Five American Inventions That Changed The World

The United States has spent its quarter millennium of existence creating tools that reshaped the modern world.

As the country celebrates its 250th birthday, here are five tools invented within its borders that completely transformed how humanity lives. . .

The Telephone — 1876

Working from his laboratory in Boston, Massachusetts, Alexander Graham Bell changed human communication on March 7, 1876, when the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent No. 174,465 for transmitting speech by electrical current. Three days later, he spoke the first clear sentence sent by telephone, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you!” . . .

The Airplane — 1903

Orville and Wilbur Wright, who ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, achieved what inventors had chased for more than a century: powered flight controlled by a pilot. On Dec. 17, 1903, Orville Wright piloted a powered flying machine he and his brother Wilbur had built off the sand at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The machine stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet during the first flight. . .

The Internet — 1969

The World Wide Web began as a U.S. defense project. On Oct. 29, 1969, researchers at UCLA sent the first message between two computers over ARPANET, a network funded by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. The message traveled from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute. The system crashed after transmitting the first two letters of “login” from one computer to the other. So, the first transmission on the internet read simply “lo.”

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