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America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 1 (EP 46)

America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American Science — Part 1 (EP 46)

From First Principles vor 4 Monaten

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1:50:16

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is part
one of our July 4th America 250 special: a celebration of the
scientific, technological, institutional, and cultural innovations
that helped shape the United States into one of the most important
scientific nations in human history. For America’s 250th
anniversary, we built an interactive timeline of the discoveries,
inventions, institutions, and funding systems that enabled American
science to grow from Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with
electricity into the age of NASA, DARPA, Bell Labs, nuclear
physics, molecular biology, modern computing, and big science. In
part one, we go from Franklin’s discovery of the conservation of
charge in 1747 through the Sputnik crisis in 1958. Along the way,
we cover the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution’s
science and patent clause, the first federal scientific agency, the
rise of medical journals, the American system of manufacturing, the
telegraph, anesthesia, land-grant universities, the telephone,
Edison’s industrial R&D lab, the Michelson-Morley experiment,
alternating current, the Wright brothers, the discovery of
galaxies, the Manhattan Project, the transistor, information
theory, the polio vaccine, the integrated circuit, and the
mobilization of American science after Sputnik. This is not just a
list of inventions. It is a story about compounding infrastructure:
universities, journals, patents, philanthropy, federal agencies,
industrial laboratories, war mobilization, immigrant scientists,
basic research funding, and the feedback loop between science,
technology, government, and culture. Explore the interactive
timeline ffppod.com/America250 Support the show Donate:
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