Whitney proved to be a competent manufacturer, but wasn't an original inventor to any important degree. Thomas Blanchard was a true genius: his stock making machine was the daddy of all the industrial profiling machinery, like the 1870s universal milling machine, that was the especial American contribution to machining technology. By that time, the British conceded that machinery innovation had shifted to America.

My neck is too arthritic to snap around. The big shift in my perspective that happened in the writing process, however, was the paramount importance of the "West" epitomized by Cincinnati.

n truth, we don't know a whole lot of what Simeon North did. He did manage to match John Hall's ability to make interchangeable parts, but it's not clear how much of that came from Hall and how much was original with North.

I've been in China enough to know that you shouldn't opine on it unless you speak Chinese and have lived there for twenty years. I wasn't pretending to be a China expert in that final chapter. I was just pointing, first to the parallels between Chinese behavior toward us and ours toward GB when we were at the same stage of development, and secondly to how much harder their development path is than ours was.

Land Grant College Act is the jewel of Republican reform. It had not occurred to any other country to educate their farmers and workers. When the British studied the reasons for American success in 1851, the consensus was that Americans workers were well educated. So they didn't oppose progress the way British workers did.

We were suddenly getting big, with burgeoning capabilities on all sides, but very clumsy, knew we were on some kind of ride, and things changing fast, but with very little idea of what was going on.

The War of 1812 perhaps the least remembered of American wars because it was fought in such a left-handed slapdash manner on both sides.