No other nation has displayed such inventive power and  produced such brilliantly original inventors as the United States during the half-century beginning around 1870. Periclean dramatists, Renaissance artists, British engineers  during the Industrial Revolution, late-nineteenth-century  Berlin physicists, and Weimar architects in the 1920s all stimulate memories of similarly remarkable creative eras. During such times as these Sophocles and Euripides wrote Oedipus Rex and Medea; architect en­gineers, including Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo left notebooks, bridges, canals, fortifications, and sec­ular and religious buildings of surpassing ingenuity and beauty; George Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel laid the railroads and built the bridges that transformed the face of Britain; Hermann von Helmholtz and Max Planck revealed the conceptual power and elegance of modern physics; and a few avant-garde architects, among them Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, established the international school of modern architecture. As yet, however, we have not realized the remarkable quality of a comparable era in American history when the independent inventors, Thomas Alva Edison and Orville and Wilbur Wright among them, introduced electric lighting, airplane flight, wireless transmission, and a multitude of inventions that shape the modern world.
 
In 1896 a writer in the Scientific American referred to the remarkable outpouring of U.S. patents since the Civil War, exuberantly insisting that his was "an epoch of invention and progress unique in the history of the world. . . . It has been," he observed, "a gigantic tidal wave of human ingenuity and resource, so stupendous in its magnitude, so com­plex in its diversity, so profound in its thought, so fruitful in its wealth, so beneficent in its results, that the mind is strained and embarrassed in its effort to expand to a full appreciation of it. " The number of patents issued annually more than doubled between 1866 and 1896, and the number for each person increased more than 1. 75 times. The historian Daniel Boorstin has observed that "all the resources which had been used to lay tracks across the continent, to develop an American System of Manufacturing in its several versions, now went into American Systems of Inventing. " Not only were tens of thousands of Americans inventing at the grass-roots level, but a singular band of independent inventors was also flourishing during the decades extending from about 1870 to 1920.
 
Before the rise, about 1900, of the industrial research laboratory, and long before that of the large government-funded national laboratories that originated in World War II with the militarization of nuclear power, the nation's technical inventiveness was concentrated in the independent inventors. The role and characteristics of the large laboratories are fairly well understood today because they are well publicized and still with us, whereas the role of the inventors has been sentimentalized, trivialized, or forgotten. Yet, if we wish to understand the nation's rise to industrial and technological pre-eminence, we ought to fathom the complex char­acter and manifold activities of the independent inventors. Instead of accumulating more biographical sketches of a heroic cast, we need to discover and understand the characteristics the inventors shared.
 
The era of the independent inventors began about the time Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone and Edison opened his Menlo Park laboratory in 1876. The failure of the U.S. Navy board of inventors, headed by Edison during World War I to fulfill its expectations, in addition to the success of a group of physicists called to solve wartime problems, signaled the end of the golden era of the independent inventors. After World War I, industrial scientists displaced the independents as the principal locus of "research and development activity," the new name for invention. During the intervening decades, as the independents flourished, the United States became not only the most inventive nation, but also the world's industrial leader, thereby surpassing the United Kingdom, whose leaders had long belittled the industry and technology of its former colony. Between 1895 and 1900, U.S. coal production overtook the British-by 1915 the young nation's production had doubled that of her rival; between 1885 and 1890 the United States also moved ahead of the British in pig-iron and steel production; and leadership in the production of heavy chemicals passed from British to American hands between 1900 and 1913. The United States moved ahead in the well-established fields of heavy industry and took a clear and substantial lead in electric light and power, a new industry at the front edge of high technology.  These, then, were epochal decades, and ones to whose technological and in­dustrial achievements the independent inventors substantially contributed.
 
The list is long of outstanding inventions attributable to the U.S. independent inventors during their era of preeminence. These inventions include Bell's telephone, Edison's incandescent lamp, phonograph, and motion-picture system, and William Stanley's, Nikola Tesla's, and Elihu Thomson's contributions to the development of electric light-and-power transmission. The Wright brothers introduced the internal-combustion­engine airplane, and Reginald Fessenden, Lee de Forest, and Edwin Armstrong pioneered in wireless telegraphy and telephony, or radio. Elmer Sperry and Hiram Stevens Maxim spread their inventive activities across a number of fields, including electric lighting, but Sperry is best remembered for his gyrocompass and automatic control devices for the navy and Maxim for his machine gun. The list reveals the prominent role that the American independents played in the rise of the electrical industry and the application of invention to military purposes during the armaments race preceding World War I. They were major contributors to the era of rapid industrialization sometimes called the "second indus­trial revolution."