Malkin - Who built that: awe-inspiring stories of American tinkerpreneurs

To President Barack Obama, who inspired me to rise up and tell these unsung stories of American individualism, exceptionalism, and entrepreneurship.

The great glory of the Americans is in their wondrous contrivancesin their patent remedies for the usually troublous operations of life.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE, 1863

So I suppose all those great works built themselves!

GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE,
RESPONDING TO NEWSPAPER ATTACKS ON HIS ENTERPRISE, 1907

If youve got a businessyou didnt build that. Somebody else made that happen.

BARACK OBAMA, 2012

Many of you know me as that angry brown lady on cable TV whos always yelling at liberals. The truth is, I am so much more than just the Angry Brown Lady on Cable TV. My kids, for example, know me as the angry lady whos always yelling at them to do their (nonCommon Core) homework, pick up their underwear, eat their vegetables, and enter the No-Whine Zone.

But I do have a softer side. Really.

At home, Im a geek mom who loves to watch the Science Channels How Its Made and ABCs Shark Tank. Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics are my airplane reading must-haves. I may be the only wife in America who was thrilled when her husband gave her a quadcopter for Christmas. And in high school, I was named Class Braintrust, which is the politically correct way of saying Queen of the Nerds. My two action shots in the yearbook showed me studying in the library and staring intently at lab equipment in my Advanced Placement Chemistry class, which increased my nerd factor by several orders of magnitude.

Here is another confession: I am a tinkerer-wannabe. Among my contrivances gone wrong:

a modified Weber grill that exploded and nearly burned my eyebrows off,

a soda-bottle submarine that sank like a concrete block in the bathtub, and

a cache of defective PVC marshmallow shooters clogged up with sticky-sweet ammunition.

Each of these endeavors remains the subject of family mockery. But yes, Im proud of my discards. In failure, after all, lies progress. In misadventure lies enlightenment. Disappointment and dead ends induce turnarounds. Turnarounds yield new and endless paths toward improvement and success. I agree wholeheartedly with Don J. Whittemore of the American Society of Civil Engineers, who wrote in 1896: The Scrap Heapthat inarticulate witness of our blunders, and the sepulchre of our blasted hopes; the best, most humiliating, legacy we are forced to leave to our successorshas always, to me, been brimful of instruction.

As an abysmal flop at even the most modest engineering and manufacturing projects, I believe I am uniquely equipped to write a book celebrating unsung American inventors and entrepreneurs whove actually succeeded. Who better than an obsessive geek tinkerer-wannabe to tell the stories of these unappreciated geniuses and business phenoms? My reverence for makers and risk-takers is unabashed and unbridled. Call me a sideline technophile, innovation groupie, and a lifelong fan girl of the American Dream. Of all the books Ive written, this one has led me on the most joyful journey through American history. Ive shared every research tidbit and discovery with my family, started my own little collection of nineteenth-century artifacts of American invention (thanks for the inspiration, Glenn Beck!), and interacted with some of the most fascinating and brilliant people Ive ever met in more than two decades as a journalist and author.

When I first thought of writing Who Built That , though, I must admit I was still in Angry Cable TV Lady mode. In 2010, Vice President Joe Biden had boasted that every single great idea that has marked the twenty-first century, the twentieth century and the nineteenth century has required government vision and government incentive. Yes, he really did say every. My poor family heard me rant about this for weeks.

That same year, President Obama opined that the proper role of private entrepreneurs was to fulfill the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economyas opposed to fulfilling their own happiness, pursuing their own personal and professional ambitions, or providing for their own families. Next, Obama argued that at a certain point you have made enough money. Then, in the fall of 2012, Republicans got their electoral butts kicked. How could this happen after Obama got caught on the campaign trail openly denigrating American entrepreneurs? Let me remind you of what he said: If youve got a businessyou didnt build that. Somebody else made that happen.

The Obama campaign and its media defenders argued that his remarks were taken out of context by critics. But heres what he said immediately preceding that infamous sound bite, straight from the White House transcript:

Look, if youve been successful, you didnt get there on your own. You didnt get there on your own. Im always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you somethingthere are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. [Applause.]

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If youve got a businessyou didnt build that. Somebody else made that happen.

The context makes Obamas contempt for private entrepreneurial achievement even clearer. His intent was to humiliate and shame those who reject collectivism. The presidents message: Innovators are nothing special. Their brains and work ethics are no different from anyone elses. They owe their success to taxpayers and public school teachers and public roads and bridges. Pushing to raise taxes even higher on wealthy Americans, Obama brazenly stoked you-think-youre-so-smart resentment of business owners and placed government at the center of every American success story.

This government-built-that version of America is anathema to how our Founding Fathers envisioned, pioneered, practiced, and enshrined the progress of science and useful arts in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8, of the Constitution. They understood that the ability of brilliant, ambitious individuals to reap private rewards for inventions and improvements benefited the public good. From colonial times through the nineteenth-century Age of Progress, our political leaders and judiciary supported the most generous protections for entrepreneurial patent-holders. Mainstream culture celebrated never-satisfied rags-to-riches capitalists.

Profit, however, is now treated as a profanity in todays class-warfare-poisoned discourse. Those who seek financial enrichment for the fruits of their labor and creativity are cast as greedy villains, selfish barons, and rapacious beastsand so are the wealthy investors who support them. During the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, candidates and operatives in both political parties derided private equity and venture capitalism as vulture capitalism. President Obama routinely indicted millionaires and billionaires as public enemies (before jetting off to raise money from them in Hollywood and Manhattan).

Anticapitalism saboteurs organized wealth-shaming protests at corporate CEOs private homes in New York and in private neighborhoods in Connecticut. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (a former high-paid adviser to corrupt energy company Enron) whipped up hatred against the plutocrats in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street mob. Krugman mocked business leaders who objected to political persecution as a small but powerful group of what can only be called sociopaths. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile publicly endorsed an incendiary protest slogan embraced by so-called progressives: The tree of life is dying. Prune the top 1% and feed the roots! And in 2011, New York State lawmakers received threatening mail from a disgruntled state government worker saying it was time to kill the wealthy if they didnt renew the states tax surcharge on millionaires: If you dont, Im going to pay a visit with my carbine to one of those tech companies you are so proud of and shoot every spoiled Ivy League [expletive] I can find, the death threat read.