Science and Technology
Main article: Science and technology in the United States See also: Technological and industrial history of the United StatesThe United States has been a leader in scientific research and technological innovation since the late 19th century. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone. Thomas Edison's laboratory developed the phonograph, the first long-lasting light bulb, and the first viable movie camera. Nikola Tesla pioneered alternating current, the AC motor, and radio. In the early 20th century, the automobile companies of Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford popularized the assembly line. The Wright brothers, in 1903, made the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight.
The rise of Nazism in the 1930s led many European scientists, including Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann, to immigrate to the United States. During World War II, the Manhattan Project developed nuclear weapons, ushering in the Atomic Age. The Space Race produced rapid advances in rocketry, materials science, and computers. IBM, Apple Computer, and Microsoft refined and popularized the personal computer.
The United States largely developed the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Today, 64% of research and development funding comes from the private sector. The United States leads the world in scientific research papers and impact factor. As of April 2010, 77% of American households owned at least one computer, and 68% had broadband Internet service. 85% of Americans also own a mobile phone as of 2011. The country is the primary developer and grower of genetically modified food, representing half of the world's biotech crops.
Read more about this topic: The United States Of America
Famous quotes containing the words science and, science and/or technology:
“The belief that established science and scholarship—which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making—are “objective” and “value-free” and that feminist studies are “unscholarly,” “biased,” and “ideological” dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Science is the language of the temporal world; love is that of the spiritual world. Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Science saddens man; love enraptures the angel; science is still seeking, love has found. Man judges of nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges of it in relation to heaven. In short to the spirits everything speaks.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)