The Character of Our Country

  By Patrick Cooke The Wall Street Journal Copper-riveted jeans, the first oil rig, running shoes, dry cleaning and the 23-story-high clipper ship—as American as apple pie. Among the many rewards of America the Ingenious, Kevin Baker’s survey of Yankee know-how, is stumbling on its buried nuggets. Here is a handful. The computer onboard Apollo 11’s lunar landing craft, Eagle, possessed less memory than today’s average cellphone. The letters in the Morse code message S.O.S. don’t mean anything; they’re just easy to send and hear. In the 1920s people spent five to six hours on weekend days at fabulously baroque movie Read More