salt in 1641, and the court granted a patent for a mill for manufacturing scythes to Joseph Jenkes in 1646. (No rule or consensus has been issued to this day, however, on how to pronounce “scythes.”) Swim fins are cool. I didn’t know that was an American thing, but I will now flop down the beach in mine with new pride. As for the Franklin stove, frankly, I cannot understand how it took so long to think of it. One has to live with a stone fireplace for maybe half of a winter to realize what an efficient device they are for emptying your home of heat while consuming the woodpile. Two or three thousand years of feeding forests into chimneys to little effect and nobody says, “What if we put the fire in an iron box so we could control it?” Pythagoras? Da Vinci? Galileo? Anyone? You’d think that just by accident some Mesopotamian soldier on a cold desert night would have leaned a shield or something against the firepit and noticed how it radiated heat while keeping the smoke out of his eyes. Two or three thousand years of feeding forests into chimneys to little effect and nobody says, “What if we put the fire in an iron box so we could control it?” Pythagoras? Da Vinci? Galileo? Anyone? It took an American, Benjamin Franklin, to say, “This is bullsh*#t,” and pull out the sketch pad and welding torch.
Americans knew going in that a box of rocks was going to be the likely payoff, and they did it anyway. It wasn’t, “We are going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade in order to own and subdivide it like Florida.” We did it because no one had ever done it and that was reason enough. The fact we got transistors and Velcro out of the deal was just good luck. We did it because we couldn’t think of a good reason not to. Robert Kennedy summed us up with, “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” When watermelon-cannon man’s wife asked him why, you know he shrugged, took a pull from his long-neck Pabst, and replied, “Why not?” I credit this trait to the fact that when early Americans, Homo “Detritus , ” were first drawn to, conned to, or dragged to the continent it was a simple fact of life that if they hadn’t brought it with them they were going to have to make it. They must have been awfully busy making the things they neglected to bring because a hundred years would pass from when the Spanish, English, and Dutch started nosing around North America in the late 16th and early 17th centuries to the arrival of the first meaningful American inventions: Swim Fins in 1717, and the Franklin Stove in 1742. There were two earlier outliers: The Massachusetts general court issued a patent to Samuel Winslow for a new way of making
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July 2019
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