Technical.ly editor Katie Malone sends her Innovation Wire column as a newsletter every two weeks, covering local trends in AI, tech, startups, entrepreneurship and jobs of the future. Subscribe here.
The light bulb. The internet. Landing on the moon. Some of the marquee triumphs that define American innovation as the US commemorates its semiquincentennial.
There’s so many more — and they’re spread across all 50 states.
I identified 200 key US inventions over the past 250 years, offering additional names and regions worthy of joining the handful that usually get credit or renown.
Take global fiber-optic internet, which owes a massive thank-you to Delaware's chemical history: DC, New Jersey and New York researchers perfected transmitting data through light and glass, but the system was fragile. In 1965, DuPont’s Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar, providing the material needed to protect undersea cables.
Smartphones followed a similar path. They fit in your pocket because Texas Instruments engineers learned to micro-etch entire electronic circuits onto tiny silicon chips, drastically shrinking down transistor concepts credited to New Jersey labs, before California engineers turned that processing power into mini computers.
Open a navigation app and you are using interface models first designed in Rhode Island. You'd be totally lost, however, without the precise satellite mapping data that mathematician Gladys West calculated at a Virginia naval base in 1986.
This multi-state reliance leads to conflicting narratives. States beef over bragging rights, arguing whether a breakthrough belongs to an inventor's birthplace or where the actual R&D happened.
True credit looks more like a relay race, full of incremental hand-offs that each place has a stake in.
Click to explore the interactive map and see what your state brought to the table — including some proud, non-tech claims to fame like slushies, ChapStick and earmuffs.
Another angle:
“Successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental pattern of mature science.”
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🐮’Til the cows come home: A farm in Sanborn, Iowa, is ditching traditional fencing for GPS-tracking collars to manage its herd. The tech recently alerted farmers the moment a cow gave birth so they could ensure the newborn's safety. [KTIV]
💻Powering down: While some schools are pushing for total digital connectivity, others are reversing the trend — including Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country. A district in Northeast Missouri is scaling back tech access for K-8 students by moving them to shared devices (high schoolers will maintain their individual setups). [ Wash Post / Missourinet]
🧬D(o) N(ot) A(ccess): Rhode Island is the latest state to pass a genetic privacy act, tightening the reins on commercial ancestry sites. Following high-profile issues — like 23andMe's massive 2023 data breach — the new law forces companies to beef up compliance, deploy “reasonable” data security and secure explicit user consent for every single use of genetic data. [Providence Business News]
What innovation do you see coming out of your community in the next 25 years? Hit reply and let me know.