanics and operations of the telegraph mechanics themselves. Although lacking of conventional knowledge forming process, or maybe his assets, he was still endowed with much powerful talents to solve practical problems confronted by technology’ pushing forward. The acess of ordinary people to electricity and bulb light marked a new era and its convenience still inherited by enormous modern residents in urban or countryside.