Americans Are Apt to Invent

choi

Patrick Cooke, The Character of Our Country; Copper-riveted jeans, the first oil rig, running shoes, dry cleaning and the 23-story-high clipper ship—as American as apple pie. Wall Street Journal, Oct 5, 2016
www.wsj.com/articles/kevin-baker-america-the-ingenious-1475614748
(book review on Kevin Baker, America the Ingenious; How a nation of dreamers, immigrants, and tinkerers changed the world. Artisan, 2016)

Note:
(a) "The letters in the Morse code message SOS don't mean anything; they're just easy to send and hear. * * * Les Paul nearly died when he was electrocuted in his Queens, NY, apartment while perfecting the electric guitar."
(i) SOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOS
(ii) Les Paul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Paul
(1915 – 2009; birth name: Lester William Polsfuss; While experimenting in his apartment in 1941 [in Queens, NY], Paul nearly succumbed to electrocution)
(iii) "perfecting the electric guitar"

Les Paul did not invent electric guitar. Rickenbacker the company did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickenbacker
(In 1932, the company became the world's first to produce electric guitars; founded in 1931 by Adolph Rickenbacher and George Beauchamp)

(b) "His subjects vary in scope from public-works projects like the Southern California Aqueduct to everyday items like Liquid Paper and the lowly safety pin."
(i)
(A) California Aqueduct. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated
https://www.britannica.com/topic/California-Aqueduct
("California Aqueduct, in full Governor Edmund G Brown California Aqueduct, principal water-conveyance structure of the California State Water Project, US.  From the Sacramento River delta east of San Francisco, it runs south through the San Joaquin Valley and over the summit of the Tehachapi Mountains, a distance of 273 miles (440 km). At this point it divides into east and west branches, the former terminating some 444 miles (715 km) from the delta. The aqueduct is the world’s largest water-conveyance system, comprising more than 20 pumping stations, 130 hydroelectric plants, and more than 100 dams and flow-control structures. Channel sizes vary along the aqueduct, a typical section being a concrete-lined canal 40 feet (12 metres) wide at the base, with 30 feet (9 metres) the average depth of flow. The California State Water Project, begun in 1960, is designed to yield millions of acre-feet of water annually to southern California from sources in the northern portion of the state")
(B) Dennis Silverman, California Water Projects Feeding Southern California. Univ of California Irvine, Apr 28, 2015 (blog)
sites.uci.edu/energyobserver/2015/04/28/california-water-projects-feeding-southern-california/
(map)
(C) There is a Tehachapi Pass
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Pass
(elevation 1,149m)
in Tehachapi Mountains, near Tehachapi, California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi,_California
(a city; section 2 History: name origin uncertain)
(ii) Compare
(A) Liquid Paper
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Paper
(B) Wite-Out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wite-Out
(Wite-Out dates to 1966, by George Kloosterhouse; now owned by BIC Corp)

choi

(c) "Mr Baker launches his tour with a look at the prairie schooner, the nearly indestructible wagon design that took some 500,000 pioneers west in the middle decades of the 19th century. About the size of a minivan, this beast weighed 1,300 pounds and could haul 3,000. At two miles per hour under ox power, it covered 15 to 20 miles a day. Its front wheels were smaller than the rear for easy tight turning—circle the wagons, boys!—and the whole thing could float if need be. Most schooner owners preferred to walk rather than ride in a rig so rough that a bucket of milk left inside in the morning was churned by nightfall."

covered wagon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covered_wagon
(fanciful nickname Prairie Schooner)

(d) "From this departure point Mr Baker skips hither and yon in time, breaking his subjects down into loose categories. 'Apparel' includes entries on copper-riveted jeans, the first bra, running shoes and dry cleaning—a process that owed its origins to the production of poison gas during World War I. * * * Some readers may find a few of Mr Baker's selections questionable. He cites Jazz and the Blues as being just as much an American innovation as, say, the pioneer-era Pennsylvania Rifle.* * * A section on transportation subtitled 'How Will We Travel in the Future?' seems a departure from known innovation into the Buck Rogers science-fiction fantasy of the 1940s"
(i)
(A) For "hither and yon," see hither (adv): "Phrase[:] hither and thither (also hither and yon) in various directions, especially in a disorganized way"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/hither
(B) yon (adv): "literary, dialect yonder"
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/yon
(ii) bra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra
(section 2 History: Germans invented first but American "Mary Phelps Jacob received a patent in 1914 for the first brassiere design that is recognized as the basis for modern bras")
(iii) regarding "dry cleaning—a process that owed its origins to the production of poison gas during World War I."   I find nothing to support this claim.
(iv) long rifle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_rifle
(also known as longrifle or Pennsylvania rifle; section 1 Origins: The reason for the American rifle's characteristic long barrel is a matter of adaptation to the new world by the German immigrant gunsmiths
(v) Buck Rogers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Rogers

choi

(e) "Richard Jordon [sic; should be Jordan] Gatling, inventor of the Gatling gun, a fearsome instrument of battlefield butchery * * * The inventor who created television, Philo Farnsworth * * * Like Farnsworth, many of the inventors in “America the Ingenious” came from impoverished upbringings and had little formal education. Walter Hunt, creator of the safety pin, was educated in a one-room schoolhouse but went on to invent scores of other items, including a device that allowed circus performers to walk upside-down on ceilings. Elisha Graves Otis [1811 –  1861; born in Vermont], of Otis elevator fame, was a high-school dropout * * * New York's Hudson and East River railroad tunnels [there are many]. * * * Telegraph begets trans-Atlantic cable. Andrew Carnegie's revolutionary steel-processing system makes skyscrapers possible and thus the modern city. * * * America itself is an ingenious idea, the author concludes"
(i)
(A) Philo Farnsworth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo_Farnsworth
(1906 – 1971; Mormon; While attending college [ Brigham Young University], he met Provo High School student Elma "Pem" Gardner [born in 1908, a two-year junior; I google but none explains why she was known as Pem among family and friends] )

Quote: "On September 7, 1927, Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube transmitted its first image, a simple straight line, to a receiver in another room of his laboratory at 202 Green Street in San Francisco.[20] Pem Farnsworth recalled in 1985 that her husband broke the stunned silence of his lab assistants by saying, 'There you are — electronic television!' The source of the image was a glass slide, backlit by an arc lamp. An extremely bright source was required because of the low light sensitivity of the design. By 1928, Farnsworth had developed the system sufficiently to hold a demonstration for the press. His backers had demanded to know when they would see dollars from the invention;[25] so the first image shown was, appropriately, a dollar sign. In 1929, the design was further improved by elimination of a motor-generator; so the television system now had no mechanical parts. That year Farnsworth transmitted the first live human images using his television system, including a three and a half-inch image of his wife Pem.
(B) The English surname Farnworth (Farnsworth being a variant): "name from either of two places, one formerly in Lancashire, now in Greater Manchester; the other in Cheshire, both so named from Old English as fearn 'fern' + worð 'enclosure' "
(ii) Walter Hunt (inventor)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hunt_(inventor)
(1796 – 1859; born in Martinsburg, New York; safety pin (1849) )

The Wiki page titled "safety pin" states, "Charles Rowley (Birmingham, England) independently patented a similar safety pin" same year.
(iii) "a device that allowed circus performers to walk upside-down on ceilings"

He did not receive a patent for that. And the reason is simple. See

Richard M Ketchum, American Heritage History of the Pioneer Spirit. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc (1959), page number not displayed
https://books.google.com/books?i ... &dq=Walter+Hunt,+walk+upside-down&source=bl&ots=xcL97icjjm&sig=RJCL7ooq9HFQfUHpZbvNLSwRG0g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjgxoH5lMzPAhVKND4KHaq_CsEQ6AEIMTAD#v=onepage&q=Walter%20Hunt%2C%20walk%20upside-down&f=false
("he was a Quaker * * * an 'Antipodean Apparatus' - a pair of shoes with suction cups for circus performers or anyone else zany enough to walk up walls and across ceilings upside down")
(iv) transatlantic telegraph cable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
(1858)