“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon

To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time:

1. Internet
2. Light bulb
3. Integrated circuit
4. Personal computer
5. Airplane

The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business historian John Steele Gordon validates the list. Gordon’s piece for the WSJ series is titled “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation.” His argument is that the United States was always in danger of falling apart and the telegraph saved the republic. Then radio, television, and even the now vilified internet knitted it even closer together.

Otto von Bismarck quipped that God looks after three things: fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Gordon agrees with the Prussian unifier of Germany. Nobody, he notes, has ever made money selling America short. As for the now venerable republic, he thinks it’s still in pretty good hands. The ever expanding national debt, however, is another matter. That certainly wouldn’t get onto Gordon’s top 250 most impactful American inventions.
Five Takeaways

• Hanging by a Thread. George Washington’s fear was geographic: the trans-Appalachian West went down the Mississippi, not over the mountains. The republic couldn’t exist without communication. The post office was almost constitutionally important. The telegraph saved the republic.

• The Atlantic Cable: Ten Days to Ten Seconds. Cyrus Field, a paper merchant, decided to lay a cable across the Atlantic Ocean. Six tries, ten years, Lord Kelvin doing the physics. Result: ten days to ten seconds. The nineteenth century was right to call itself an age of miracles.

• The Robber Barons Were Misunderstood. Vanderbilt built faster, safer, cheaper transportation. He died worth $105 million. Henry Ford democratized the automobile. Musk is doing the same with rockets. Nobody complained about their products. They complained about their wealth.

• The Internet Is the Greatest American Invention. Number one on the WSJ list, above the light bulb and the integrated circuit. Changed everything in thirty years. Scholars bless Google every day. We’ve basically seen nothing yet.

• God Looks After Fools, Drunks, and the United States. Bismarck said it. Gordon believes it. Nobody has ever made money selling America short. The national debt is another matter — used to fund wars and depressions, now used to ensure no congressman ever loses an election. The republic survives. The budget system is a disgrace.

About the Guest

John Steele Gordon is an American business and technology historian, author of An Empire of Wealth and A Thread Across the Ocean, and a contributor to The Wall Street Journal and Commentary.

References

"From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation," John Steele Gordon, The Wall Street Journal, 2026
An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon
A Thread Across the Ocean by John Steele Gordon

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:31 The WSJ’s most impactful US inventions
00:01:52 The founding fear: too large to hold together
00:03:08 The transatlantic cable
00:07:37 The nineteenth century as an age of miracles
00:09:15 Railways, titans, and robber barons
00:11:24 Henry Ford and democratization
00:26:00 AI and the fear of HAL
00:33:09 Opposition to AI data centers
00:34:39 God looks after fools, drunks, and the United States
00:35:16 The national debt
00:37:09 Is the Internet really number one?