Two hundred and fifty years ago, if you were reading this, it would be in a letter or a newspaper. And, probably since I couldn’t afford to send a letter to everyone, especially not on a daily basis, and since newspapers wouldn’t (and couldn’t) publish everything submitted to them, you would not be reading this at all.

Recorded human history goes back about 5,000 years. Humans were around thousands of years before that, but any previous written history is long lost and for a long while there was likely no recorded history at all.

Look back at the past couple hundred years and compare them with the thousands that came before them. For a long time, human development was fairly stagnant. Many, many years would go by before we would see something new.

This is partly due to the fact that, for a long time, ideas had no value. You could buy and sell goods; they had value. But, ideas were free for the taking. If someone made something, others could freely copy them. As a result, what incentive is there in creating new things when you have a family to feed and there is more value in goods than in ideas?

We often credit the ancient Greeks with the beginnings of modern civilization. The Greeks invented coined money, thermometers, tumbler locks, among other things. The Greeks also had a patent system, where the inventor of a new device had exclusive rights to it for a period of one year.

The modern day patent system came out of Venice in the 1400’s. The first patent in what is now the United States was issued by Massachusetts in 1646.

The other factor to consider is that, for the vast majority of human history, people were ruled by systems of government that did not favor the individual. The individual was considered the subject or even the property of the government, often a king.

There was often no upward path either. If you were born a peasant, you stayed a peasant. Odds of you becoming the king of your own land were slim to none. With no hope of advancement, there is little drive to achievement.

But, then we come to the New World. In the American colonies, the colonists had more freedom, being far from the crown. In the 1700’s, Ben Franklin invented the Franklin stove, the lightning rod and the concept of mail order.

When the British government became too oppressive to the colonists, they rebelled. And won. Instead of setting up a monarchy (some troops wanted to make George Washington their new king), the colonists set up a democratic republic. The nation would be self-ruled.

There would be no monarchy to dictate what they could and could not do. And the federal government would have limited powers–powers designed to protect essential freedoms rather than power to rule.

So, for a long time in the United States, people had a wide latitude of freedom. And look where we are now!

Refrigeration was invented in 1805, with improvements in the mid-1800’s and early 1900’s. The early 1800’s also saw the invention of the circular saw, dental floss and the profile lathe. The electric telegraph was invented in 1831. Later came sewing machines, the wrench, and the electric relay. In the mid-1800’s, there was ether anesthesia, the rotary printing press, vulcanized rubber, safety pins, rolled toilet paper, the burglar alarm, the can opener and the web printing press, among many other inventions. Later in the 1800’s, there came the motor cycle, the paper clip, barbed wire, tape measure, vacuum cleaner, paper bags, pipe wrench, clothes hangers, fire hydrants, sandblasting, fire sprinklers, electric dental drill, mimeograph, airbrush, phonograph, carbon microphones, the cash register, metal detector, electric fan, electric iron, fountain pen, photographic film, skyscrapers, dish washer, drinking straw, escalator, radio, zipper, tractor, pneumatic hammer, remote control, the flashlight and more!

The early 1900’s saw assembly line production, the mercury vapor lamp, the hearing aid, air conditioning, offset printing press, airplane, electric washing machine, paper shredder, headset, auto pilot, electric blanket, gas mask, the supermarket, silica gel, polygraph, adhesive bandage, radial arm saw, bulldozer, masking tape, cotton swabs, garbage disposal, freon, electric razor, sunglasses, particle accelerator, and many more!

Americans were inventive during the Great Depression as well, giving us the thermistor, strobe light, staple removed, tape dispenser, frequency modulation, black light, pH meter, programming languages, chair lifts, radio telescope, shopping cart, xerography, fiberglass, nylon, teflon and more.

The mid-1900’s brought the blood bank, acrylic fiber, deodorant, microwave oven, chemotherapy, the transistor, defibrillator, mobile phone, instant camera, cat litter, video games, cable tv, barcode, artificial heart, heart-lung machine, automatic sliding doors, radar gun, polio vaccine, hard disk drive, industrial robot, bone marrow transplant, video tape, laser, carbon fiber, integrated circuit, spandex, LED, glucose meter, computer mouse, plasma display, heart transplants, artificial turf, kevlar, hypertext, cordless telephone, compact disc, DRAM, food bank, handheld calculator, crash test dummy, laser printer, smoke detector and more!

The late 1900’s gave us optical fiber, personal computers, eMail, operating systems, digital camera, ethernet, compact fluorescent light bulbs, the space shuttle, the graphical user interface, the Internet, voice mail, GPS, sulfur lamps and more.

All-in-all, there are over 7,000,000 patents in the United States. This is not to say that other countries have been idle, but it is important to bear in mind that, in comparison with centuries past, people in many countries have more freedoms and rights than in centuries past.

All these inventions move the world forward. Without freedom and property rights, people would have little incentive to create new things. Too many people think that inventions come about because of an altruistic desire for people to help others. While that may be the case for some people, most people just want to make a buck. Many immigrants came to this country, not looking for a handout, but looking to strike it rich. In their native lands, their “upward mobility” was restricted. In the U.S., they could develop new ideas and profit by them and achieve things they could only dream of in their homeland. And, for those already here, it didn’t matter whether they were born in poverty, they had equal opportunity to make it. There was no class system to hold them back.

It wasn’t some big government program that gave them any guarantees or incentives to succeed. It wasn’t people voting for the government to give them money or benefits that moved us forward. It wasn’t the government guaranteeing a minimum income, a livelihood or a bailout that allowed us to flourish.

It was freedom. It was liberty. It was the right of the people to own their own property and ideas. It was their own self-determination, self-motivation and drive to succeed and, yes, even a quest for profits, that brought us farther along in the past couple hundred years than in the prior few millennia.

Perhaps the greatest recognition of this is the Statue of Liberty, whose formal title is Liberty Enlightening the World. But, long before Lady Liberty greeted immigrants from Europe in New York Harbor, the promise of liberty was the great hope of all mankind.

Remember that, Liberty Enlightening the World. Look at how Liberty has enlightened the world in these past couple centuries!

Freedom works. Liberty is what gives us all hope. And that’s not something we should take away or change.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 11:33 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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