The Creativity Conceit

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

The Europeans have been leaping ahead in Big Science. The trend is expected to be highlighted this year with the opening of Europe’s $5 billion Large Hadron Collider. Located on the Swiss-French border, it will be by far the world’s largest energy particle accelerator. A proposed American response, the International Linear Collider, will be largely funded by Japan—so heavily that it may well be located on Japanese soil.

America’s era of greatest innovation was the 1930s through the 1960s. In the 1930s alone, American inventions included nylon, the helicopter, the electron microscope, and the automated teller machine. Then in the 1940s came the bazooka, the atomic bomb, the microwave oven, and the transistor. The 1950s brought the nuclear reactor, industrial diamonds, the computer hard drive, the integrated circuit, the videocassette recorder, and the communications satellite; in the 1960s the laser, the computer mouse, and light-emitting diodes followed.

Of course, the flow of significant American breakthroughs didn’t stop in 1970. American leadership has become increasingly attenuated, however. Although Americans played a key role in developing both personal computers and cell phones, for instance, these innovations were rather predictable refinements of earlier devices.

The story has been similar in liquid crystal displays. While scientists from the United States, Japan, Britain, and Switzerland have all made significant contributions, commercialization has been led by the Japanese. In a related development, the Japanese claim most of the credit for creating high-definition television, despite a much publicized but short-lived intervention by Zenith and General Instrument in the early 1990s.

If America’s declining technological prowess has been little publicized in the United States, the trade figures are indisputable. In a 2005 report to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, technology-policy analysts Pat Choate and Edward Miller summed up the point in their definition of a China Sphere, a region encompassing not only mainland China but also the wider Confucian world from Vietnam to Japan. As of 2004, the China Sphere already enjoyed a $60 billion surplus in technological trade with the United States—a divide that grows with each passing year.

“The United States’ economy is so large and powerful, and its scientific and technological leadership has long been so overwhelming, that the nation could ignore potential technology-based flaws, traps, and dangers,” Miller and Choate commented. “But that era is quickly ending.”

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print