These United States: Bright ideas

When it comes to bright ideas, why do these United States have the rest of the world beat? Our very bright David Pogue is looking for answers. If you plot the origins of the greatest inventions in history, you start to notice a pattern. The light bulb, the phonograph, the airplane, air conditioning, the zipper, the microwave, lasers, transistors, the personal computer, the internet, GPS, the smartphone. No country on earth has as rich a history of modern invention as this one. But my question is, why is that? Well, the answer may start with a guy from Ohio. We all know Thomas Edison invented the light bulb. Kind of. What we like to say is Thomas Edison invented a commercially practical light bulb. Hal Wallace is a curator at the Smithsonian's Museum of American History. Light bulb was just one component. He was inventing new dynamos, cables, switches, sockets, meters. If you're going to sell electricity, you've got to have a meter. So it's the systems approach. On New Year's Eve 1879, Edison gave an unforgettable demo in Menlo Park, New Jersey. He lit up the grounds. He lit up the laboratory. He lit up the office building with about a hundred of these light bulbs and invited the press to come out to Menlo Park and see what we've done. He especially invited his investors. That must have been mind blowing for a world who had not seen these. When the lights come on, it's almost a mystical experience because these are not candles. They're not gas lights. They don't hiss. They don't smoke. They don't create noxious odors. You turn it on, it just sits and it glows. So we know him for the phonograph and for the light bulb. What else was there in his portfolio? Quite a lot. Motion pictures, Portland cement. Occasionally, we also have on display one of Edison's talking dolls, which is one of his famous flops. The inventive genius whose fantastic mind had formulated the magic of the internet. There are these two archetypes that people use all the time that are almost always wrong. And they are the kind of lone genius coming up with a brilliant idea and having that idea in a moment of sudden inspiration. That is almost never the case. Steven Johnson has written 14 books about innovation. I'm just wondering, what do you all... He also co-founded a new Google AI tool for research called Notebook LM. Edison gave a lot of credit to the crew. He has a famous line where he's like, I'm not so much a generator of ideas as I am a sponge. Edison called Menlo Park the invention factory. He employed engineers, chemists, glassblowers and mathematicians. He came up with this idea that if you got these interesting people together and put them in the same room together, that you could create a kind of a factory for new ideas. And that's what Menlo Park became. Today, Americans come up with more inventions than ever. Introducing the dingle dangle. Genius litter is a super smart, health indicating cat litter. I'm known as the daddy of the scrub daddy. The cutest but most high tech scrubbing tool in the world. Over the years, hundreds of entrepreneurs have appeared on ABC's Shark Tank. Two sharks are out. Ryan and Doug have two offers on the table from Lori and Kevin. Where they pitch a panel of potential investors. They think their idea is always terrific. Very often isn't. Including real estate mogul Barbara Corcoran, kind bar founder Daniel Lubetzky, fashion pioneer Damon John and venture capitalist Rashaun Williams. We met them at the Empire State Building as they were promoting the show's 17th season. As Thomas Edison might have said, genius is one percent inspiration, the 99 percent perspiration. Anybody could come up with an idea. Everybody has at least a dozen. Really, everybody's got an idea. But building a business, not many people can do it. Do you think anyone comes in not appreciating that? That the hard part is still ahead? Most people don't. But David, it's not necessarily bad that entrepreneurs don't know how hard it will be. I would have never done one of them, never. That's a deal. This really is the big one. If you think about electricity, the personal computer, the Internet, it's all American stuff. So why? Why this country? The people that founded the country and went against all odds to come here. So we got the cream of the crop of the world. You see also the pioneering spirit of all the immigrants and all the people that tried things out and bring that spirit. And they bring that spirit. And then you have the top people around the world who left for either famine, atrocities. They made it over here. And they had a goal to make it over here. So they are, first of all, 1% of where they're from. I think we have to give this government a lot of credit, too, because a lot of the original venture capital funds were funded by government entities. Marketplace where the financial ecosystem allows ideas to be financed. Venture capital is much, much less developed than most other countries. And we also glamorize the successful entrepreneur in this country. Yes, we do. Just like we glamorize the professional athlete or entertainer. If you start a company, you sell it for a billion dollars, you scale it, you're on the cover of every magazine. You're a superstar in this country. And as for failure, there's only one answer to this. I have to hire you both so I can fire you. This is so horrible. In most of the world, if you fail, it's a negative mark on your family. Right. And you are, you know, it's horrible. You're outcast. In the United States, screw it up and you try again. The real question is, what do the successful entrepreneurs have in common? And I say what they have in common is the ability to get back up. Yeah. Take rejection. According to Google's Steven Johnson, history is periodically upended by huge foundational technological breakthroughs. Edison realized that for the light bulb to work, he had to build an electrical grid. But it was the grid that really changed everything. Because once you had power to your homes, like, yeah, you could turn on the light, but you could also build a dishwasher and you could have a television and you could have a radio. The personal computer launched another huge round of innovation and then the Internet and now artificial intelligence, all of it invented in America. Openness to new ideas, willingness for consumers to experiment, that mix of a capitalist model with venture capital, but government support and academic support put all those things together. And it's a pretty powerful combination.