They Made America
Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine

By Harold Evans

     In this audio version of They Made America you can really feel the author's excitement about his subject matter as he reads the book. Listen as he profiles 70 of America's leading inventors, entrepreneurs and innovators, beginning with the colorful career of Robert Fulton.

    Some of America's greatest inventions were useless until someone came along with the insight to make the invention commonplace, like the lightbulb. Without the support systems worked out by great innovators, it was a mere novelty. Evans shows innovation as both a product of and a contributor to the grand apparatus of American society. He puts the spotlight on the true American elite: the best of the best of strategic visionaries, creative risk takers and adventurers in their natural environment; the free-market democracy of the United States.

    Evans starts off with the early settlers, and how they transformed their chain mail into cooking utensils, but he by no means neglects the more recent entrepreneurs like Ted Turner who inherited a regional billboard company and worked his way up to founding CNN, a 24-hour news channel updated continuously. He gives us a rich education in how America became the great nation she is through the grand thinkers of our time.

    This is a book that should be in our schools as part of the American History curriculum. What an inspiring survey of the movers and shakers of our time! It shows how each enterpreneur took an idea and brought the final product into reality and general usage from Ida Rosenthal who parlayed her home sewing business into the Maidenform Bra dynasty, to Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The audio version, of course, can't include the illustrations and photos of the book, but Harold Evans paints very compelling word pictures in his narration.