What Hath God Wrought

End of Eureka?

A record number of new inventions are expected to be processed by the US Patent and Trademark Office this year - in spite of concerns that funding for scientific research has slowed because of the recession.

More than half a million filings are anticipated in fields ranging from life sciences and personalised medicine to solar energy and mobile phone applications.

The surge of ideas coincides with a major exhibition in Washington DC that examines America's history of innovation and the belief that Americans themselves have a special genius for scientific discovery.

"The heritage we owe to the 19th Century is this inherent belief, this optimism in the ability of innovation to solve our problems," said David Kappos, director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, which helped produce the show.

"That spirit is alive - every bit as much as it was 200 years ago."

The Great American Hall of Wonders at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC features objects, paintings and drawings that explore how the study of nature and advances in technology and engineering helped shape the fledgling democracy.

"The US in its early years just didn't have many people," said Claire Perry, an independent curator who organised the exhibition.

"They knew that to have a thriving economy for an independent nation they needed to create labour-saving, efficient machines that would help to relieve the problem of not enough workers."

The 19th Century in America was a period of social upheaval and crisis.

On 4 July 1826, on the 50th anniversary of American independence, former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, and Americans feared that the nation would not survive the loss of those Founding Fathers.

But Americans realised that the great democratic experiment needed more than revolutionary zeal to ensure its success, deciding that innovation was the key.

"They attended botany lectures, read books about geology and mechanical improvements, and each person felt there was a niche for them to make a contribution."

The inventions that emerged were largely the work of individuals.

Many people had experimented with the electromagnetic telegraph, but the artist Samuel Morse was the first to come up with a device that was both economical and easy to use.

"What hath God wrought": Not Quite the First Telegraph | Motherboard

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One-hundred sixty-seven years ago, about a mile from where I’m sitting in Baltimore, an inventor named Alfred Vail (Samuel Morse’s number-two) is hanging around a train station waiting beside one of the first telegraph devices. It’s not the tappy tap key kind we think of now, but its predecessor, a pendulum thing that swings back and forth according to the electrical current and leaves dots and dashes on a long, narrow strip of paper.

This is what comes:

Vail, or perhaps some lackey, decodes the message to read, ’What hath God wrought” (from the Bible). And Vail sends the same message back to Washington. Success. Ten years later, 23,000 miles of wire crisscrossed the United States, delivering mainly information on train operations–information could now travel faster than a train–and business dealings. Information itself would never be the same, and the great string of technological dominoes that lead to the telephone, radio, and eventually, the internet was in motion.

It’s worth noting, as Vail’s son does in a 1900 letter to the editor of The New York Times , that “What hath God wrought”-as-first-message is not actually the case. The very first was an experiment done by Vail and Morse earlier in the month to see if they could get information from Annapolis Jct., Maryland—between Baltimore and D.C.—to D.C. Faster than a train.