Among the Founding Fathers of the United States were inventors and scientists. More importantly, however, the Founders were truly inventive leaders. They were tremendous problem-solvers and great innovators across a wide spectrum of academic and practical pursuits. There seems to be no end to their involvement in research and development on behalf of the new nation. Their biographies always leave you wondering, “How did they find the time, and when did they sleep?” Hamilton, for example, led his battalion to victory in the decisive battle of Yorktown. He later became the very first treasury secretary. Without any previous template to follow, he devised the national banking system that was necessary for the economic development of the United States. Thanks to his genius, our very bankrupt country overcame the financial problems of its earliest years. Without capital from banks and loans, future inventors would never have been able to open businesses or sell their new products.
What was their motivation? Why were the Founders so inventive, and what hopes and dreams did they have for us? Their future vision rings as clearly in their writing and in their work as the Liberty Bell rang before the famous crack. They wanted prosperity and a rising GDP for us and for our children. Surrounded by European military powers, economic independence was needed just to survive. To achieve it, the Founders carefully designed a more open business climate—a better kind of capitalism than the one that they had suffered with under the British Empire.
Jefferson worked to improve a farming plow and designed a device to copy letters. As secretary of state, he invented a “wheel cipher” that was part of an early attempt to send secretly encoded messages. Privacy must have been a problem even before the internet. Still, Jefferson’s greatest contribution to science probably took place when he sent Lewis and Clark to explore the vast Louisiana Purchase. Their expedition into the unknown resulted in hundreds of geographic discoveries and encounters with many amazing new plants and animals.
Benjamin Rush was a pioneering advocate for the mentally ill at Pennsylvania Hospital, which Benjamin Franklin helped to charter. Rush was the first American to argue that mental illness had a physical cause, and he made great advances in more humane patient treatment. The U.S. Psychiatric Association acknowledges Dr. Rush as the “Father of American Psychiatry.”
Franklin was already a world-renowned scientist and inventor when George Washington was only a teenager. His inventions are known, or should be known, to every school-age child. There is the lightning rod, the bifocals, and the Franklin stove. Electricity? By the end of the 1750s, his publication, “Experiments & Observations on Electricity,” had been printed in both French and German. He developed many important electrical terms such as these common essentials that not a single modern electrician can live without: positive and negative.
Franklin helped to start the American Philosophical Society in 1743, and many of the other Founders later became members—Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Rush. This was the premier scientific group in colonial America. The members shared research and exciting new findings in all fields of science to promote the common good as well as the American economy. The APS building and library still stands in Philadelphia today. Its close proximity to Independence Hall is symbolic of the unbreakable connection between scientific life, invention, and the Founders’ vision for the new republic.
Inventors would need a way to protect their inventions. Adam Mossoff of George Mason University provides some excellent background: “Patents were granted by royal decree from the King. … They were expensive. … If you’re going to create a new, thriving free society, it’s not going to be based on aristocracy, the existing wealthy. It’s going to be based on the creation of new wealth. They took the position that patents should be like property rights. Economists have called this the democratization of invention. The American Founding Fathers recognized that if you are going to have an innovative economy, … Congress would authorize protection of patents and copyrights.”
James Madison made sure that patent protection was included in the original Constitution. It seems that whenever they considered the future, the Founders thought about each and every detail. Article I secures the patent right: “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
“Buy American” and “Made in the USA” are not just recent ideas. Early in 1789, George Washington wrote to Lafayette about the American “improvements in manufactures.” He praised the cotton cloths, hats, leather goods, glass, shoes, and nails being produced that once were imported from Britain. He wrote about having a suit of clothes made with American cloth that he would later wear, famously, at his inauguration ceremony. “Indeed we have already been to[o] long subject to British prejudices. I use no porter or cheese in my family, but such as is made in America—both … may now be purchased of an excellent quality.” Washington was no doubt tired of overpriced imported goods delivered by a hostile country that he had spent a lifetime fighting against, a country that held nothing but contempt for his own.
On April 10, 1790, Washington signed the Patent Act into law. The first president approved 156 new patents during his two terms. If you were lucky enough to be one of those 156, you received your document hand-signed by Washington himself. The author B. Zorina Khan, in her book “The Democratization of Invention,” describes the impact: “The United States created the first modern patent system and its policies were the most liberal in the world toward inventors. Individuals who did not have the resources to directly exploit their inventions benefited disproportionately from secure property rights and the operation of efficient markets.”
This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.
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