I'm William Brangham and this is "Horizons."

From the light bulb to the iPhone, American inventions have rocketed around the world thanks to their innovation and ingenuity.

But some American innovators, including women and people of color, have largely been overlooked.

Some unsung figures of American innovation, coming up next.

♪ Narrator: Support for "Horizons" has been provided by Steve and Marilyn Kerman and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

From the David M. Rubenstein Studio at WETA in Washington, here is William Brangham.

Welcome to "Horizons."

As America is celebrating its big birthday, we wanted to look at why this country has been such a hotbed of innovation over its 250 years.

When we think of this creative spirit in America, the great parade of iconic American inventors marches by.

Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, Jonas Salk, Steve Jobs, just to name a few.

But there are thousands of other Americans who've had that spark of an idea and turned their concept into reality.

And so today we want to look at some unheralded innovators in America and examine why this country has been such fertile ground for these creative people.

For that, we are joined by Sujai Shivakumar.

He directs Renewing American Innovation at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And Eric S. Hintz is the acting director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

Gentlemen, so good to have you.

Thank you so much for being here.

- Thanks.

- A pleasure.

Eric, to start with you first, let's just tackle that question that I just mentioned.

What is it about America, when you look at it, that makes this place seemingly such a welcoming environment for creative innovators?

Thanks, William.

There are a lot of factors that make the United States a welcoming place for innovators.

Part of it is our policy and just our traditions.

We have a real great tradition of welcoming people from all over the world.

Our patent system is built right into the founding documents of the United States.

Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S.

Constitution is the IP Clause.

For the promotion of science and the useful arts, Congress said, "We're going to give Congress "the power to create a copyright law "and a patent law that enables writers and inventors "to protect what they work on "and to benefit financially from that."

So, right from the beginning, the United States says, "This is valuable and we want to promote this."

And they made it really open to all.

If you think about the tradition of patents going back to the United States, or back to England and France, where the tradition comes from, it's like a monarchical privilege.

The king can grant you a temporary monopoly to work on your water wheel or whatever sort of medieval thing that you're working on.

In the United States, it's much more egalitarian.

They say anyone can apply for and earn a patent.

That includes women.

That includes free blacks.

Enslaved blacks were not initially able to do that.

They did not have citizen status.

But if you think about it, way before women or black people could vote, they could get a patent.

And so it's really one of the more egalitarian institutions from the founding of the United States.

Sujai, what would you add to that about what it is that we have created, like Eric is describing, as a culture that spurs this on?

Well, William, you know, genius is spread evenly across the world.

But we have a system in place that actually captures this genius and helps to take ideas that are born in genius or in labs and actually transport them and scale them up to the commercial marketplace.

That journey from idea to actually the store shelf, if you will, is the story of innovation.

The patent story is, you know, it's in the constitution part of our DNA, if you will.

And to add to his point, you know, what is a patent?

Basically, it turns an idea into a property right.

So if I have, you know, if I can capture the property rights to my idea, I can then work with him and he has his ideas and we can then share and cooperate and build that idea up to bring it to the marketplace.

The other part of our DNA is standards, which is also in Article 1 of our Constitution.

Brangham: Standards, standards about...?

Standards, well, basically it's technological standards.

So the first thing that standards do is they enable interoperability.

So if you've gone to Europe and tried to plug your computer into the socket, you know why standards are so important.

But moreover, it's a technical language, a technological language.

So if you and I are trying to cooperate to take an idea and bring it to a prototype and to scale up into the market, we can actually talk the same language.

And so it's really important that we, that those two elements of our innovation system were baked in at the very beginning.

Brangham: So I know the two of you each have some innovators that you would like us to talk about.

Eric, let's talk your first vignette here.

This is about a group of women who saw a need and rushed out to fill it.

Tell us about them.

Hintz: Yeah, so one of the great stories that, and we have these collections at the National Museum of American History, is the story of the invention of the Jogbra.

Brangham: The Jogbra.

Hintz: The Jogbra.

This is women's undergarments, right, for athletics.

So, you know, this is an invention by women for women at exactly the right time.

It's invented in the 1970s.

Lots of things happening in the 1970s, right?

You've got the reinvigoration of the women's rights movement, the proposed ERA amendment to the Constitution.

Title IX legislation by Congress demands that women have equal participation in all educational endeavors funded by the state, including sports, so that really increases women's participation.

And you also have this fitness and jogging craze happening in the 1970s, and so all these things come together.

Zoom in on Vermont.

You've got two women there named Lisa Lindahl and Hinda Miller, and they're taking part in this jogging craze, and it's just uncomfortable.

They're wearing their sort of standard fashion bra, and it's just uncomfortable.

And so they're sitting around shooting the bull one afternoon, and they say, you know, "Men have jockstraps for their anatomy "and for their support.

"Why don't we have something like this for us?"

They call their mutual friend.

Her name is Polly Palmer Smith.

She was a seamstress and a costume designer, a very decorated one.

She would actually go on to win Emmys doing costume work for Sesame Street.

But at the time, you know, they call her, and they say, "Hey, let's do some research."

So they go out, they, you know, surreptitiously try on different bras, jogging in place in stores and things like that.

They buy some male jockstraps.

They take scissors, they take them apart.

Polly sews them back together into a women's undergarment, and then Lisa and Hinda road test it, right?

And it works, and it really makes their exercise much more comfortable.

And initially it didn't sell very well.

When they would approach sporting goods stores, often owned and run by men, they just sort of poo-pooed them, and it kind of turned them away.

They didn't get it.

But they took out ads in running magazines and they built a male order business, and they slowly, you know, one Jogbra at a time, built this business, and they eventually sold it to Champion.

And then when the patents expired, now every company, Nike, every apparel company that you can think of has a women's athletic undergarment.

So it's a huge thing that's made sports much more comfortable for women.

It's such a great story, just seeing a need as an individual and seizing the moment on a very personal level.

Sujai, one of the first stories you were wanting to tell us was about someone who, in a very different way, came up with a manufacturing process that really helped America fight a world war.

Tell us about that.

So this whole idea of, you know, manufacturing parts and then assembling them is actually also very old in our country.

If you think about Eli Whitney, and, you know, if Alexander Hamilton actually prompted George Washington, president at that time, to ask Congress to set up a factory, in a sense, which is a modern concept, that they built different parts of the musket and then they were assembled.

So the same principle was then brought to building Liberty ships during the Second World War.

When we were starting, you know, getting into the war, our infrastructure was fairly limited.

So Henry Kaiser had this idea of actually taking this idea of, you know, this sort of manufacturing, this American style of manufacturing, applying it to Liberty ships.

And at the height of the, you know, the war, we were actually building a ship every four and a half days.

Brangham: A single warship in four days?

Shivakumar: So these are supply ships to, you know, cargo ships to take supplies across the Atlantic.

But, you know, still remarkable that we could actually build these things and sort of the can-do attitude as well as the know-how and to bring all the, you know, the supply chain together to actually build these things is just a remarkable story.

Brangham: Right.

And that is also one of those things where it seems that the government, giving the incentive for this, obviously a world war is one way to certainly spur innovation, but then the government saying, "Every ship you produce, "we will purchase."

That seems also critical to this.

Yeah, so, you know, the two drivers of technological innovation have traditionally been one, standards, which allows the pieces actually to fit together, and the second is procurement.

So that's been historically two of the major drivers of our innovation system.

Great.

Eric, another story you wanted to highlight was about a man who created something, but then had to really fight to hold on to his intellectual property.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, so the story is about a gentleman named Robert Kearns.

He's born in Detroit, kind of comes up surrounded by the auto industry.

He serves in the U.S.

Army in World War II, comes back, invests in his education, and gets a series of degrees in mechanical engineering, and he works for some of the supplier firms in Detroit that supply the auto industry, like Bendix and other firms like that.

You know, one day he's driving around.

This is in the 60s.

He's got a Ford Galaxy, and it starts to rain, but it's not raining super hard.

And at the time, windshield wipers had three speeds, off, slow, and fast, and it was continuous.

And he thought to himself, "Well, why can't "windshield wipers act more like the human eye," right?

If you think about the human eye, it doesn't blink continuously.

It only blinks when it needs to blink.

And so this was kind of his inspiration.

He thought, "Let me see if I can rig up what he would "call an intermittent windshield wiper."

So he gets a circuit and a timer, kind of rigs it up in his home, and he kind of installs it on his Ford Galaxy, applies for the patent, and while the patent is pending, he contacts some folks at Ford and Chrysler and does a demonstration.

And they think, "Oh, gee, this is neat, "but we're not really interested."

Fast forward a few years to 1967, the patent issues.

Fast forward another couple of years, he's not able to get any interest.

But then all of a sudden in 1969, Ford comes out with a model, and it's got the intermittent windshield wipers.

So they've essentially pirated his invention.

And of course, this is frustrating to him.

Kearns goes to Ford and says, "Hey, you know, "you owe me retroactive licensing fees.

"That's my invention."

And they say, "Hey, we'll see you in court."

Essentially, they're betting that, "Hey, we're a big three auto company.

"We've got billions of dollars.

"You're this one guy."

Brangham: Little David, big Goliath.

Hintz: Exactly.

And they're just going to dare him to sort of go up against him, but he's undaunted.

The case runs for years.

I mean, he's inventing this in the 60s.

The case doesn't settle until like 1990, but he ends up winning against Ford.

He actually represents himself in court.

Total David and Goliath story, but he's vindicated.

He beats both Ford and Chrysler.

So great story of Robert Kearns, of David beating Goliath and really protecting his invention.

There's a great movie I know about this that was done by Greg Kinnear.

Let's play a tiny little clip of that.

Hintz: Sure.

Very, very good.

Bob Kearns, winner of the wiper competition.

Congrats.

We're going to need a working unit from you.

There's 20 million cars built in this country and every one of them's going to need our wiper.

Realize what we're up against.

Man: It's just a windshield wiper.

Man: To you, maybe.

To me, it's the Mona Lisa.

"To me, it's the Mona Lisa."

I'm sorry, Sujai, you were going to say something there.

Shivakumar: I think it sort of goes back to the point that we were talking about earlier about patents.

It is his property.

And so a property right is as solidly an American concept as any.

And so the fact that he could protect his property rights even against a large company in a legal proceeding is a huge incentive for other inventors to come out and to go out and do their thing because they know that their idea as a piece of their property will be secure.

Brangham: You had also wanted to mention a story of a major medical breakthrough that helped treat a disease that is unfortunately afflicting so many people, and that's diabetes.

Yeah, so back in the 50s and 60s, insulin had been discovered as a treatment for diabetes, but insulin was basically being procured from slaughtered pigs and cows, and it was a very expensive process.

Insulin was not widely available.

So you have Cohen discovering in the lab a way to make this synthetically.

But then the question is, the discovery is there, yes, but how do you actually make that discovery into an innovation?

So he entered a venture capitalist named Swanson who then figures out how to actually license this to a major pharmaceutical.

The pharmaceutical then, because the pharmaceutical not only has a manufacturing capability but also the distribution capabilities globally, they get funding, they get the revenue from the pharmaceutical company then to scale up and build up their innovation.

And then that sort of sets the groundwork for the modern biotechnology industry, really a path -breaking way of financing the growth of these biotechnological innovations which didn't exist before, and now it's sort of the standard model.

Right, and now it's yielded CRISPR and mRNA vaccines and all of the biotech that we see.

As we were researching this program, we talked with a friend of our program, Dr.

Howard Markel, who's a medical historian and a writer, and I asked him, "Who would you highlight "in this conversation in the medical field?"

Here's who he told us.

My favorite unsung hero in the history of American medicine would have to be Dr.

Charles Drew.

Dr.

Drew was an African-American man.

He figured out how to store and keep blood fresh by separating the liquid part, the plasma part, from the cellular part.

Then you could reconstitute it at various points.

He was the first director, not just the first black director, but the first director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank.

He resigned in 1942 because the Red Cross had to accede to the military's wish that white blood was segregated for white military men and black blood for black officers and soldiers.

Dr.

Drew said, "This is ridiculous.

"The biology doesn't show there's any difference.

"When somebody needs blood, "it does not matter about the color of their skin."

And so he resigned and went back to work at Howard University and the Freedman's Hospital where he was chief of surgery.

While driving through North Carolina, he apparently fell asleep at the wheel.

The car turned over three or four times, and he suffered really what you can only call as mortal injuries.

Soon after Dr.

Drew died, a myth emerged that he was taken to a white hospital in North Carolina, a small community hospital, and was refused care, specifically was refused blood transfusions because they didn't have any black blood, and consequently he died very shortly after coming there.

That was the myth.

In reality, including his widow said, "No, he did get treated and he did get transfusions."

Charles R. Drew's work has saved hundreds of millions of lives over the past hundred and so years.

I remember hearing this story for years that this incredible innovator had died because he was denied care in a Jim Crow southern hospital.

But in working on this program, I found out that that was actually not true and that his invention obviously saved millions of lives.

Eric, another inventor you wanted to tell us about was one I had never heard about before, fascinating musical addition.

Tell us that story.

Yeah, another story that we can tell at the Smithsonian is the story of Grandmaster Flash, one of the pioneers of hip-hop.

So Joseph Saddler is born in Barbados.

His family immigrates to the United States and they set up in the Bronx, New York.

And he's coming up and he's growing up in the 1970s and this is the disco era and it's about dancing and this new art form alongside disco comes along that they called hip-hop.

And Grandmaster Flash really creates a lot of the technology and technique that underlies hip-hop.

So if you think about how this works, you want to find that part of the song that they call the break.

So the break is where there's no lyrics, but there's a really great beat and you can dance to it and also, crucially, the MC can rap over the break.

And so how do you find that break and how do you extend that break?

If you think about the era of records and turntables, usually you're really careful with the record, you don't want to touch it.

Brangham: Right, let alone scratch it.

Yeah, he was all about manipulating the record.

You would put one record on one turntable and he would mark it.

And then he had a second turntable.

And this is crucial.

He had studied at a vocational high school and he had trained as an electrician.

So he really knew how to rig this stuff up and he had a mixer in between them so he would start one record and when the break would end, he would cue up the other record and do the switch and throw the other record to extend the break.

And so that was one crucial innovation.

But then it was also, as you mentioned, scratching.

So this idea that when you manipulate the record over the needle, it actually creates this chaka-chaka sound that became synonymous with hip hop.

And so he and Grand Wizzard Theodore and others kind of developed this sound and transformed a device for playback of music into an instrument itself.

So Grandmaster Flash, one of the great innovators and pioneers of hip hop.

I love that.

We have a little bit of that sound.

Let's hear it.

[Playing hip-hop] [scratching sound] I just love that.

I just had no idea about what a remarkable innovator he was, too.

Sujai, you also wanted to highlight someone who was instrumental in creating what we think of as some of the original roots of the internet and the creation of computer.

Tell us that story.

Yeah, so Licklider, who was a program manager at ARPA, which was the predecessor of DARPA... Brangham: This was the government?

This was the government, yeah.

The Department of Defense Advanced Research Agency.

Back in the 50s, computers were as large as this room.

And they were mostly used to do computations.

And Licklider understood that we actually needed to communicate with these machines and they needed to be connected to each other as a way of enabling that.

And so he conceived of this idea of what became the Internet of communications across computing and then had the foresight to actually connect the expertise, the funding, etcetera, within ARPA, the predecessor to DARPA, to actually bring this idea from an idea, fund it, scale it up, build a prototype, which was then used by the Department of Defense and then later became the foundation for the Internet.

And of course, today our lives are very much lived within the Internet.

Brangham: Right, and thankfully our computers are no longer the size of this room anymore.

In the last few minutes we have, these are wonderful vignettes and I appreciate you bringing them all to us.

I wonder when we look at the next 250 years of American innovation, what are the things that you think that we as a country need to keep emphasizing?

I mean, I was looking at a list of the other countries that are rising innovators as well, Switzerland and Israel and China, of course, South Korea.

What would you urge, Eric, that we do or continue to do to keep this edge so that we can continue to be an innovative nation?

Yeah, it's a really important question.

Two of the things that we've talked about today are government support and immigration.

I think those are two things that I would suggest.

I've heard someone say that the federal government is the world's greatest venture capitalist.

I mean, you talked about Kaiser, you talked about Licklider and the Internet.

There are so many places where the federal government invests in innovation, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health.

That government funding is important.

Not all of these things work out, but if you spread it around, a few dozen flowers will bloom, right?

And we get things like the Internet and other innovations.

And so I think continuing those investments by the federal government is really important.

And also, you know, keeping the doors open to this country.

I mean, Alexander Graham Bell, you mentioned at the top, immigrant from Scotland, one of the pioneers of video games, Ralph Baer, immigrant from Germany, Grandmaster Flash from Barbados.

So like you said, there's no borders on innovation.

So I think it's important that we're welcoming to anyone that has a good idea in this country.

And Sujai, what would you add to that?

Yeah, so I would like to think, have our audience think about innovation as sort of occurring within a system.

So as you mentioned, you know, there's the research and development part of it, there's the education part of it, but there's also manufacturing.

And what's been happening in our country over the past few decades is that we've been offshoring manufacturing.

And along with that, we have been under-investing in the workforce, in the infrastructure for manufacturing, as well as our regulatory system that underpins it all.

So, you know, today there's sort of this understanding that manufacturing is actually a core component.

There's a strong complementarity, circularity between research and development and the manufacture of that research and the scale-up of that.

What's been happening recently is that, you know, other countries like China have really built up that manufacturing infrastructure.

So we develop the ideas, they do the manufacturing.

And that system cannot, you know, it cannot be sustainable.

We need to rebuild our manufacturing sector.

And so, you know, that requires us reinvesting in our workforce training, reinvesting in our infrastructure, modernizing our regulatory framework to make sure that we make what we also invent.

Do you think, Eric, we also just need to be celebrating these people even more so than we do?

Yeah, I think that's really important.

There was some really great research that's come out over the past few years.

And forgive me, Bell and Chetty and some of the authors of that research, the shorthand was called the Lost Einsteins Research.

And one of the things that they found is that if you grow up around someone that's a scientist, if you grow up around someone that's an inventor that has a patent, exposure is the thing, right?

If you grow up in proximity to invention or you grow up in one of these zip codes like Silicon Valley, you're much more likely to become an innovator yourself because they can track these things longitudinally over the years.

And so that kind of exposure, celebrating these kinds of stories, hopefully there's some kid out there watching right now that sees a couple of these stories and thinks, "I can do that too."

Eric Hintz and Sujai Shivakumar, thank you both so much for being here.

Wonderful conversation to celebrate 250 years of innovation.

Thank you so much for doing this.

Hintz: Pleasure.

Shivakumar: My pleasure.

And that is it for this episode of "Horizons."

Thank you so much for watching.

You can catch us on PBS or on YouTube and we will see you next week.

Narrator: Support for "Horizons" has been provided by Steve and Marilyn Kerman and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Friends of the News Hour.

♪ This program was made possible by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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